Exclusive: Forrest Gump 2 In Development, Tom Hanks And Robert Zemeckis Returning
Forrest Gump 2 will reunite Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis for their sixth film together.
Forrest Gump 2, a sequel to the enormously popular 1994 comedy-drama film, is in the works with original star Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis. According to our trusted and proven sources, the long-in-development movie is finally moving forward, though it raises a whole lot of questions about what the Back to the Future director and his frequent collaborator have planned. Forrest Gump 2 will be Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis’s sixth movie together, and will reportedly begin production immediately after wrap on their current film, Here.
There have been plans to make a sequel to Forrest Gump at last as far back as 2001, when Eric Roth wrote a screenplay adapting original author Winston Groom’s 1995 follow-up novel Gump and Co. However, following the September 11 attacks, plans for Forrest Gump 2 were shelved, with Tom Hanks and Robert Zemeckis both feeling like the film was no longer “relevant” to modern America. However, times change, and so apparently has their opinion about the further adventures of Alabama’s favorite son.
It is not clear whether Forrest Gump 2 will see Tom Hanks in the events described in Gump and Co., though it is likely the narrative will be heavily altered. The original film was more of a loose re-imagining of some of the central ideas of the book than a straight adaption, so it stands to reason its sequel will do the same. Regardless of how much it pulls from the second book, however, it will almost certainly credit it as source material.
Forrest Gump is somewhat notorious as a case of so-called Hollywood accounting, in which “creative accounting” is used to obscure the actual profitability of a particular film. In this particular case, Paramount Pictures claimed that Forrest Gump (which grossed nearly $700 million on a $55 million budget) had actually lost the studio money and thus, it did not have to pay Winston Groom his contractual 3 percent of the net profit of the film. Notably, both Hanks and Zemeckis received percentage points on the gross profits of the film, netting them approximately $40 million.
Groom sued Paramount and likely had some feeling of added insult to injury that he was not mentioned once in speeches for the six different Academy Awards the film received. Interestingly and relevantly for Forrest Gump 2, Groom announced that Paramount’s financial explanations were okay by him at the same time as Gump and Co. was optioned by the studio for a figure in the reported seven-digit figures.
Thus, it is likely that Forrest Gump 2 will star Tom Hanks as least ostensibly in an adaptation of Gump and Co., given that Paramount already has the rights to it. Currently, Hanks and Zemeckis are working on the comic book adaptation film Here, which also features Forrest Gump star Robin Wright in a supporting role. Combined with Zemeckis’s growing interest in de-aging technology, it sounds like the whole band could be getting back together for some eerily smooth-faced flashback scenes.
