Tales From Development Hell: Gump & Co
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By Ryan Fleming.
Every work is a product of its time. Some might be ahead of their time or look back to an earlier time, but even these cannot look forward or back without being products of their time. At times, whether or not something can be a product in a particular time can change very suddenly. Adaptations of the comic Watchmen kept struggling during the 1990s in part because the dark Cold War tale seemed out of sync with that more optimistic decade; that changed with 9/11. Many works of popular culture were directly impacted because of those attacks, including the subject of this article. Whilst Watchmen received a renewed vigour as darker works of fiction became more vogue, the sequel to Forrest Gump (1994) instead became a product of a time that no longer existed.
Forrest Gump began as a 1986 novel by Winston Groom, chronicling the life of its low IQ but savant Alabamian protagonist through the postwar United States, often brushing up against landmark events in both US and world history during that era. It was subject to a bidding war by Hollywood studios even before publication. Warner Bros. would win that bidding war, but after the release of Rain Man (1988), which also featured a savant main character, they put the project into turnaround. A Hollywood studio not wanting to proceed with a project because one of their competitors had done something similar is objectively the most dated concept you shall read about in this article.
Paramount would receive the rights in 1992, in exchange for which Warner Bros. received the script that became the Kurt Russell action picture Executive Decision (1996). Robert Zemeckis was hired as director after several others turned down the project. Screenwriter Eric Roth abandoned some aspects of Gump’s misadventures, such as his sojourns as an astronaut, professional wrestler, chess player, and acting opposite Raquel Welch in a remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon. The character also became less of a savant and more of an earnest simpleton, which also resulted in his frequent uses of profanity and his sexual encounters being removed or reduced in frequency. Tom Hanks would drop out of another project to star in the title character, after the original choice wound up passing. Both actors were very different to Groom’s vision of the character, for which he has said John Goodman would have been the perfect choice, and he also says was a rougher version than the one portrayed in the script. The still relatively new CGI technology was used to insert Hanks next to long-deceased historical personages such as George Wallace, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and John Lennon, amongst others, and even physically interact with them in the case of Kennedy.
The film would go on to be the second highest-grossing film of 1994 after The Lion King. It garnered positive reviews from contemporary critics, but it was not universally acclaimed. Whilst some praised the script for its tone, balancing drama and comedy, and glib takes on recent US history, others criticised the film for those exact same things. Its use of nostalgia for the eras portrayed also generated discussion, but not to the extent it would later. At the following Academy Awards, Forrest Gump would win six of them: Best Picture, Best Director for Zemeckis, Best Actor in a Leading Role for Hanks (his second in as many years), Best Visual Effects, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. It had been nominated for seven more Academy Wards and received several from other ceremonies, including the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama. It went on to subsequently appear on several best or greatest films lists, and in 2011 was selected for preservation in the US Library of Congress’s National Film Industry.
Perhaps more than anything else, its Best Picture win at the Academy Awards has come in for retrospective criticism. 1994 was a high watermark year for Hollywood motion pictures. In addition to Gump and The Lion King, the year also saw Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption released. The former would win Best Original Screenplay at the Oscars and the Palm d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, whilst the latter, which attracted little notice in its theatrical release, would find a new life on home video and become regarded as one of the greatest films ever made. A 2015 poll of Academy members indicated that, given a second chance, they would have given Best Picture that year to Shawshank. It had actually been Shawshank that Hanks dropped out of, in the lead role of Andy Dufresne, to appear in Gump. He replaced John Travolta, who had passed on the title role in that film to star in Pulp Fiction as Vincent Vega. Unfortunately, it does not appear that Tim Robbins (who would actually play Dufresne) was ever considered for the role of Vega to bring things full circle.
Although the novel had only sold tens of thousands of copies in its original release, after the success of the film it would surpass more than a million copies sold. Groom would pen Gump & Co. in 1995, which continued chronicling Gump’s life through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Unlike some authors responding to changes in adaptations of their work to inform a literary sequel, like Michael Chrichton retroactively changing the ending and fates of several characters in his novel Jurassic Park to be more like its film adaptation, Groom retained the original characterisation and life story of Gump from his novel. The title character even advises the reader not to let anyone make a film of their life story, which he does at the end of Gump & Co. after already meeting a young Tom Hanks earlier in the book. The film was incorporated into the work as metafiction, with Gump himself appearing on talk shows and awards ceremonies, the experience of which informed his advice to the reader earlier in the book.
The novel sequel received a similarly divided response from critics as the film did, with many of the opinions of film critics being repeated, positively and negatively, but their literary counterparts. Hollywood was still eager to secure the rights to the sequel, but the film remained on the backburner for several years as Hanks, Zemeckis, and Roth all worked on other projects. By the early part of the 21st century, work had begun in earnest, with Roth completing a first draft of the script that began minutes after the first film ended.
In a case of being coincidentally present for massive historical events worthy of Forrest Gump himself, the draft was submitted on September 10th, 2001. The very next day saw the terrorist attacks that would change the world overnight and put Gump & Co. into turnaround. It remains an unmade film as of 2026.
Roth has told of a meeting between himself, Hanks, and Zemeckis soon after the attacks whose outcome was essentially that they would not proceed with the film. None of them would be involved directly in the attempts to bring the film to the screen again. Hanks has since been candid about preferring that it not be made, even disregarding the changed cultural climate following 9/11. He felt there was a completeness to the original that would have been undermined by a sequel.
There was no contractual obligation for Hanks to return for a sequel. There was however another contractual obligation that led to development of it. Groom had long disputed the royalties he received for the film from Paramount, the studio employing their usual Hollywood accounting techniques. He eventually declared himself satisfied, after the studio paid him a second figure sum for the rights to Gump & Co. Hanks has also been candid that actual discussions including himself on the project never amounted to more than an hour, and the sequel only ever entering development to save the studio bother from an irate author would tie into Hanks’ account of only the most preliminary of discussions being held on producing it.
The project would be revived briefly in 2007 when Wendy Finerman and Steve Tisch, two of the producers of the first film, looked into the project. It had seemingly taken six years for the project to become relevant again. Around this time, at least one report indicated that Gary Sinise would reprise his role as Lieutenant Dan from the first film, and that talks were happening between the producers and Hanks. These might have been the discussions that Hanks would later recollect where he stated his position that they should do a sequel if there was reason to do it, and not simply because the first one had been a success and therefore a sequel would be a success too. After this brief resurrection, the project was put back into turnaround and there it has remained since, doing very little in the way of turning around.
It was after this too that what had begun as a disagreement over the film’s themes would become a major line in the sand of film opinion, one that reflected a polarisation of opinion in the US that was already underway even when the film was originally released.
Hanks and Tisch both claimed at the time of release that the film was apolitical. Very few people agreed with them. It was ranked by the conservative magazine National Review as one of the best conservative films in 1995 and was even evoked by Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole in 1996. With its release the same year as the Republican Party captured a majority of the US House of Representatives for the first time since 1952, some said that, intentional or not, Gump had heralded a shift in US politics and culture. Critiques of the film as conservative usually pertain to its portrayal of the countercultural of the 1960s as seen through the experiences of Jenny (Robin Wright). In contrast to Forrest, who stumbles into fame and fortune by following what he is told to do, Jenny becomes part of the counterculture and goes through several cycles of abuse, drugs, and prostitution, eventually dying from an unknown disease speculated variously to be Hepatitis C or HIV/AIDS. Though never explicitly confirmed, both diseases can be spread by injection drug use and unprotected sexual intercourse.
The film’s adoption by US conservatives at the time, along with the retrospective questioning of its Best Picture Academy Award win, led to a re-evaluation of the film as the years passed. And as the generation that grew up during the eras portrayed grew older, the generations that came afterwards began to question those eras and the popular recollection of them.
What if Gump & Co. had made it to screen? The simplest way to achieve this might be to avoid 9/11, but such a massive change in world history for the sake of considering how a film might have turned out feels like using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Let’s imagine instead that the decision is made to proceed with the film even after 9/11 happens. Say someone has the idea that audiences might want a return to simpler times, which could mean either the periods when the film takes place or the year of its release. Perhaps not a very sensible notion, but when has that ever stopped Hollywood executives once they got an idea in their head? They would not have proceeded without Hanks, so he would either have to be convinced of the merit of producing the sequel or be offered an astronomical recompense. Or both!
Roth had already turned in the screenplay, Finerman and Tisch tried to produce even historically after it had lain dormant for years, and Zemeckis did not make a film between Cast Away (2000) and The Polar Express (2004), both of which also starred Hanks. Most of the principals involved in Forrest Gump would thus be returning for Gump & Co. eight or nine years after the former had been release to critical and commercial success. How would the sequel have fared in a radically different world from the one in which the original was released? How would the release of the sequel change perceptions of that first film? Would it change the career trajectory of any of those principals?
Let’s consider some of the events portrayed in the Gump & Co. novel. In the sequel, Forrest Gump plays for the New Orleans Saints, invents New Coke, is recruited into the Iran-Contra conspiracy by Oliver North, works with Ronald Reagan’s would-be assassin John Hinckley Jr., reveals televangelist Jim Bakker’s affair with his secretary, causes the 1987 stock market crash, wrecks the Exxon Valdez, brings down the Berlin Wall, captures Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War, and invests in Bill and Hilary Clinton’s real estate company. Whilst not all of these events would have made it to film, what stands out are some of the events that would have echoes less than a decade later had the film been released in 2002 or 2003. The New Orleans Saints won their first Super Bowl in 2009. One of Gump’s investing partners in Whitewater stood for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008. The shady dealings he has with Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken make for repeating history after the 2007 financial crash. Most notably, the film might have been released and showed Gump capturing Saddam Hussein at the same time as the United States geared up for the Iraq War which eventually saw the dictator captured, tried, and executed. A surprising number of current events for an irrelevant project.
None of that would have impacted the film at the box office, of course, but what might have harmed it was not how much the global political context had changed since 1994 but how much Hollywood had by 2002/3. Of the five highest grossing films of 2002, four of them were sequels, and all of them were science fiction or fantasy: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Spider-Man; Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones; and Men in Black II. 2003 saw only three sequels in the top five, but with one slight exception, all again were science fiction or fantasy, and the exception starred talking animals: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King; Finding Nemo; The Matrix Reloaded; Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl; and Bruce Almighty.
The box office would seemingly not indicate a more cynical outlook that precluded the film being made historically. Nor did the Best Picture winners at either Academy Awards: Chicago (2002), the first musical to win that award since 1968; and the aforementioned Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Gump & Co. might not even stand out as a film seemingly from a different era for its tone but instead get lost in the shuffle amidst so many big budget science fiction films. Even the visual effects, which had been almost universally praised in 1994, might not be praised so much, and not just on their effectiveness. Zemeckis had used similar effects that let Tom Hanks shake hands with the long-deceased President Kennedy to put the current President, Bill Clinton, into his science fiction film Contact (1997), repurposing his speech on the Alan Hills 84001 (speculated to contain some evidence of extraterrestrial microscopic bacteria) to be about the events of that film. The White House sent a letter calling the use ‘inappropriate’.
Conservatives might also be less inclined to use as a prop a film that showcased the hypocrisy of televangelists, the corruption of Wall Street executives, and President Reagan’s direct involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. On the other hand, liberal commentators might be less forgiving too of a film whose sole appearance by a Democratic politician references the Whitewater scandal. Sometimes, the only way to truly know that you have shown no bias is to piss everyone off to an equal extent.
In as much as all art is political to an extent, trying to be apolitical is itself a political decision. Gump & Co. portraying the events covered in the novel, not all of them guaranteed even if the film had been made, might have created more interpretations of both films as satirical to an extent.
Can two films, an original and a sequel, both be products of their respective times but have diametrically opposite receptions as a result? The allegedly apolitical nature of Forrest Gump might have played well in 1994, but would a sequel with the same glib interpretation of modern US history be accidentally seen as more satirical because of the historical events presented?
We’ll never know how Gump & Co. might have been received, but one thing it would have going in its favour is its 1980s setting. The early part of the 00s was the beginning of pop culture works playing on nostalgia for that decade. A quarter century later pop culture is still in thrall to that nostalgia, whilst longing for Blockbuster, Tamagotchi and Sega consoles always sits on the backburner.
It can be easy to imagine a divided reaction to both Gump films on a generational level in the US. With baby boomer audiences preferring the original that portrayed their own formative years with a more conservative tinge, whilst younger Generation X and millennial viewers prefer the more satirical take on their own formative years.
Ryan Fleming is the author of SLP's Reid in Braid and various short stories for the anthologies, as well as editing The Scottish Anthology.
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