Forrest Gump is one of those movies that every regular person you know loves and every snob hipster douche you know likes to shit on.
Is Forrest Gump perfect? Absolutely not. But similar to baseball, despite its obvious flaws, it’s Americana in its purest and most entertaining form, and that’s what makes it great.
And while I personally will always love Forrest Gump and consider it one of those movies you just have to watch when it’s on (similar to Pulp Fiction, American Pie, Remember The Titans, Austin Powers, Goodfellas, etc), that does NOT mean I would be on board with the idea of a sequel, especially when that sequel sounds like it was written in the middle of a bad acid trip.
According to Forrest Gump‘s screenwriter Eric Roth, a script for the ill-fated sequel was turned in “the day before 9/11” but was ultimately “shelved permanently” because “the film no longer had meaning.”
In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Roth said that the sequel was “gonna start with his little boy having AIDS.”
Yikes, indeed.
“I had him in the back of O.J.’s Bronco. He would look up occasionally, but they didn’t see him in the rearview mirror, and then he’d pop down,” Roth said
“I had him as a ballroom dancer who was really good, he could do the [rotation] ballroom dancing. And then eventually, just as sort of a charity kind of thing, he danced with Princess Diana,” he continued.
However, due to a scene that connected Gump to the Oklahoma City Bombing, the film was ultimately scrapped when the 9/11 terrorist attacks occurred.
“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. … So when 9/11 occurred … everything felt meaningless,” Roth explained.
Yahoo Entertainment’s full interview with Roth, who was recently nominated for his work on A Star Is Born, will be released in unison with Forrest Gump‘s 25th anniversary in July.