'Gremlins' Series Renewed for Season 2 Ahead of Its HBO Max Premiere

The forthcoming Gremlins series has already been renewed for Season 2, ahead of its HBO Max premiere. The upcoming animated show — titled Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai — has yet to debut, but it's already built a lot of hype within WarnerMedia that the studio feels confident it will be a huge hit with audiences, per a report from Screen Rant. Currently, Season 1 of Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai is set to debut sometime in 2021, though no official release date has been announced. Presumably, Season 2 will premiere in 2022, but that is unconfirmed.

The official synopsis for Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai reveals that the show is a prequel that will take place in 1920s Shanghai. It will tell "the story of how 10-year-old Sam Wing" first met Gizmo, the beloved young Mogwai who has been the face of the Gremlins franchise since the first movie was released in 1984. "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," the synopsis adds.

Notably, Sam Wing is the same Mr. Wing from the original film. Wing's shop is where Randall Peltzer (Hoyt Axton) secretly acquired Gizmo from Wing's grandson. He brought the little Mogwai home to his son Billy (Zach Galligan) and, as fans are gleefully aware, chaos ensued. The sci-fi comedy was a massive success, earning over $200 million on a $11 million budget, and spawned a sequel several years later, 1990s Gremlins 2: The New Batch.

The new Gremlins series was first teased back in 2019, with Harvey Girls Forever executive producer Brendan Hay later telling Collider in 2020 that he was working on the show. "I can say I'm working on Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai right now for Warner Bros., which has been a blast and totally different type of show than Harvey," he told the outlet. "Getting to do a horror and horror-comedy aimed at slightly older kids is a very different beast but still been a lot of fun and yeah, so that'll come out sometime in 2021."

Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai was developed by Tze Chun, who is both writing and executive producing the series. Chun is a comic book publisher who co-founded TKO Studios, and he also worked on hit TV series such as Once Upon a Time and Gotham. The voice cast of the show includes Izaac Wang (as the voice of Sam Wing), Ming-Na Wen (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), B. D. Wong (Mulan), James Hong (Big Trouble in Little China), Matthew Rhys (A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood), A. J. Locascio (Dawn of the Croods), and Gabrielle Green (All That).