Small Soldiers, the 1998 action-adventure film from Universal and Amblin, was directed by Joe Dante (Gremlins) and stars Kirsten Dunst, Gregory Smith, and Tommy Lee Jones. It's now been 26 years since the original movie was released in cinemas, so let's answer the burning question of we will ever get a Small Soldiers sequel?
What's It About?
In Small Soldiers, the CEO of a toy company decides to change the game by introducing two new lines of smart toys. Unknown to him, both factions of toys develop independent personalities after having advanced military-level technologies installed by mistake, and things take a turn for the worse when one faction decides to turn its weapons on the other. The lethal faction is known as the Commando Elites, elite special operatives armed to the teeth, while the other faction is the Gorgonites, misshapen aliens who have been programmed to seek out their home world somewhere in middle America. As the two factions go toe to toe, civilians of a small town are caught in the crossfire.
According to director Joe Dante, Small Soldiers was supposed to be an edgy film for teens with plenty of action and explosions but later studio mandates forced him to soften it up to boost toy sales. The film was made on a budget of $40 million and didn't exactly set the world on fire with its total box office rake of $87 million. With the film making most of its money in the US, Universal Pictures and Amblin hoped that toy sales would lift the bottom line and help greenlight a proposed sequel. While the cast and crew had been enthusiastic for a sequel from the start, the disappointing results meant that this could not happen immediately. The studios then began to count on home media sales to bump up profits, but this meant any potential sequel was years away, as home media sales take time to significantly matter.
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Approached objectively, Small Soldiers is not a bad film, and it is still a mystery why it performed rather poorly. In a time of Jumanji and Chucky, Small Soldiers should have been a homerun, but box office analysts argue that it was kneecapped by the one-two punch of Lethal Weapon 4 and Armageddon on its opening weekend. In addition, the ‘toys becoming sentient genre’ has not really been saturated, so there haven't been too many stories similar to Small Soldiers in recent memory. All of this should have made the film a bigger hit than it really is. While some might say the film is a grown-up version of Toy Story or a twist on the idea behind Chucky, Small Soldiers manages to stand on its own when compared to these films.
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Another factor working to the film’s detriment is that time hasn't been kind to it. It hasn't developed the kind of cult following that some other box office bombs have, and it does not have the rabid fanbase that works to keep the legacy of the film alive. A deep dive on Reddit and X shows a handful of dedicated diehards continuing to root for the film, but sadly, these are far too small to make any meaningful impact. Some fans did manage to get together to create a fan film titled ‘Small Soldiers: War for the Nekron,’ which replaces Gorgonites and Commandos with Space Marines and aliens. More of a proof of concept, the fan film nevertheless shows what could be possible if a Small Soldiers sequel were to be made today.
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Small Soldiers Sequel
Sans a vibrant campaign on the scale of the ‘Snyder Cut’, there seems to be no chance that audiences care about the film enough for the studio to think about a sequel seriously. When greenlighting a sequel, studios always look at the bottom line; if the demand is there, they will gladly sink some money into a pre-existing property, knowing that a part of the fan base will always show up to check out the story. However, this might not be possible here, and with its growth now plateauing, even Netflix won't take the initiative here to buy the rights and make the film. Some have thus rightly said that Small Soldiers has been lost in the annals of time, destined to be a stand-alone film for the foreseeable future.
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However, as fate would have it, we would all be blindsided by what was to transpire. In the aftermath of the Disney Fox merger, Disney announced an outright cancellation of about 200 films that had been in development at 20th Century Fox. Since Fox had been hemorrhaging money, Disney saw no reason to continue on with risky films that would further put its investment in the hole. While some of these films were well known, such as the X-Men film about Gambit, fans would discover that one of the cancelled features was a Small Soldiers remake that Fox had been quietly developing under the name of Toymageddon. Fast and Furious director Justin Lin was attached to the project, which began sometime in 2014. In addition, recently, one of the writers for the original, Adam Rifkin, would go on Twitter to say that he would absolutely love to do a sequel.
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Small Soldiers Sequel
Disney's cancellation of the Small Soldiers reboot brings to light another issue regarding the franchise: that of the ownership of its rights. Even though the original film was made by Universal and Amblin, the reboot was in development at 20th Century Fox. In addition, it appears Paramount Pictures holds the rights to the film’s home video sales. So it is not accurately known who really has the power to make the sequel a reality if the stars were to align one day.
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Therefore, there are no official plans for a Small Soldiers sequel, and chances are there won't be one in the future as well. This is not the ‘Snyderverse’ situation; the film has no discernible visibility on social media, and the demand simply does not exist for the rights holders to spend millions of dollars on a sequel that no one wants. As a result, Universal and Amblin have not moved forward with a proposed sequel, and chances are, they won't do so in the future as well.
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Small Soldiers Sequel
