'Gremlins' Director Joe Dante Will Consult On HBO Max's Animated 'Gremlins: Secrets Of The Mogwai' Series

Gremlins and Gremlins 2: The New Batch director Joe Dante is feeding fans of the furry creatures with the confirmation that he will be consulting on the upcoming HBO Max animated prequel series, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai. The filmmaker revealed to what degree he will be consulting on the series, which is set in 1920s Shanghai and will follow Mr. Wing, the shopkeeper from the first movie, as he first discovers Gizmo the Mogwai.

In an interview with Daily Dead, Joe Dante, who directed the beloved 1984 comedy-horror classic Gremlins and its 1990 sequel Gremlins 2: The New Batch, revealed that he will be consulting on the HBO Max prequel series Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai:

"Yeah, I'm consulting on it. It's good. It's going to be good, yeah. I'm very pleased with the way it's going. It's a prequel. It goes back to the character Mr. Wing when he was a boy, and when he first discovered the Mogwai. It's set in China in the '20s, and it's animated and it's very big in the sense that if you tried to shoot it as a theatrical film, it would be outrageously expensive. But in animation, you kind of get away with almost anything you can think of. And it's probably not going to be done until 2021 or maybe the end of 2020. It's for HBO Max, a new streaming variant of HBO. I think this is a really clever way to get back into that. I think that they found it pretty difficult to make a sequel to Gremlins 2, because of just the way I made it. And they just could never really quite figure out how to do it. So I think this is a great way to sort of get the franchise back on people's minds."

Written by Tze Chun and executive produced by Darryl Frank, Justin Falvey, and Sam Register, with Chun and Brendan Hay serving as co-executive producer, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai will be a 10-episode, half-hour series that expands the mythology of the comedy-fantasy classic. It follows other remakes and sequels of '80s classics that introduce an old franchise to a new generation, and will likely be a profitable piece of nostalgia content for HBO Max as it readies its May launch. Having Dante on board lends to the credibility of the series as well.

Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai does not yet have a set premiere date.

In the animated television adaptation, we travel back to 1920s Shanghai to reveal the story of how 10-year-old Sam Wing (future shop owner Mr. Wing in the 1984 movie) met the young Mogwai called Gizmo. Along with a teenage street thief named Elle, Sam and Gizmo take a perilous journey through the Chinese countryside, encountering, and sometimes battling, colorful monsters and spirits from Chinese folklore. On their quest to return Gizmo to his family and uncover a legendary treasure, they are pursued by a power-hungry industrialist and his growing army of evil Gremlins.