"The current Disney would never make 'Roger Rabbit' today," the filmmaker insists.
Fans of Who Framed Roger Rabbit know that Jessica Rabbit isn't bad -- she's "just drawn that way." But according to director Robert Zemeckis, the hit movie will never get a sequel because its animated femme fatale is simply too risqué.
On a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Zemeckis lamented, "There's a good script [for a sequel] at Disney, but here's the thing: The current Disney would never make Roger Rabbit today. They can't make a movie with Jessica in it." He added that the sequel script, which was penned by original Roger Rabbit writers Peter S. Seamen and Jeffrey Price, "isn't ever going see the light of day, as good as it is."
If it sounds implausible that Disney would hold up a no-brainer follow-up to a box office smash, Zemeckis offered this: "I mean, look what they did to Jessica at the theme park. They trussed her up in a trench coat, you know."
Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Disney for comment on Zemeckis' remarks.
If anyone would know the chances of another Roger Rabbit film getting the green light, it would seem to be Zemeckis, who managed to get the genre-bending, form-exploding original a PG rating in 1988, despite its copious amounts of eyebrow-raising content.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit is based on the 1981 novel Who Censored Roger Rabbit, and tells the story across live action and animation of Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins), a private eye with a grudge against toons (animated beings) who must nevertheless work to get the titular Roger Rabbit (voiced by Charles Fleischer) exonerated for a murder he didn't commit. One of the film's standout characters is the seductive Jessica Rabbit, a provocatively dressed, Veronica Lake-esque lounge singer breathily voiced by Kathleen Turner.
According to Zemeckis, it necessarily isn't the murder, kidnapping, voyeurism, drug use, or crooked cops and politicians that today's House of Mouse would object to, but Jessica's scandalous sartorial sensibility.
Zemeckis also elaborated on the miraculous timing that allowed Who Framed Roger Rabbit to go forward in the first place. "We were able to make it right at the time when Disney was ready to rebuild itself," he said. "We were there when that new regime came in, and they were full of energy, and they wanted to do it. I kept saying, and I sincerely say this, I do believe this, 'I'm making Roger Rabbit the way I believe Walt Disney would have made it.' The reason I say that is because Walt Disney never made any of his movies for children. He always made them for adults. And that's what I decided to do with Roger Rabbit."
Rather than trying to temper the film's racier elements, Zemeckis embraced them. And he knew before the film was even released that this gamble would pay off. "One time we did a test preview with just moms and kids," he recalled. "I was terrified because these kids were like 5, 6 years old. They absolutely were riveted to the movie. And I realized that the thing is, kids get everything. They understand. They get it. You don't have to -- the thing that Walt Disney never did was he never talked down to the children in his movies. He treated the kids like they were adults."
Speculation about a Roger Rabbit sequel has swirled for years. J.J. Abrams has talked about being approached by Steven Spielberg (whose Amblin Entertainment co-produced the first film) in 1989 to write a sequel. "I actually have some storyboards for a Roger Rabbit short," he said. "Honestly, we never really got to that phase [where it got serious]. We were writing an outline, but it honestly went away before it was anything. This was a long time ago. Zemeckis probably would've been a producer on it."
Then there was the intended prequel film Roger Rabbit II: The Toon Platoon, which entered development the same year but died in 1990. Toon Platoon would have set Roger in the early 1940s attempting to track down his real parents, only to get side-tracked fighting Nazis in World War II.
Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.'s free newsletter
In 2016, Zemeckis called Seaman and Price's sequel script "magnificent," explaining that it follows Roger and Jessica "into the next few years of period film, moving on from film noir to the world of the 1950s." Acknowledging Hoskins' death in 2014, Zemeckis conceded that "it would be very hard to do, but we would do a digital Bob Hoskins." But even then, he noted that "the current corporate Disney culture has no interest in Roger, and they certainly don't like Jessica at all."