Gremlins 3 to hide from the harsh, Mogwai-killing light of day until October 2028

That’s a setback of nearly a year, as the film—set to be directed by veteran filmmaker, and Gremlins inventor, Chris Columbus—was previously set for a November 2027 release. Columbus (who initially wrote the original 1984 Joe Dante film as a spec script, one that he reportedly never expected to actually sell) worked with Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein on an initial draft of the script for the franchise’s third movie, with the most recent version penned by Hannah Marks. At present, we have no idea what the film is about, although Columbus did float, way back in 2017, at least one truly gnarly idea he was at least interested in hitting in passing, i.e., whether it’s ethically correct to execute Gizmo if he’s the otherwise-innocent source of all these murderous Gremlins that keep going on a rampage. “I think it probably is a good idea to be honest with you,” Columbus told SlashFilm at the time. “Too many people are dying.”

And, look: We have no concrete information that Gremlins 3 has been delayed so that Warner Bros. could hire a fresh time of ethicists to really dive deep into this particular “adorable cuddly monster creature tied to train tracks by its murderous children/siblings” trolley problem; it’s probably just a concern about budgets, or not running the movie straight into that new Matt Damon film from Daniels that’s supposed to come out that same day. But it does put one more tally in our mental “Never actually coming out” count, which tends to only go up, and up, until news that principal photography on a project like this has actually wrapped arrives.