By Drew Dietsch
| Published
In addition to more assembly line MCU entries like new Avengers flicks, Disney has gone all in on sequels with the next few years of movies. Here’s just a sampling of the unoriginality we can expect from now until 2027: Freakier Friday, Tron: Ares, Zootopia 2, Avatar: Fire and Ash, Toy Story 5, Incredibles 3, and Frozen 3. Not to mention more milking dry of the Star Wars cow.
Will some of those movies be good? Probably! But I’ll never know because none of them spark even a modicum of interest in me. What does keep me intrigued is why Disney is farming sequel slop instead of searching through their library to revive one of their original and ripe for revival properties: Gargoyles.
Gargoyles Is Awesome And Original
Gargoyles was an animated series on the Disney Channel back in the ‘90s that spawned from the competing success of Batman: The Animated Series. It’s a rich modern fantasy about creatures who turn to stone during the day, taking the vampire mythos and warping it into something new.
Anyone who knows about or remembers Gargoyles knows that it rules. The show ran for three seasons and still maintains a cult following. The show offered mature stories with strong character arcs and plots. It was also a totally original idea at the time, not being based on any previously existing source material.
Which makes it one of the properties Disney should actually look toward exploiting instead of endless sequels. Even though it would be a remake, Gargoyles has enough distance and niche appeal that any new version will essentially come off as new to a modern audience.
Is Gargoyles Getting Revived?
Supposedly, we are going to get a Gargoyles rebooted TV series from James Wan’s Atomic Monster production house. However, the last news about that project was back in 2023. Perhaps it’s still in the works but it certainly doesn’t seem to be a priority project for Disney. It won’t surprise me to hear that show is dying on the vine.
Frankly, I don’t think a live-action Gargoyles series is the right way to go. A feature film is a more risky effort these days, but the epic potential of Gargoyles deserves the biggest stage and budget possible. Plus, it would be nice to see Disney invest in a potential new film franchise that isn’t Marvel-adjacent, part of the Star Wars churn, or one of their animated offerings.
While Disney seems allergic to developing big original projects at this point in their corporate life-cycle, at least Gargoyles is a property that deserves a revamp for new generations. Like I said, for all intents and purposes, Gargoyles would come across as something fresh for younger viewers because it hasn’t been siphoned and diluted over the last thirty years. It’s a lot fresher than a fifth Toy Story, that’s for sure.
I don’t have any interest in Disney’s upcoming slate of factory-processed sequels, but the announcement of a blockbuster Gargoyles movie would send me into an excited tizzy. Not much does that at all today, so I could use a bare-chested monster man on the big screen to see if my blood is still flowing.
