The Wait Continues: Warner Bros. Pushes Gremlins 3 Premiere to Fall 2028

The return of the cult furry troublemakers to the big screen will have to wait. Warner Bros. has officially pushed the release of the horror comedy Gremlins 3 from November 19, 2027, to October 6, 2028. The studio isn’t saying why the delay is so substantial, offering only a short video teaser announcing the new date on its social media, which officially revealed a new Mogwai for the first time. For fans of the franchise, it’s mixed news: the wait stretches out by nearly a year, but the project is alive and in active development, Variety confirms.

For Hollywood, the third Gremlins is one of the biggest long-gestating projects around. The original film came out in 1984 and proved so frightening for younger audiences that it helped spur the creation of the PG-13 rating. The sequel, The New Batch, reached theaters in 1990. That means 38 years will pass between the second and third installments.

Betting on puppets, not graphics

The main hope for preserving the original’s mischievous spirit rests with the production team. Chris Columbus will take the director’s chair and a producer credit — the man who wrote the screenplay for the first Gremlins before his triumphs with Home Alone and the Harry Potter films. Steven Spielberg will once again serve as executive producer, just as he did in the eighties.

According to TheWrap, Hannah Marks is writing the current draft of the script. She is building on earlier work by Columbus himself, as well as by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein (the co-directors of Final Destination: Bloodlines). The filmmakers’ key promise remains a refusal to rely entirely on computer graphics: they intend to lean on classic animatronics and practical effects so the monsters look tangible and alive on screen.

A plot kept secret and casting rumors

Warner Bros. is still keeping the film’s official synopsis and full cast under wraps. Rumors periodically surface online about the return of stars from the original two films — Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates or Howie Mandel — but so far those reports remain at the level of fan expectations and have not been confirmed by anyone.

Moving the release to 2028 could give the team more time for the difficult work of practical effects: building quality animatronic puppets and staging stunts with them right on set takes far more painstaking preparation than adding CGI models in post-production.