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Short Circuit Remake Will Bring Number 5 to Life Again

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Published on November 16, 2020

Screenshot: TriStar Pictures
Short Circuit, Number 5
Screenshot: TriStar Pictures

Get ready to have “Who’s Johnny” stuck in your head forever: Short Circuit is getting a do-over. Deadline reports that Spyglass Media Group are bringing the 1986 film back for a remake.

Spyglass hasn’t been very active in almost a decade, but the company also produced the comic book adaptation Wanted and the 2011 remake of Footloose. With Project X Entertainment, who will help to produce Short Circuit, they’re also behind the relaunch of the Scream franchise. (Are you sensing a trend?) For Short Circuit, they’ve brought on writers Eduardo Cisneros and Jason Shuman, who Deadline says will “put a Latinx twist on the screenplay.” The writing duo also wrote the screenplay for this year’s comedy Half Brothers.

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The original Short Circuit starred the extremely-of-an-era trio of Ally Sheedy, Steve Guttenberg, and Fisher Stevens. Stevens’ role is just one of the things the new version will need to change: He was in brownface as an Indian man. The real star, though, is Number 5 (pictured above), a weirdly adorable robot that becomes sentient after being struck by lightning. (His death—temporary though it is—rates a distressing mention on our list of The 12 Most Gratuitous Robot Deaths in Sci-Fi.)

Original director John Badham also directed WarGames, which is surely the next ’80s classic to wind up slated for reboot. But we’ll have to wait and see if Short Circuit makes it to screens, or if it joins the plethora of ’80s remakes lingering in development hell: What happened to Channing Tatum’s version of Splash? The Ryan Reynolds Clue re-do? Chad Stahelski’s Highlander?

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Molly Templeton

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Molly Templeton has been a bookseller, an alt-weekly editor, and assistant managing editor of Tor.com, among other things. She now lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods.
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