Ahead of Gremlins: The Secrets of the Mogwai‘s upcoming debut sometime this year, Deadline brings word that HBO Max has officially granted Warner Bros. Animation and Amblin Television’s upcoming animated Gremlins prequel series an early second season renewal. This comes a day after it was confirmed that Mulan’s Ming-Na Wen, BD Wong, and Matthew Rhys have joined the series’ voice cast.
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Set in 1920s Shanghai, Gremlins: Secrets of the Mogwai will tell the story of how 10-year-old Sam Wing (future shop owner Mr. Wing in the 1984 movie) met the young Mogwai called Gizmo. 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. On their quest to return Gizmo to his family and uncover a legendary treasure, they are pursued by a power-hungry industrialist and his growing army of evil Gremlins.
Sam is set to be voiced by Izaac Wang (Raya and the Last Dragon) while Wen will voice his mother Fong, a doctor of Chinese medicine who is “resourceful, slyly funny and fiercely protective of her family,” and his father Hon will be voiced by Wong, described as a “calm rock” who “never believed his father-in-law’s tales of magic and adventure.” The family grandfather is set to be voiced by James Hong (Big Trouble in Little China) while Gizmo will be voiced by A.J. Locascio, Gabrielle Green voicing a human-friend of Sam’s and Rhys set to star as Riley Greene, an English industrialist and treasure hunter who uses black magic on a quest for power and will stop at nothing to acquire Gizmo and the mythical treasure of the titular species.
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Tze Chun (Children of Invention, Gotham) will write and co-executive produce the 10-episode series. Darryl Frank and Justin Falvey will serve as executive producers for Amblin Television along with Sam Register. Brendan Hay will serve as co-executive producer with Dan Krall serving as supervising producer. The series is produced by Amblin in association with Warner Bros. Animation.
Gremlins first took the box office by storm in director Joe Dante’s 1984 Christmas/horror/comedy. In 1990, Dante returned for Gremlins 2: The New Batch, which had a much lighter tongue-in-cheek tone than the first film.
