The director of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Robert Zemeckis, believes Disney will never approve Roger Rabbit 2 because of the fatal Jessica Rabbit. The «Good» scripts are already out there.
In the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Robert Zemeckis talked about the script for the new movie from the original writers Peter S. Seaman and Jeffrey Price, which will «never see the light of day, no matter how good it is:
«Disney has a good script [for the sequel], but here’s the thing: today’s Disney would never make «Roger Rabbit» today. They can’t make a movie with Jessica in it. I mean, look what they did with Jessica in the theme park. They put her in a cape».
The film «Who Framed Roger Rabbit» is based on the 1981 novel «Who Censored Roger Rabbit» and tells the story of Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), a private investigator who dislikes toons (cartoon creatures) but must work with them to exonerate Roger Rabbit from a murder he did not commit. One of the important characters in the movie is the seductive Jessica Rabbit, a provocatively dressed singer.
«We were able to do it right at a time when Disney was ready to reinvent itself. We were there when the new board came in and they were full of energy and they wanted to do it. I kept saying, and I mean this sincerely, I believe in it: «I am making «Roger Rabbit» the way I believe Walt Disney would have made it». I say this because Walt Disney never made his movies for children. He always made them for adults. And that’s what I decided to do with «Roger Rabbit»
«Once we did a test preview with just moms and kids. I was scared because these kids were 5-6 years old. They were absolutely riveted to the movie. And I realized that the thing is that children get everything. They get it. They get it. You don’t need something that Walt Disney never did, he never talked to children in his movies. He treated children like adults».
Speculation about a sequel to «Roger Rabbit» has been going on for years. J.J. Abrams said that in 1989, Steven Spielberg (whose Amblin Entertainment was among the producers of the first film) asked him to write a sequel.
«I actually have a storyboard for a short film «Roger Rabbit». To be honest, we never got to the point [where it became serious]. We wrote a plan, but he, to be honest, left before anything happened. It was a long time ago. Zemeckis would probably have been a producer on it,» Abrams said.
Then came the prequel movie «Roger Rabbit II: The Toon Platoon», which was started in the same year but stopped in 1990. In the movie, Roger tried to find his real parents in the early 1940s, but joined the fight against the Nazis in World War II.
In 2016, Zemeckis called the screenplay for the Seaman and Price sequel «excellent» and said that it tells the story of Roger and Jessica «in the next few years from the film’s era, moving from film noir to the world of the 1950s». Regarding the death of actor Bob Hoskins in 2014, Zemeckis admitted that it would have been very hard for «to do, but we would have done a digital Bob Hoskins». But even then, he noted that «the current Disney corporate culture is not interested in Roger, and they certainly don’t like Jessica» at all.
Source: Entertainment Weekly