Production on Lars Klevberg’s Child’s Play remake wrapped earlier this month, and the studio has begun its marketing campaign with a site promoting “Buddi”, the seemingly innocent doll that'll take a sinister turn. A remake of director Tom Holland’s classic slasher film Child’s Play was announced back in July, and while it doesn’t involve franchise creator Don Mancini, writer David Kirschner, or Chucky’s voice actor Brad Dourif, it will follow the same basic plot as the original film.
The first Child’s Play followed a mother who gives her son a “Good Guy” doll for his birthday, but it turns out that the doll has been possessed by the soul of serial killer Charles Lee Ray. While the synopsis for the new film is pretty much the same, Chucky will go through a few transformations, and just like any other toy in the modern era, the now called “Buddi” doll has gotten its own promotional site.
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Orion Pictures launched the Best Buddi site to promote the film, and introduce the new Chucky. The new Buddi doll, just like the Good Guys, “wants you for a best friend!” but does much more than its predecessors: Buddi comes with a voice recognition engine, capable of identifying speech, inflection, tonality, and “subtle variations in the human voice”. Buddi also learns from human interaction and through its sensors and cameras, and has the ability to comprehend and converse fluently in English and Spanish. It can also be programmed via tablets or computer and controlled via smartphone. With all these characteristics and enhancements, the doll itself (without being possessed by anything) is scary enough.
In the original film, the mother finally realises her son is telling the truth about Chucky when she finds out that the doll has been working without batteries. It'll be fun to see how they will realize something is wrong with Buddi with all the technology involved in it. In addition to these new characteristics, Chucky is getting a new origin story, in which, instead of being possessed by a serial killer, it's programmed to be violent by a Chinese factory worker who later kills himself.
There's been some controversy around the remake from the beginning, as MGM holds the rights to the original film, which means they can remake it regardless of what creator Mancini thinks about that. In fact, Mancini has been quite vocal about his thoughts on the remake. However, Universal owns the rights to the sequels, which is why Mancini has been working on a Child’s Play TV series. In a way, fans of the franchise are in a win-win situation here. This new Chucky is very up-to-date with technology and modern toys, which makes it scary enough as it could easily influence its owner without the intervention of black magic. With more than six months to go until the release of the new Child’s Play, fans probably can’t expect a trailer or teaser to drop soon, but this Best Buddi site is a good way to get the marketing started.
More: Child's Play Reboot: First Look At New Chucky
Source: Orion Pictures.
