Sequels We're Glad Never Happened

Hollywood is a pretty risk-averse place. More often than not, movie execs would rather cash in on success than try something new. If a movie makes money, it only makes sense to produce a sequel... or ten. And spinoffs. Maybe a cartoon, too. And then, once the franchise stops making money, reboot it all again in five years or so. No wonder filmgoers complain about the complete lack of creativity coming from the movie industry.

But if there's one thing even worse than a lack of creativity, it's too much creativity. This list of insane sequel ideas proves it. It's unfathomable to believe that some of the world's most gifted filmmakers almost managed to talk multi-billion dollar corporations into spending millions of dollars and man-hours to produce these potential sequels. Meanwhile, the rest of us have to beg our bosses for different flavors of K-Cups. 

Thankfully, these sequels did not happen. But who knows?  Audiences have a voracious appetite for familiarity and Hollywood is all too happy to oblige. Maybe we will see these sequels someday. In the meantime, we can only watch (and shudder) at what might have been. Here are the sequels we're glad never happened.

"E.T. would be so much better if it were dark, depressing and freaking terrifying," said nobody ever. Well, nobody except for Steven Spielberg, apparently.

Some backstory: Steven Spielberg had refused to make a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but offered up an alternative: a movie that mixed the horror of Jaws with extraterrestrials of Close Encounters. The result was Watch the Skies, penned again by John Sayles (who seems to get all the worst assignments). That film was abandoned, though elements remained in E.T. the Extraterrestrial, which presents a much kinder, gentler alien, resulting in critical and commercial glory. So much so, Universal wanted a sequel. Surprisingly, Spielberg was on board. He and E.T. screenwriter Melissa Mathison penned a treatment that had that lovable little guy E.T. being part of a warring alien race whose evil albino members have imprisoned other alien races from across the galaxy for food... uh, what?

Yes, that's exactly what Spielberg planned for E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears. Now, E.T. isn't all sunshine, unicorns and rainbows — it's actually a compelling examination of the effect of divorce on a family — but still, carnivorous mutant E.T.'s? Is that what the franchise needed? Phone home? More like phone your therapist.

Man, if you thought Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was bonkers, hold our beer. The original pitch for a third film (before Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade) was as crazy as its title — Indiana Jones and the Monkey King. The story was conceived by three of the greatest blockbuster minds ever: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and Home Alone director Chris Columbus. Columbus, then riding high from writing Gremlins and The Goonies, was hired to pen the script, which begins with Indy fighting a ghost in Scotland. When your film starts with ghost fights, where else do you go? To much, much crazier places, it turns out.

Indy and friends are seeking the mythical city of the Monkey King, whose enchanted orchard contains fruit that will grant eternal life. In typical Indy movie fashion, he must fight Nazis along the way. In not-so-typical fashion, the Nazis have machine gun arms and Indy's saved by tank-driving gorillas. Indy even rides a rhinoceros. It's pretty intense.

Despite everything he's survived before, in this film, Indiana Jones actually dies... temporarily. Because he's pure of heart, Indy's brought back to life by the magical fruit of the Monkey King. And yes, the half-man, half-monkey, all-skeleton Monkey King does appear. Had Monkey King happened, the Indiana Jones franchise would have "Nuked the Fridge" much earlier. Except instead the phrase would have been "Rode the Rhino" or "Fought the Ghost."

This is the one abandoned sequel idea that actually became a movie (more on that in a sec). The sequel to Se7en was going to be titled Ei8ht, because of course it was. Unlike I Am Legend, which wanted to bring back its dead lead, Ei8ht was content with leaving Brad Pitt's character offscreen. Don't assume this means the sequel wasn't going to be ridiculous — far from it. In Ei8ht, Morgan Freeman's world-weary detective continues to hunt serial killers, but discovers he has the ability to predict the future. This concept got far enough along that a script was actually written. In a 2005 interview, David Fincher said, "I read a script two or three years ago... they wanted Morgan to have become clairvoyant in some way and that was the way he was now solving serial-killer cases! And I was like, 'Well, that's handy.'"

You don't need to be see the future to know this would have been a very bad idea. A sequel to Se7en isn't bad in theory, but giving Freeman supernatural abilities is ludicrous. While the sequel never happened, the story did. Much of the screenplay was repurposed for 2015's Solace, a movie about a psychic solving crimes starring Colin Farrell and Anthony Hopkins. Despite the talent attached, Solace bombed, so we don't have to worry about anyone making N9ne.

To be fair, describing Forrest Gump's plot makes it sound kinda nuts. Tom Hanks plays a man with a 75 IQ who experiences almost every momentous event in American history between 1950 and 1981, from teaching Elvis to dance to calling the police during Watergate. Sounds wacky, but the film functions as a fable and it works. So much so that it won Best Picture and Tom Hanks his second Oscar for Best Actor. 

Even with that primer, Forrest Gump II sounds genuinely insane. Where to begin? Well, Forrest goes broke and plays for the New Orleans Saints. He invents the formula for New Coke and also creates a power plant fueled by pig poo (the two have remarkably similar flavors). He crashes the Exxon Valdez, rides in the back of OJ's Bronco, and works for NASA. There, he befriends an orangutan named Sue, who joins him in Operation Desert Storm.

If life is like a box of chocolates, Forrest Gump II is like a bag of Necco Wafers — it's all awful. While the first film managed to seamlessly weave this one man throughout American history, the proposed sequel did so with all of the subtlety of Lt. Dan hosting a children's show. The whole thing is just awkward. Despite all of the history we've experienced in the past 40 years, hopefully we'll never see a movie where Forrest buys a subprime mortgage or builds a wall.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (the 1970s), George Lucas made plans for a Star Wars sequel that wasn't part of his original vision. Long before Team Disney took over, even before the movie that would eventually be called A New Hope was released, Lucas gave partial creative control of his space opera to Alan Dean Foster. Foster was hired in 1976 to pen the novelization of Star Wars, as well as a second book which Lucas could use for a potential follow-up. That book was the first official Star Wars sequel, Star Wars: Splinter of the Mind's Eye. Lucas' only restriction was that the story could be filmed on a low budget so he could reuse props and sets.

Splinter finds Luke, Leia, C-3PO, and R2-D2 stranded on a dark, foggy mining world named Mimibian, which contains a powerful crystal sought by the Empire. Vader shows up only briefly for the grand finale fight, while Han and Chewie don't show up at all, as Harrison Ford was only contracted for one Star Wars. Luke and Leia's relationship also has romantic undertones throughout, meaning perhaps they weren't siblings in this version of the story. Splinter is a cool idea, but was basically Lucas' backup plan in case Star Wars only did so-so. Of course, it became the highest-grossing film of all time at that point, launching arguably the most popular franchise in history and allowing Lucas to film his saga as he had planned it from the start.

Of all the movies in all the world, why did Warner Bros. have to try to make a sequel to this one? Casablanca is near the top of most Best Films Ever lists. So it's no surprise that during the past 70-plus years, there have been numerous attempts to film a sequel.

The first was Brazzaville, named after the location of the Free French garrison mentioned at the end of the movie. Brazzaville was announced by Warner Bros. in the 1940s, and a treatment was even written. Picking up where Casablanca left off, we learn the iconically laconic Rick Blaine was actually an Allied agent all along. This would retcon the most famous morally ambiguous character in all of moviedom, destroying his entire arc in Casablanca. 

While Rick Blaine made appearances on the small screen and in novels, the issue with an official movie sequel was that you simply cannot replace Humphrey Bogart (or, for that matter, any of the other actors). Howard Koch, one of the original film's three credited writers, understood this. His 1988 synopsis for Return to Casablanca focused on Richard, the son of Rick and Ilsa. Following his mother's death in 1961, Richard goes to Casablanca, where he was conceived, to find his father. The idea isn't bad, just unnecessary. Who's the audience for this anyway? Film buffs don't want a sequel and mainstream moviegoers don't care. Much like Rick and Ilsa's romance, some things belong in the past.