Producer Frank Marshall says he's willing to get behind a possible prequel to the 1988 hit Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But is anyone listening?

Frank Marshall says he's willing to entertain the idea of a Roger Rabbit sequel (or prequel). But can he get Disney, Warner Bros., director Robert Zemeckis and producer Steven Spielberg on board?

Hollywood first started talking sequel when Who Framed Roger Rabbit? became 1988's biggest hit. However, an ugly turf war between Spielberg and then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner, plus prohibitive production costs, eventually doomed the project.

“It came pretty close. We shot a test. We had a script. But unfortunately, we didn’t have computer generated animation quite yet - it was just too expensive,” Marshall told MTV News about the never-titled prequel, codenamed Roger Rabbit 2. Some estimates put the cost of a sequel at around $100 million, an insane sum for the time.

100 Minutes of Roger Rabbit in New Movie

The big difference was that, in the new movie, Roger Rabbit would be in every frame, instead of being in less than half the scenes in the previous flick.

“If you think about it, in the original movie there’s really only 48 minutes of animation," Marshall says, "and in the new movie - or in that movie - he was in everything. So it went from 48 minutes of animation to over 100 minutes of animation."

“I remember we shot the test to try and see how much we could do with digital props - We weren’t even into digital characters yet,” he says (keep in mind this was in 1990, five years before Pixar unleashed Toy Story. “The idea was to see what we could do with digital props as opposed to what we did in the original movie where everything was puppeted - all the props were puppeted by strings and wires and poles.”

So what was the plot of the Roger Rabbit prequel, and where was it set?

“New York!” says Marshall. “Roger was a song and dance man in New York City (when he) discovered that he wanted to be in the movies and so he came across the country. I remember there being a big dance number. He came out with a troupe of sort of Busby Berkeley dancers on a train and they got to Hollywood and he and Baby Herman moved in together. And that’s when he met Eddie Valiant.”

What Are the Chances?

A Roger Rabbit prequel is possibly the biggest chimera in Hollywood, right after a Ghostbusters sequel and a John Carter of Mars movie. There already have been three rumours of a Roger Rabbit revival in the past year-and-a-half alone, but they've never gotten past the "wouldn't it be nice if" stage.

Obviously Marshall is pounding the drum, seeing if there is enough fan interest (read: box office) to justify sitting down with Disney, Warner Bros., and Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment and hashing out the petty details involved in bringing Roger Rabbit 2 to the silver screen.

And petty they will be: in the first movie, Warner Bros. only released the rights to Bugs Bunny after tortuous negotiations, after which Disney and the WB agreed that Bugs would have an equal amount of screen time with Mickey Mouse, and have the exact same number of lines (to the freakin' word!).

A Roger Rabbit sequel will obviously not include any of the original human cast, since they've all aged a bit in the last 20 years. There's also the issue of bringing back several of the voice cast, such as Jessica Rabbit voice Kathleen Turner and Jessica Rabbit singing voice (and Spielberg ex-wife) Amy Irving.

And there's also the price tag involved with animating Roger and the rest of the toon gang. The advent of CGI has brought the costs of animation way down, but will fans accept a CGI Roger, Baby Herman, and others?

Until there's some kind of official announcement, we can safely put a Roger Rabbit 2 movie in the "snowballs chance in ****" pile.

Here's the follow-up discussion on this article:

View all related messages

Post to this discussion

For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Dominic von Riedemann's Hollywood Animated Films topic, please visit the Discussions page.