Warner Bros. is officially reviving the “Gremlins” franchise, with a new installment set to barrel into theaters in November 2027.
The film has been added to the studio’s release schedule for Nov. 19, 2027, David Zaslav, the CEO and president of Warner Bros. Discovery, revealed on Thursday’s investor call.
Steven Spielberg is returning to executive produce “Gremlins 3” while “Harry Potter” filmmaker Chris Columbus is set to direct and produce, Zaslav confirmed. All other details, including a plot description and anyone starring in the film, haven’t been disclosed.
The original “Gremlins,” which famously led to the creation of the PG-13 rating, was released in 1984 and directed by Joe Dante with Columbus writing the screenplay. The horror-comedy follows a boy named Billy who receives a cute, furry creature called a Mogwai as a pet. Billy is warned to never expose the animal to bright light, water or to feed him after midnight. After those rules are broken, the gremlin spawns more of its kind and end up wrecking havoc on Billy’s hometown during Christmas. “Gremlins” was a box office hit with $212 million dollars worldwide. The sequel, 1990’s “Gremlins 2: The New Batch,” was less successful with $41 million but became a cult classic.
Zaslav touted the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group’s epic theatrical streak in 2025, where seven consecutive releases — including “A Minecraft Movie,” “Sinners,” “Weapons” and “The Conjuring: Last Rites” — opened above $40 million. No other studio has ever achieved that level of consistency at the box office. The studio’s slate of triumphs helps offset a financial miss like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” which is expected to be a major Oscar player but is tracking to lose $100 million in its theatrical run against its $130 million budget.
“We’re leading the 2025 box office domestically. We’re leading it internationally, and we’re leading it globally,” Zaslav said on the investor call. “Not only are we in first place, but we’re the only film studio to have crossed $4 billion in 2025 box office revenue thus far, and we’ve done it with a significant amount of original stories that leadership was on full display in the third quarter.”
He attributed the box office wins to the wide range of offerings, including the kid-centric “Minecraft” and “Superman” as well as the adult-skewing Brad Pitt’s “F1: The Movie” (which WB distributed for Apple) and not-so-family-friendly “Sinners,” “Weapons” and “Conjuring.”
“In Q3 alone, we successfully launched a new era for the DC studios with ‘Superman.’ We showed our exceptional horror genre expertise yet again with ‘Weapons’ and ‘The Conjuring: Last Rites,’ which have together grossed more than $750 million in ticket sales,” Zaslav said. “And we reinforced our commitment to producing great original works by great filmmakers, with Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘One Battle After Another.’”
