Movies

The Unmade 'Forrest Gump' Sequel Would've Been Out Of Its Damn Mind

forrest gump sequel
By Chris Evangelista

There was almost a Forrest Gump sequel, but we were never got to see more of the maudlin adventures of Tom Hanks' accidental witness to history. In a recent interview, screenwriter Eric Roth revealed he completed a script for a sequel, and let's just say the ideas contained therein were a bit off-the-wall. And to make this whole experience extra surreal, Roth claims it was the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that officially stopped Forrest Gump 2 from ever seeing the light of day.

Remember Forrest Gump? Of course you do – it was a big hit and won a bunch of Oscars. It's also not very good (don't @ me, I'm right)! The Robert Zemeckis film starred Tom Hanks as a "slow-witted but kind-hearted man" who somehow manages to be present at several big historical moments between the 1950s and 1980s. Eric Roth, who won an Oscar for his adaptation of Winston Groom's Forrest Gump novel, was tasked with writing a sequel – and that sequel came very close to happening. Author Groom wrote a sequel, too, called Gump & Co., but Roth's script differed from Groom's book significantly. And it also was pretty damn crazy.

In the video interview above, Roth lays out some details about his script, none of which sound very good. "It was gonna start with [Forrest's] little boy having AIDS," said Roth.  "And people wouldn't go to class with him in Florida. We had a funny sequence where they were [desegregation] busing in Florida at the same time, so people were angry about either the busing, or [their] kids having to go to school with the kid who had AIDS. So there was a big conflict."

I'm not exactly sure what's "funny" about that sequence, but hey, what do I know? Other tidbits from Roth's script included Forrest becoming a ballroom dancer, and dancing with Princess Diana; and Forrest somehow ending up in the back of O.J. Simpson's White Ford Bronco during the infamous chase seen round the world.

As if all that weren't enough, Roth also included the Oklahoma City bombing in the script:

"He meets on a bus a Native American woman and finds his calling, as a bingo caller on a reservation. And the big event in that, which you could see was diminished only in tragedy, I guess, because it's the same tragedy, but every day he'd go wait for his Native American partner. She taught nursery school at a government building in Oklahoma City. And he was sitting on the bench waiting for her to have lunch and all of a sudden the building behind him blows up."

Hey – what the fuck? Forrest Gump 2 was never made – for one specific reason. According to Roth, he turned the script in on September 10, 2001 – the day before the 9/11 attacks:

"Literally, I turned it in the day before 9/11. And Tom [Hanks] and I and Bob [Zemeckis] got together on 9/11 to sort of commiserate about how life was in America and how tragic it was. And we looked at each other and said, 'This movie has no meaning anymore, in that sense.'"

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