One of the most iconic movies of the 1990s very nearly got a sequel.
Released in 1994, Forrest Gump was a massive critical and commercial success, earning more than over $677 million at the box office and scoring a slew of Academy Awards, including a Best Actor gong for TomHanks for playing the unassuming young man who played a pivotal role in some of modern history's most defining moments.
With the original film based on a novel by Winston Groom, director Robert Zemeckis was in luck: in 1995 Groom penned a second Gump novel, meaning there was source material for a sequel.
It's the movie that gave the world the line 'life is like a box of chocolates'.
Screenwriter Eric Roth, who had originally adapted Groom's novel for the screen and earned himself an Academy Award in the process, was tasked with writing the script for the sequel.
He turned in his completed draft on September 10, 2001.
"Literally, I turned it in the day before 9/11," Roth told Yahoo Entertainment.
"And Tom (Hanks) and I and Bob (Zemeckis) got together on 9/11 to sort of commiserate about how life was in America and how tragic it was. And we looked at each other and said, 'This movie has no meaning anymore, in that sense'."
So what exactly happens in this never-to-be-seen sequel? While Forrest Gump traced the story of the titular character's life from his childhood in the 1950s, through his time in the Vietnam War and into the 70s, the sequel — titled Gump and Co. — would pick up in the 1980s.
And things take a sad turn for Gump's own son, played in the original film by a young Haley Joel Osment.
"It was gonna start with his little boy having AIDS," Roth told Yahoo, explaining that the film would've examined the brutal HIV/AIDS stigma of the 1980s, with the young boy facing discrimination at school because of his disease.
And the sequel would again see Gump pop up in some of history's most seminal moments — this time, in the back of O.J. Simpson's Bronco during the sports star's 1994 televised police car chase after the murder of his ex-wife.
The sequel would've featured Gump in more real-life scenarios
"He would look up occasionally, but they didn't see him in the rearview mirror, and then he'd pop down," said Roth.
Gump would also become a ballroom dancer, dancing with Princess Diana before her 1997 death.
Another real-life event that was woven into the script: The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, a terrorist attack that killed 168 people.
Gump befriends a Native American woman, who teaches nursery school at a government building in Oklahoma City (the site of the real-life bombing). In the proposed film, Gump is sitting on a bench outside the building waiting for her to join him for lunch, when the building behind him explodes.
Given the tragic events that occurred just one day after Roth turned in his script in, the sequel was put on ice — permanently. "Everything felt meaningless," he recalled of life immediately after 9/11.
