That desperation for contemporary legitimacy forced the company to work well outside its wheelhouse, and fortunately for Disney fans like me Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a gamble that paid off big time! However, so did another one just a year later.
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In terms of both budget and content, the company was more willing to take risks with Roger Rabbit because Disney didn’t have a whole lot to lose.Īllegedly, Disney’s survival as a studio was hardly guaranteed during certain parts of the 1980s, and was a bit of a joke in the movie business, as they continued to coast by on the remaining legacy of its earlier days. The Black Cauldron nearly cratered is animated division, Don Bluth and other animators had left Disney to beat it at its own game (An American Tale outgrossed fellow vermin-based movie The Great Mouse Detective in 1986), and high-profile bombs like Tron and Return to Oz meant the live-action branch wasn’t doing any better. The early-to-mid 1980s may go down as the worst period in Disney’s history.
The studio itself assumed its name was poisonous with its intended audience. THE DARKEST DISNEY TIMELINE: Note that Midnight Madness contains no mention of Disney. Who Framed Roger Rabbit came out at a very different time for Disney, and part of the reason it was allowed to happen at all, take so many chances, and do something so unprecedented was because Disney as a company was doing, well… pretty shitty. If you haven’t seen it, rest assured that event will always and forever be associated with tragedy long after WWII has been forgotten.Īllegedly one of many reasons we don’t have a Roger Rabbit 2īut don’t get depressed! Bad timing is the only reason Roger exists. Genius executive Michael Eisner balked at the price tag, and Roger’s sequel budget was said to be funneled into a much more sure-fire cinematic bet Pearl Harbor. Studio heads understandably couldn’t balance the risk of an even pricier ten-year-old sequel to the (then) most expensive movie of all-time, especially considering that audiences (especially kids) might not even remember the characters. Sadly, at the time, CGI was even more expensive than it is today.
However, by that point it was looking like traditional, hand-drawn animation was on its way to becoming passe and computer generated imagery was now the bee’s knees in Hollywood! A CG Roger Rabbit test was even conducted to test the waters for a potential sequel. For a sad example, a sequel was seriously considered back in 1998. But why exactly has a sequel never materialized before now? We’ll, in the article’s longest entry, I’ll try and answer that to the best of my knowledge to provide the two biggest reasons.īAD TIMING: Disney didn’t have anything against the idea of a Roger Rabbit sequel, but it wasn’t exactly gung ho about it either. Hope survives among fans, but yeah, it’s been years since news of anything Roger-related has emerged, and I think with Disney’s relatively recent acquisitions of both Star Wars and Marvel, they have far more lucrative pasts to mine than a sequel to a thirty year old movie with little franchise potential.
But let it be known: They tried! After all, several scripts were commissioned and even written, including one by JJ Abrams and a prequel set in WWII where Roger learns his dad is Bugs Bunny.Įven as recently as 2013, there were reports of a pitch within Disney to essentially remake The Stooge (a 1952 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie), following Roger and Mickey Mouse as best friends coming up through vaudeville. Given that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the second highest-grossing movie of 1988 (after Rain Man, really?!) and is still beloved to this day, it’s a wonder Disney never got around to making a sequel. Why did one of the most profitable movies of all-time never get a sequel? Furthermore, if Tron can get one why not Roger Rabbit?!ġ0.
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