Ahead of its premiere, HBO Max greenlit a second season of its animated Gremlins series.
Gremlins: The Secrets of the Mogwai will serve as a prequel to the popular film franchise and is currently under production. Tse Chun will write and executive produce the series from Warner Bros. Animation and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television.
Directed by Joe Dante, 1984's Gremlins follows a young man named Billy (Zach Galligan), who receives a strange creature called a mogwai as a pet. Billy soon learns that when the adorable creature named Gizmo gets wet -- or fed after midnight -- it spawns other creatures, who transform into destructive and evil monsters that wreak havoc on Christmas Eve.
1990's Gremlins 2: The New Batch finds Gizmo and his legion of reptilian pals moving into a newly erected skyscraper in New York City. When Billy and his bride-to-be Kate learn that Gizmo has taken over the building, they try to stop the mogwai from escaping into the city.
News of Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai already being renewed came in the wake of original Gremlins star Galligan suggesting that the new animated series might spark interest in a third Gremlins film being made.
"You just simply have to look at the nature of the way large entertainment corporations deal with franchises and properties over the years and decades," Galligan recently told EW. "It's not difficult to make an educated guess that the cartoon is a way of seeding the younger generation that's not aware of it." He added, "If it is successful, if it gets like Mandalorian-big, then I think Gremlins 3 is inevitable."
Original Gremlins writer Chris Columbus also recently confirmed that he would love to be part of a third movie, saying, "I wrote a script, so there is an existing script. We're working out some rights issues right now, so we're just trying to figure out when the best time to make that film would be." Columbus also said that he would still use real puppets, not CGI if he got the chance to work on another film in the franchise.
Written and executive produced by Tse Chun and produced by Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, Sam Register and Brendan Hay, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai stars Ming-Na Wen, B.D. Wong, James Hong, Matthew Rhys, Izaac Wang, A.J. LoCascio and Gabrielle Green. The series has yet to receive a premiere date.