It was announced yesterday that a new Gremlins movie, Gremlins 3 , has been pushed back to October 2028, almost a year later than the original release date which was supposed to be November 2027.
But Warner Bros did drop a teaser. It’s short, but instantly recognisable for those who know – you hear him before you see him. And then when he says “uh oh”, you hear THEM.
10.6.28. Only In Theaters. pic.twitter.com/kZVLPrNd12
— Warner Bros. (@warnerbros) September 23, 2026
If you love Gremlins – or, rather, Gizmo – maybe stop reading now. It’s not that I want to spoil the party, I just want to share some concerns. Tessa Thompson’s character put her concerns into a “15-page unsolicited treatise” in Dear White People.
In 2012, Gremlins made Complex’s list of 50 Most Racist Movies . There are Black people who take exception to it and Asians too. After all, Gizmo is Chinese, he’s a “mogwai”, he comes from a shoppe in Chinatown, and he’s renamed “Gizmo” because Billy’s dad says that “mogwai” is just “some Chinese word” so they give him a name that is less foreign, less ethnic, as the first step to his assimilation.
When the mogwai is kept dry and if he’s not fed after midnight, he is pure and helpful and integrated into the lives of his suburban white family. The mogwai only becomes a problem when he multiplies and becomes greedy. He’s welcome in the home and the neighbourhood if he stays cute, cuddly, and solo. In other words, model minority. Too many of him and it’s ugly greed that becomes dangerous. Throughout the first movie, there are so many casual instances of anti-Asian dialogue, I felt like I was being zapped when I watched it back one night during the pandemic.
Gremlins came out in 1984, followed by a sequel in 1990. So it’s been over 30 years since Gremlins have been at the movies and even though the original movies have been seen by the generations who came after, it’s been long enough that they can, if they choose to, go back to the beginning and reboot the story in the smartphone and social media age.
But what will that look like? Dialogue can be updated, but there are still other underlying issues to be addressed. I wonder if there might be a way where the mogwai and what happens to him can be an allegory not to amplify white fright and xenophobia but to satirise appropriation – this interminable habit of stealing what’s “exotic” and then muting and morphing it to the point where it’s nearly unrecognisable … in the way of, for example, bone broth and mahjong.
Then again, this is a Warner Bros title and the Paramount/WB merger is about to go through so what are the chances that the new WB overload is going to allow for that kind of storytelling?
Yours in gossip,
Photo credits: YouTube/Warner Bros.
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