The forces of the dreaded nostalgia miners have finally breached one of the last, most fortified redoubts of millennial childhood today, with Warner Bros. announcing that it’s officially putting a sequel to 1985 adventure classic The Goonies into development. That includes a tacit vote of “producer or executive producer credit” approval from original story writer Steven Spielberg—whose Amblin Entertainment will once again produce—screenwriter Chris Columbus, and Lauren Shuler Donner, prolific film producer and widow of original director Richard Donner.
As to this new movie, there’s no word yet on who’ll be sitting in the director’s chair, although writer-director Potsy Ponciroli has been tapped to write the screenplay, possibly as part of a complicated plan to steal some pirate’s treasure from local teens. (Ponciroli has an eclectic resume; he directed half of the episodes of Billy Ray Cyrus’ CMT sitcom Still The King in the mid-2010s, and picked up some critical acclaim for writing and directing 2021 Tim Blake Nelson Western Old Henry.) There’s absolutely zero information about casting or plot, meanwhile, which feels mildly worrying, since it’s not clear yet how far into the “watching a bunch of 50-year-olds run around in caves repeating lines from the first movie” spectrum the film will go. The original cast members haven’t been shy about being interested in revisiting the movie, mind you: Ke Huy Quan’s Hollywood resurgence has included comments saying he’d “love for it to happen,” while Corey Feldman has made it clear that he would love to revisit a period of cinematic history in which people liked the things he said or did.
Most PopularThe most surprising thing about this whole announcement, honestly, might just be that it took this long: The original movie was a genuine hit at the box office, making $125 million off of a $19 million budget, and has remained a staple of kid entertainment even as its various stars have (mostly) aged into positions of respect in the entertainment industry. (Consider this your reminder of the very sweet fact that Jeff Cohen, who played Chunk in the movie, is now an entertainment lawyer, and helped Quan negotiate his deal for Everything Everywhere All At Once.) Just a few months ago, Star Wars made a fairly blatant effort to capture the movie’s tone of “surprisingly dangerous kid adventure” with Skeleton Crew, while the original movie has been entered into the National Registry by the Library Of Congress. People still like The Goonies, is the point, and everything people still like must eventually be sold back to us, because reboots and sequels never say die.
Related Content More from A.V. Club