Tom Hanks, who played the iconic eponymous character in the beloved 1994 drama Forrest Gump, has revealed why the film never got a sequel. A massive box office success, met with critical acclaim, and winning six Academy Awards, Hanks revealed that the lack of a follow-up wasn’t because the studio didn’t want it, but because everyone involved in creating the character didn’t deem it necessary.
So, if Forrest Gump was so beloved upon release, why wasn’t part two ever made? Forrest Gump 2 was likely part of the plans of every executive at Paramount Pictures after the first film became one of the most watched of the year, falling second to The Lion King, Disney’s animated behemoth of 1994. Forrest Gump made $678 million at the box office from a $55 million production budget, representing Paramount’s biggest blockbuster of the year.
Now, in a conversation with CinemaBlend’s podcast, ReelBlend, Hanks revealed that Forrest Gump 2 was a hot topic of conversation at one point. Although screenwriter Eric Roth would eventually write a script years later (and a follow-up novel, “Gump and Co.”), Hanks said he had meetings with Zemeckis and Roth after the release of the first film. Check out what happened in that meeting below:
“Eric Roth and Bob and I, we got together, and Eric sort of mapped out what the second one could be. The studio actually said, ‘What, are you guys allergic to money?’ That’s one of the things they said. And so we got together and talked about what the possibilities could be. And here’s what we could do. We could come up with a story. We could come up with a plot. We could come up with things that happened to the characters. We could come up with something that would work.
But that was the only meeting we ever had about it, because when it was done, we just said, ‘This remains unnecessary.’ Why would we try to continue a story that came to its own complete and proper conclusion? So yeah. Talked about! Never gonna happen.”
Things Get Real Weird in the Forrest Gump Sequel Novel
Well, there you have it. In case you expected Forrest Gump 2 to be made at some point, Hanks is clearly against bringing the character back to the big screen, feeling that there aren’t any more stories to tell about the multifaceted genius with the unmistakable accent. However, this doesn’t mean that a sequel doesn’t exist. Forrest Gump was based on a novel by Winston Groom published in 1986. In 1995, Groom released a sequel titled “Gump and Co.,” following the main character’s adventures throughout the following decades. However, what makes the novel hard to adapt is that Forrest’s story in the book gets a bit weird, as the character falls in love again, participates in environmental disasters, and helps to catch Saddam Hussein.
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- Release Date
- July 6, 1994
- Director
- Robert Zemeckis