Was there going to be a Forrest Gump 2?
Short Answer
Yes. They gave it a go, but history was quicker on its feet than they were.
Long Answer
Gump & Company, or Gump & Co. if you like your heartbreak dressed up like a law firm, was meant to pick up where Forrest Gump left off. Winston Groom’s 1995 novel dropped Forrest into the middle of a decade that was already outpacing parody. His son has AIDS. Forrest meets Princess Diana. He blunders into the O.J. Simpson car chase. A cartoon wandering wide-eyed through a burning building.
Eric Roth, who had wrung gold out of the first film, turned in a script. Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis read it and quietly walked away. Maybe they knew that Forrest’s innocence, just about believable against the backdrop of Vietnam and Watergate, would look ridiculous against the grubby horrors of cable news and celebrity trials. Or maybe they had the good sense not to gild the lily.
Meanwhile, Winston Groom was rowing with Paramount over unpaid profits. Whether that slowed things down or not is academic. The real killer was time itself.
The script landed on 10 September 2001. The very next morning, the idea of a wide-eyed fool tripping through American history stopped being quaint and started being offensive. The project died. Nobody has tried to revive it. Nobody will.
Forrest Gump remains a one-off. Lucky, really. Some stories are only charming once. Drag them out for an encore and you end up with a punchline nobody laughs at.
