Despite the worldwide triumph of ‘Forrest Gump’, the planned sequel, based on Winston Groom’s book ‘Gump and Co.’, was ultimately canceled. The project, which was intended to reunite director Robert Zemeckis and star Tom Hanks, was actively in development, and Eric Roth was already working on a script that would continue Forrest’s unwitting journey through American history.
In theory, nothing prevented the sequel from being made. Although Hanks’s contract included a clause allowing him to decline sequels, he was open to returning and eagerly awaiting the script. In Roth’s vision, the new film would have placed Forrest Gump in the events of the 1980s and 1990s. However, the story took on a darker tone from the outset: Forrest Jr. was to be diagnosed with AIDS — the same disease that had claimed his mother Jenny.
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The proposed sequel included episodes in which Forrest finds himself in the back seat of O.J. Simpson’s SUV during a Los Angeles police chase, dances with Princess Diana at a White House charity gala, and, toward the end of the film, becomes the host of a bingo game on a Native American reservation. A poignant subplot involved Forrest meeting a woman who waited for him every day on a bench outside the building where she worked in Oklahoma City. Their story was to end tragically when the building is destroyed in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which claimed 165 lives.
Although the film was intended to conclude with this tragic event, another catastrophic real-life event prevented the sequel from being made. On September 11, 2001, just as Roth, Hanks, and Zemeckis had gathered for a script reading, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center occurred. The shocking event deeply affected all three. They realized that the world had changed forever and that making Forrest Gump 2 in this context no longer made sense. The project was immediately canceled. Roth, Hanks, and Zemeckis decided to close the box of bitter, rather than sweet, memories and set it aside forever.
