Child's Play

The Kaslan Corporation has just launched Buddi, a line of high-tech dolls built to be lifelong companions. Each doll learns from its owner and surroundings through artificial intelligence and links up to other Kaslan products. The doll becomes a worldwide hit. At a Kaslan assembly plant in Vietnam, an overworked employee is fired and chewed out by his supervisor. To get back at the company, he switches off every safety setting on one Buddi doll and then kills himself.

In Chicago, widowed store clerk Karen Barclay and her twelve-year-old son Andy, who is hearing-impaired, have moved into a new apartment. Andy is unhappy about the move and about Karen's new boyfriend, Shane. To cheer him up, Karen blackmails her boss into giving her a returned Buddi doll. It is the doll that was tampered with. When Andy switches it on, the doll names itself Chucky and quickly attaches itself to him. Chucky helps Andy make friends with two neighborhood kids, Falyn and Pugg, but he also starts showing a violent streak.

After the family cat scratches Andy, Chucky kills it. He then scares Shane, and Shane lashes out at Andy. Chucky hears Andy say he wishes Shane would go away and takes it literally. He follows Shane to his house, where it turns out Shane has a wife and children. Chucky breaks Shane's legs and starts up a garden cultivator that scalps and kills him. Chucky then brings Shane's skinned face home to Andy as a gift.

Police detective Mike Norris starts investigating. Andy, Falyn and Pugg shut Chucky down and throw him in the trash. Gabe, a creepy electrician who spies on tenants, pulls the doll out and fixes it. Chucky kills him with a table saw. Andy tries to tell Karen the doll is a killer, but she doesn't believe him and takes him to work with her at the mall so she can keep an eye on him. Chucky follows Norris's mother Doreen, who books a ride in a self-driving Kaslan car, and he takes over the car and crashes it, killing her. Norris decides Andy must be behind the killings and arrests him just as Chucky takes over the whole store.

Chucky switches on the Buddi dolls in the store, and they turn on the staff and shoppers. People are killed and the crowd stampedes. Norris is hurt in the chaos while Andy and his friends get out. Chucky then reveals he is holding Karen hostage in the store's storage area, so Andy goes back in. Andy saves his mother. Norris shoots Chucky down and Karen cuts off his head, and both finally realize Andy was telling the truth. While police and paramedics look after Karen, Norris and the other survivors, Andy and his friends burn what is left of Chucky in an alley.

Afterward, Kaslan CEO Henry Kaslan announces a huge recall of Buddi dolls. As one of the recalled dolls is put into storage, its eyes flash red and it smiles. Chucky has moved his programming into a new body.

Story notes

• In a separate remake continuity, Andy Barclay receives a connected Buddi doll whose disabled safety programming turns it violently possessive.
• This Chucky is an artificial-intelligence product; not Charles Lee Ray in a doll.

Release facts

• Released: 2019-06-21 (United States and Canada); premiere in Paris a few days earlier
• Rated: R for bloody horror violence, and language throughout
• Domestic: $29,208,403 (opening weekend $14,094,594 from 3,007 theaters)
• Worldwide: $43,499,580 per The Numbers; $44.9 million per Box Office Mojo as cited by Wikipedia
• Distributor: United Artists Releasing (United States); Elevation Pictures (Canada)

Marketing started with the first image of Chucky in September 2018 and the Buddi teaser poster on November 12, 2018. Orion launched a website for the fake Kaslan Corporation. The first trailer played in theaters with The Prodigy starting February 8, 2019, and a second trailer and the theatrical poster came in April. Starting in April, posters showed Chucky killing Toy Story 4 characters, since both films opened June 21, 2019. On June 24 a poster showed Chucky going after the Annabelle doll as Annabelle Comes Home opened.

The film premiered in Paris and opened in the United States and Canada on June 21, 2019. It was the first Orion Pictures film released through United Artists Releasing. It made $6.1 million on its first day, including $1.65 million from Thursday previews, and opened to $14.1 million from 3,007 theaters, second behind Toy Story 4. It fell 68.6 percent to $4.4 million in its second weekend and dropped to eighth. It finished with $29.2 million in the US and Canada against a $10 million budget.

Rotten Tomatoes gives it 64 percent from 208 reviews, and its consensus says it updates an '80s horror icon for the Internet of Things era. Metacritic scores it 48 from 35 critics. CinemaScore audiences gave it a C+, tied with Seed of Chucky for the lowest grade in the series.

Nick Allen of RogerEbert.com gave it three of four stars and called it nastier and more playful than the original. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave it four of five stars. Jeremy Dick of MovieWeb called it a model for horror remakes. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave it two of five stars, and Peter Debruge of Variety said the script pokes fun at how little the premise makes sense.

Don Mancini, Jennifer Tilly and Christine Elise, all longtime faces of the original series, criticized the remake.

At WonderCon Grahame-Smith said they would like to make a sequel if the film did well, and Klevberg said he loved the Buddi Bear idea. In July 2020 Klevberg said a sequel was unlikely because Mancini's Chucky TV series was moving ahead. No sequel has been made.

Press and marketing

• Theatrical key-art / poster campaign reference: IMP Awards — Child's Play (2019) poster archive.

Cast

Crew

Production

A remake of the 1988 Child's Play was first talked about in the early 2010s, before Curse of Chucky, with Brad Dourif expected to voice Chucky again. That version never got made. MGM kept the rights to the first film, and in July 2018 it announced a new Child's Play with a different creative team.

Lars Klevberg, who had just made Polaroid, signed on to direct from a script by Tyler Burton Smith, a writer on the video game Quantum Break. Seth Grahame-Smith and David Katzenberg, the producers of It and It Chapter Two, produced through KatzSmith Productions. Klevberg said he drew on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.

Don Mancini said MGM asked him and longtime producer David Kirschner to be executive producers and they said no, because they still had their own ongoing Chucky business. He admitted his feelings were hurt that the character he created was being remade without him.

Gabriel Bateman, Aubrey Plaza and Brian Tyree Henry were announced in September 2018. Beatrice Kitsos and Ty Consiglio joined in November.

Principal photography ran from September 17 to November 8, 2018, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Reshoots took place in Vancouver on December 15 and 16, 2018, with more in April 2019.

Mark Hamill was revealed as the voice of Chucky on March 31, 2019, during Orion's WonderCon presentation. Seth Grahame-Smith told Entertainment Weekly that Hamill was their first choice and they never expected him to say yes.

Production designer Dan Hermansen says in an interview on the 2024 Scream Factory disc that the team had to make the film look different from the original for legal reasons.

Einar Martinsen served as lead character designer for the redesigned Chucky and published original concept artwork and production-result references in his portfolio.

Einar Martinsen’s early Chucky concepts explore removable facial skin and an exposed mechanical face. The artist’s development images are distinct from finished-film stills.

Filming locations

• Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada: Principal photography September to November 2018 and reshoots in December 2018 and April 2019
• Chicago, Illinois (story setting): Setting of the Barclays' apartment, the mall and the police investigation
• Vietnam (story setting): Setting of the Kaslan factory in the opening
• MGM announced the reboot entering principal photography in Vancouver, British Columbia in September 2018; the production's effects work was also prepared through MastersFX's Vancouver studio.

Effects and makeup

MastersFX, led by Todd Masters, spent six weeks building seven practical animatronic Chucky puppets. Each had interchangeable arms and heads so it could be set up for different actions on set.

Einar Martinsen was the lead character designer on the new Chucky, brought on by Lars Klevberg. Todd Masters told HorrorFuel that MastersFX printed the design in four different sizes so Klevberg could pick the one that worked next to the young cast.

Masters told Daily Dead the team asked how a group of company executives would design a doll they planned to mass produce, and decided they would simplify it. He told HorrorFuel there were six main Chuckys that could be taken apart, including a fully self-contained robot called Robo Chucky and two hero puppets with animatronic heads on mostly rod-puppet bodies. It took four puppeteers.

The production went practical whenever it could. Chucky's face was run by remote-controlled servos, the way Kevin Yagher had done it on the older films. A walking rig managed a few steps, but most walking shots and some big moves were done in CG. Pixomondo provided the CGI.

Orion released a behind-the-scenes video, Bringing Chucky to Life, on its YouTube channel on May 16, 2019.

Director Lars Klevberg described using several practical Chucky builds, including radio-controlled dolls, multi-operator puppets and a stunt doll designed to withstand impacts.

The 2019 production emphasized practical doll performance for most scenes; not relying entirely on digital animation.

MastersFX built multiple interchangeable Chucky puppets for specialized tasks, including close-up hero units, rod-puppet bodies and a self-contained 'Robo Chucky' configuration.

The reboot led with practical effects whenever possible: facial performance was servo-controlled, a walking rig handled limited practical steps, and CG was reserved for movements or expression refinements that the physical puppet could not accomplish convincingly.

Todd Masters said the team printed Einar Martinsen’s 3D design files and produced four or five fully clothed size studies so Lars Klevberg could assess the doll’s proportions.

Kalos Studios unified differences between practical Chucky puppets across a sequence, restored the smooth plastic face digitally, and replaced or animated eyes for Chucky and the Buddi Bear.

Kalos used FaceBuilder or a Maya head model, then FaceTracker inside Nuke, to preserve Chucky’s performance while adjusting facial movement and blinking. Joon Lee estimated that about eighty percent of their work stayed in Nuke and KeenTools.

Props and costumes

Jori Woodman designed the costumes. Dan Hermansen was production designer, Doug Girling art director, Rachel Robinson set decorator and Slade Young property master.

The Good Guy doll became the Buddi doll, a name that nods to the My Buddy doll that inspired the original Chucky design. The teaser poster put a WiFi symbol over the i in Buddi.

The official poster shows a single Buddi toy box sitting on the floor of a dark warehouse.

Masters said the Zed Mart finale was shot in the first week of production, when the crew had expected to start with a different scene, and they were already behind on the hero puppets because of late studio changes.

Einar Martinsen designed the reboot's Buddi Chucky. MastersFX refined the character around the idea that a corporation would mass-produce the toy, favoring cleaner manufactured lines and using digital sculpting/output before traditional puppet fabrication.

The effects team created multiple sizes and modular heads/arms so the doll could be configured for different actions and for scale against the young cast rather than relying on one all-purpose hero prop.

Production artifacts

Art and design

• The IMP Awards poster archive catalogs fourteen designs; the primary one-sheet is credited to Blood & Chocolate.

Scripts and documents

The killers

Deaths

Bear McCreary wrote the score for a toy orchestra inspired by Chucky's toy-store origins. He said he took toys from his daughter's playroom and added toy pianos, hurdy-gurdies, accordions, action figures, Slinkies, slide whistles, Otamatones, melodicas, harmonicas and kazoos.

The main theme doubles as The Buddi Song, a jingle programmed into the doll in the story. McCreary wrote the lyrics with screenwriter Tyler Burton Smith, and Mark Hamill sang both a cheerful and an evil version. The upbeat version plays over the end credits. McCreary released the full opening theme with Hamill in June 2019.

Waxwork Records released the soundtrack in 2019 as a double LP on 180-gram Chucky's Eyes colored vinyl, one blue iris disc and one red iris disc. It has art by Phantom City Creative, liner notes by McCreary and a 12x12 insert.

A soundtrack trailer, a music video by McCreary, is included on the 2019 Blu-ray.

Soundtrack releases

Home Media

• 2019, digital release on September 10, 2019.
• 2019, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment Blu-ray + Digital and DVD, September 24, 2019. The Blu-ray is a Region A BD-50 at 2.39:1 in 1080p with DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 and English and Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1. Extras: audio commentary by director Lars Klevberg, The Making of Child's Play (5:05), Bringing Child's Play's Chucky to Life (4:28), a Bear McCreary soundtrack trailer (3:16), two Lee Hardcastle claymation shorts, Toy Massacre (0:49) and A.I. Mayhem (0:48), a photo gallery and the theatrical trailer. The Numbers tracked $1,561,468 in US DVD sales and $1,699,219 in Blu-ray sales.
• 2024, Scream Factory Collector's Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray, March 19, 2024. New 4K remaster with Dolby Vision and HDR and DTS-HD Master Audio. Both discs carry the archival Klevberg commentary. New extras: A New Start with Gabriel Bateman (about 11 minutes), Head of the Patch with David James Lewis (about 9 minutes) and Beautiful Darkness with production designer Dan Hermansen (about 12 minutes).

Home video history

• 2019, Waxwork Records double LP soundtrack on Chucky's Eyes colored vinyl.
• Trick or Treat Studios-branded Child's Play (2019) Buddi vacuform promotional mask, documented in the collector market; promotional/origin claims remain secondary-market provenance.

The catalog

Official trailer

Gallery

Posters & Key Art

Film Stills

Behind the Scenes

Effects

Production Art

Alternate Art