Billy actor from Gremlins starred in controversial movie in 1984 that wasn't released until 2015

A new Gremlins film is confirmed to be in the works after the studio released a short teaser which announced its release date.

The sequel was first confirmed in an investor’s call last year, but new footage on social media has shown Gizmo peeking through a backpack as they announced a new release date, 6 October, 2028.

The film, which will be written and directed by Harry Potter and Home Alone director Chris Columbus, is sure to spark fan interest in the original movies and leave viewers wondering what happened to its celebrity cast.

Whilst Corey Feldman’s bizarre career has been widely publicised, the actual star of Gremlins was Zach Galligan who played Billy, the unfortunate owner of Gizmo who faces off with the creatures in the first film.

He returned for the second film but outside of that has had a pretty wild career in the years since, starring in erotic thrillers, B-Horror movies, and one controversial film that wasn’t released until 31 years after it was made, Nothing Lasts Forever.

Galligan starred in the movie the same year as Gremlins, in 1984, and it only released in 2015 for the first time

The actor starred in two movies in 1984, one of which went down quite a bit better than the other.

Whilst Gremlins kick started his career and was easily his most notable film role, he starred in Nothing Lasts Forever the same year.

On paper this should’ve been a huge success, the movie featured some comedy legends such as Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, and was even supposed to feature Jim Belushi in what would have been his last ever film role. He died just six weeks before production started.

The movie was controversially shelved after a ‘disastrous’ test screening, only showed in one public screening before it was made into a tax write-off. It was then kept in the vault by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for decades until it leaked on YouTube in 2011. It was eventually taken down after a copyright claim but was then shown on TV in 2015.

Galligan spoke about the film being his ‘big ticket’ before it was shelved by the studio for decades, going on to appear in some bizarre films after Gremlins

Speaking about the film in 2008 with Den of Geek he admitted that he had thought it was going to be his ‘big ticket’, explaining: “Here I am doing a movie with Saturday Night Live people, with Lorne Michaels producing it, and Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and even John Belushi was going to be in it, until he passed away about a month before we were going to start shooting it.

“So here I am the lead, with all this stuff going on. And then I did the movie, and it turned out very differently.

“MGM just had no idea how to market it. They were just baffled. So it kind of fell between the cracks, and to be honest, MGM took it as a tax loss, which meant they couldn’t make any kind of profit on it.”

He stated that there were occasional screenings but no full release until it was shown on TV in 2015.

After this Galligan starred in some bizarre films such as a pair of erotic thrillers Mortal Passions and Caroline At Midnight. Search them up at your own peril.

He spoke about a potential Gremlins 3 in 2021, telling Screenrant: “The nice thing about it is, because the two movies are so different, you really can go a number of ways with it. I know that Chris Columbus has hinted that on the Gremlins 3 script that he's written, he's going to go darker and more of a Batman tone. It's a lot darker and more adult and gloomier and scarier - just more menacing. Which is a good way to go, because we haven't done one of those.”