Hollywood’s great at coming up with stupid ideas because the people who run the industry aren’t very creative. The bean counters always want to prove they can put their “stamp” on something, and often times, when you see a very stupid idea in a movie that feels wedged in, apropos of nothing, it’s usually something some idiot studio executive insisted on it until it finally became a reality.
Now The Daily Beast has listed a number of sequels that thankfully never came to pass, and another fun game you can play is sequels that never should have been made in a million years. (Jaws 3D, Jaws the Revenge, The Sting 2 with Mac Davis, and Godfather 3 are just a few that come to mind.)
The latest, of course, is the proposed sequel to It’s a Wonderful Life, which we hope will never get out of the development phase. If it does get made, it’s not going to be embraced by the public, and it will have a real uphill battle getting anyone to see it. Yet we think one movie on the list, Beetlejuice 2, isn’t such a bad idea, and Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton are said to be onboard if it goes through.
Okay, now back to the nonsense. How about the proposed sequel to Se7en, Ei8ht, where Morgan Freeman has psychic powers. There was also going to be a sequel to E.T., Nocturnal Fears, which would have had evil aliens coming to earth, but Spielberg soon abandoned it. As successful as Jaws and E.T. were, he ultimately refused to be involved in sequels in either.
How about Forrest Gump 2, where he now has a kid, and they’re sitting on the same bench waiting for the bus to pick him up. Gump was even going to be put into one of the most notorious events in history, the O.J. trial. Thank God this didn’t get made. Another blasphemous idea on the same level of a Wonderful Life sequel was the proposed sequel to Casablanca. (There was a Casablanca TV series however, with David Soul in the Humphrey Bogart role!)
A few others? Batman Triumphant, which would have been the follow up to Batman and Robin with The Scarecrow, The Joker, Harley Quinn and Man-Bat, The Breakfast Club 2, Gladiator 2 (with a screenplay by Nick Cave!), and more. There’s a lot of awful sequels that have been made throughout cinema history, and these days, thankfully, filmmakers strive for better the second time around. As much as the public would have loved another Animal House, or another GoodFellas, some films should never be sequelized.
