Forrest Gump’s Son Was Going to Have AIDS in Cancelled Sequel

Forrest Gump I almost had another big screen showing, and it would have been a truly moving film.

The Oscar-winning 1994 drama was directed by Robert Zemeckis and starred Tom Hanks as the eponymous Alabaman who changed history just about everywhere he went. Following the film’s critical and commercial success, the film’s masterminds planned to reunite for a sequel. In fact, screenwriter Eric Roth, who won one of the film’s six Oscars for adapting Winton Groom’s novel, filed a completed version of the film on September 10, 2001.

“I literally shot it the day before 9/11,” Roth told Yahoo Entertainment in an interview (see above). “And Tom, Bob and I got together on 9/11 and were just lamenting about life in America and the tragedy of it. And we looked at each other and said, ‘This movie doesn’t make sense anymore, in that sense.’”

Forrest Gump was adapted from Groom’s 1986 novel of the same name. Groom wrote a sequel in 1995 titled Gump & Co.which followed Forrest’s adventures in the 1980s. Roth’s proposed film sequel would have been a much freer adaptation of the book.

In our interview, Roth shared new plot details from the film that never happened, including a reveal that addresses Forrest Jr.’s (Haley Joel Osment) health after his mother, Jenny (Robin Wright), died from a virus believed to be HIV/AIDS.

“It all had to start with his little boy having AIDS,” said Roth, who recently earned his fifth Oscar nomination for co-writing last year’s remake of the hit musical. A star is born“And people didn’t want to go to school with him in Florida. We had a funny sequence where they were busing (for desegregation) in Florida at the same time, so people were either angry about the busing or their kids having to go to school with the kid who had AIDS. So there was a big conflict.”

And as Gump apparently made a quantum leap from one momentous event to another throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Forrest Gump 2 would have followed him through real events from the 1990s.

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“I had him in the back of O.J.’s Bronco,” Roth said of the infamous 1994 chase involving O.J. Simpson. “He’d look up sometimes, but they wouldn’t see him in the rearview mirror, and then he’d come back down.”

“I had him as a ballroom dancer, he was really good, he could spin. And then eventually, as a kind of charity donation, he danced with Princess Diana.”

The last detail Roth shared helps explain why the film was scrapped after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

“He meets a Native American woman on a bus and discovers his calling, which is to be a bingo announcer on a reservation. And the big event that happens in there, as you could see, is only mitigated by the tragedy, I suppose, because it’s the same tragedy, but every day he’s going to wait for his Native American partner.

“She was teaching kindergarten in a government building in Oklahoma City. And he was sitting on the bench waiting for her to get her lunch and all of a sudden the building behind him exploded. … So when 9/11 happened … everything seemed meaningless.”

Reporting by Kevin Polowy, Yahoo Entertainment