Answering Reader Mail: what's the status of a sequel (or prequel) to 1988's hit animated movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Here's a note I recently received from a reader.
Hi! Dominic. I'm Jim and I want to tell you about that possible Roger Rabbit sequel from the article Who Killed Roger Rabbit? and of couse (sic) the saying from that article "If it happens it won't be before 2010"?. So what does that mean? Do you think Disney and Amblin will finally make that sequel to 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I got the 2-disc special edition vista series DVD of the original film at home and it's still ever so popular.
Well, Jim, I did a little digging and the general attitude still seems to be that a Roger Rabbit sequel is possible, but highly unlikely at this time. The last known script information was in 1997, when Amblin Entertainment (Steven Spielberg's production company) and Disney talked about a prequel to the 1988 hit, which would tell the story of Roger Rabbit's rise to fame and meeting his wife Jessica (voiced by Kathleen Turner, with singing by Spielberg's ex-wife Amy Irving). Composer Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid) had already written a Busby Berkeley-type score for the flick but Michael Eisner, thinking the movie would be too expensive, killed the project.
Ten years later, the puzzle pieces (Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis) are looking closer than they have in recent memory. Disney CEO Robert Iger apparently has gotten a lot friendlier with Katzenberg, to the point that DreamWorks Animation's Christmas special Shrek the Halls will air on Disney's ABC television network in December. Since Katzenberg works closely with Spielberg in DreamWorks, he could be a possible conduit in getting The Beard to deal with Disney again.
Director Robert Zemeckis is now making motion-capture movies for the Mouse House . . . that is, if Brad Bird's little comment "Our Quality Assurance Guarantee: 100% Genuine Animation! No motion capture or any other performance shortcuts were used in the production of this film" at the tail end of Ratatouille didn't piss him off too much.
The question then becomes: will we see a motion-capture Roger Rabbit? Do we want to see a motion-capture Roger Rabbit? The big problem with mo-cap is that you lose the element of squash-and-stretch that's so essential to classic animation in general, and Roger Rabbit in particular.
I believe that most Roger Rabbit fans would want to see him looking his usual self, which implies cel animation. That implies a Walt Disney Feature Animation project. WDFA has Bolt (formerly American Dog) scheduled for November 26, 2008, then The Princess and the Frog and Rapunzel for 2009. Given the high profile of both those latter movies, I wouldn't be surprised if one of them isn't bumped to 2010 to become that year's Disney tent-pole animated film. So that's this decade down the tubes.
Of course, green-lighting a Roger Rabbit prequel means talking with Warner Bros. about loaning out their Looney Tunes gang again, with all the usual stipulations (Bugs Bunny gets the same screen time as Mickey, the same number of lines, blah-blah-blah). If Warner gets too persnickety with their demands, that's another reason to say "Game over" for Roger Rabbit.
So, Jim, the best answer I can give you is a possible maybe. Disney, Zemeckis, Spielberg and Warner may be talking Roger Rabbit sequel (or prequel) but until an official announcement is made, I can't speculate any further.
Post Script: Keep in mind also that the major studios like to keep their projects under heavy wraps, mainly because if one studio finds out that another is doing a zombie movie, then that first studio quickly green-lights their own zombie movie in order to get first crack at the potential audience. So if Iger, Zemeckis and Spielberg are talking Roger Rabbit sequel, they're nowhere near admitting it yet.
