Talks of a Forrest Gump sequel ran out of steam after “all of 40 minutes,” according to star Tom Hanks. The actor — who won his second Academy Award for his role as the all-American man who ran through highlights of modern American history — reveals director Robert Zemeckis only took a “stab” at a follow-up to the 1994 original. Based on author Winston Groom’s novel of the same name, Forrest Gump won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and grossed $678 million worldwide. Groom’s book sequel about Forrest and son Little Forrest navigating life in the 1980s, titled Gump and Co., was published in 1995.
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“I will say that, with a long time in between, we did take a stab at talking about another Forrest Gump that lasted all of 40 minutes,” Hanks told the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “And then we never…we said, ‘Guys, come on.’”
In 2008, Forrest Gump screenwriter Eric Roth revealed the would-be sequel was to be a continuation picking up where the 1994 film left off. Roth submitted the Forrest Gump 2 script to Zemeckis on September 10, 2001 — one day before the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“I want to start the movie literally two minutes after the end of the last one, with him on the bus bench waiting for his son to get home from school. But I turned in the script the night before 9/11,” Roth told /Film at the time. “And we sat down, Tom and Bob [Zemeckis] and I, looked at each other and said, ‘We don’t think this is relevant anymore. The world had changed.’ Now time has obviously passed, but maybe some things should just be one thing and left as they are.”
It was previously reported that Forrest Gump producers Steve Tisch and Wendy Finerman had revived the sequel from development hell in the late 2000s, with Gary Sinise poised to reprise his role as Lieutenant Dan. In 2007, Groom refuted rumors of a “feud” with studio Paramount Pictures, saying in a statement to CinemaBlend that an issue of payment never “caused any delay in making a movie of Gump & Company, a sequel to Forrest Gump.”
Groom added: “Hell, the studio bought the sequel [and] paid me a ton of dough even before it came out, and they then owned it, as they still do, and can make it a movie anytime they damn well please.”
Hanks, who also starred in the Zemeckis-directed Cast Away and The Polar Express, reunites with the Gump filmmaker in Disney’s live-action Pinocchio. The new retelling is streaming September 8 on Disney+.
