It's quite arguably the greatest movie of our generation. If you saw Forrest Gump and didn't have a reaction, you've probably got the intelligence of a vegetable.
The 1994 Oscar-winning drama was supposed to have a sequel written by Eric Roth, the same screenwriter who adapted Winston Groom’s 1986 novel of the same name to create the first movie.
The Munich, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and A Star Is Born writer revealed to Yahoo Entertainment in an interview that he had written a completed draft for a sequel to Forrest Gump and turned it in to the powers that be on September 10, 2001...
Roth says of the script:
“Literally, I turned it in the day before 9/11. And Tom and I and Bob got together on 9/11 to sort of commiserate about how life was in America and how tragic it was. And we looked at each other and said, ‘This movie has no meaning anymore, in that sense.’”
“It was gonna start with his little boy having AIDS,” said Roth, who recently earned his fifth Oscar nomination for co-writing last year’s hit musical-drama remake A Star Is Born. “And people wouldn’t go to class with him in Florida. We had a funny sequence where they were [desegregation] busing in Florida at the same time, so people were angry about either the busing, or [their] kids having to go to school with the kid who had AIDS. So there was a big conflict.”
Much like the first Gump, Forrest would again find himself wrapped up in the culturally formative events of the 90's. The screenwriter then clarified how the September 11th attacks deemed his sequel “meaningless” by calling attention to a particular potential storyline.
“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.”
After reading the interview, I'm kinda glad the sequel never happened. Of course I'd have gone to see it in theaters! But maybe some things are better left unknown to the world.