Young Guns and St. Elmo’s Fire star Emilio Estevez sat down with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this past week to discuss everything from his past work in the film industry to his father’s time shooting Francis Ford Coppola’s iconic Apocalypse Now. He also shed some light on a few projects that could have been. Specifically, scripts that he himself wrote to serve as legacy sequels to some of his most beloved works. This includes a sequel to the one film Stephen King ever directed: Maximum Overdrive. One of the most bizarre horror films of the 1980s (which is really saying something), Maximum Overdrive was King’s loose adaptation of his own short story, “Trucks.”
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It was trounced by critics and even received two Golden Raspberry Award nominations, one for King as Worst Director and Estevez as Worst Actor. It’s a project that King himself has disowned and has gone so far as to apologize to Estevez for. But it seems Estevez himself was warmed up to the goofy midnight movie over the years, even if he didn’t always feel that way.
What Would This Maximum Overdrive Sequel Have Been and Is There Any Chance It Will Ever See the Light of Day?
First, Estevez shed some light on why and when he wrote the Maximum Overdrive sequel, explaining how AI actually led him to his idea.
“With the advent of more computer technology and AI and all of that, I started to imagine what a sequel to Maximum Overdrive would look like,” he said. “And during the [2023 SAG-AFTRA] strike, I wrote one.”
At first, the sequel script was more for fun and to kill time over any actual play to get it made, as the actor does not own the rights to the original film. But apparently, it was a script that practically wrote itself (just not in an AI kind of way).
“I started page 1, I started an idea, now I’m on page 10, I’m on page 20, now it’s 50 pages, and I can’t stop…I created an insane world,” he explained.
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Just what exactly would this Maximum Overdrive 2 be? According to Estevez, he would be back as protagonist Bill who has “got his own diner, he’s got a young daughter, and he’s got his crew, his people. And Guy Fieri is coming to do Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives on the day the world falls apart and machines turn.”
As for who owns the rights to King’s film, that would be the De Laurentiis Company, as the late Dino De Laurentiis and his De Laurentiis Entertainment Group produced the 1986 film. Estevez took his concept and script for the sequel to the company and, in spite of it being “a cool idea” and “a bitchin’ script,” the rights-holders declined.
“‘Nope. We have the rights to this. We’re not interested. We’re going to pursue our own thing,’” he said.
Who knows how a Maximum Overdrive sequel would do. The original film is far from being one of the most revered King adaptations but it’s also the stuff of which cult movies are made. After all, it comes equipped both with a fantastic AC/DC soundtrack and a scene where a soda machine kills a grown man.
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