The ‘Goonies’ Sequel Shouldn’t Be Made in the Context of 21st Century Parenting
The original Goonies was released in 1985. It has since become a cult classic, a movie starring kids but that entertains anyone of any age bracket. The news of it getting a sequel 40 years later was obviously not well received by many people; it’s another desperate nostalgia-fueled cash grab by studios who don’t trust audiences enough to produce original material.
The writer attached for The Goonies 2, Potsy Ponciroli, is obviously not unaware of these sentiments. At the Venice Film Festival, he gave updates on how the script is going — according to reporting by Deadline, Ponciroli is about 95 percent done with a second draft. “I know there’s a lot of ‘do we need a new Goonies,’” Ponciroli said, “but I’m the biggest fan of the original, it’s my favorite movie of all time. I’d never ‘redo’ The Goonies. To me, it was a story that never ended so this is the movie I want to see as one of its biggest fans.”
While the script is almost done, there’s still no director attached. So we’re a long way off from sitting down in a movie theater to watch the follow-up to what’s essentially a perfect film that told a complete story that requires no expansion.
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Some of the film’s central themes still resonate today. The idea of evil real-estate developers closing in on your parent’s homes and forcing working-class families into foreclosure is still a very big problem. An evil real-estate developer even grew up to become president. But there’s a bit less whimsy today. There are fewer pirate ships, all the thieves are doing online scams now and affordable coastal neighborhoods don’t exist in the U.S. anymore.
But the real gap in reality comes in the difference between parenting in the 1980s and the 2020s. I do not want to watch a movie about children parented the way 2025 children are parented. The adventure from The Goonies could never happen in the modern era for a number of reasons.
In fact, I will list them…
Children Are on Their Phones Too Often
Kids are more likely to join a group FaceTime than coordinate a real-life hang out. They are Snapchatting and TikToking and Instagramming their social lives. If they had been in the position to find a hidden map, it would have been posted on the internet before they ever left the house. The amount of time children spend on their cell phones is, of course, their parents’ fault, as is the fact that no one, child or adult, knows how to be bored anymore. Boredom birthed the grand adventure of The Goonies. Barring a nationwide internet outage, I don’t know the circumstances that could launch modern children into that much boredom.
Parents Aren’t Chill Any More
Parents might be letting their kids have too much screentime, but they aren’t letting them do much else. Kids are being tracked through those same phones. There’s simply no world in which a group of children could disappear into the sewers of their town and not be found for hours on end. Maybe not every child will have a parent that insists on treating their offspring like FedEx packages, but at least one preteen in the pack would have Life360 tracking their whereabouts at all times. They would be rounded up before they even made it to the pipes under the country club in the modern era.
Children Don’t Have Unstructured Outside Time
Kids are either left to mess around on screens to their own detriment, or their parents are “productivity maxing” every spare moment of their childhood. After-school hours are filled with sports practices and extracurriculars; weekends are spent at tournaments or working on enrichment activities. What those kids aren’t doing is having unstructured free time wandering around the neighborhood. A series of high-profile stranger kidnappings in the 1990s put an end to that practice.
In 2025, Chunk’s mother would be forcing him on some low-carb, low-sugar organic diet or he’d be pursuing internet fame as The Rizzler. Mouth would be pages deep in a Discord argument and Data and Mikey would be focusing on college-friendly volunteer opportunities. Maybe they’d all play each other on Fortnite on weekends. Brandon and Andy would be filming cringe dance videos for their couples TikTok. I like to imagine Stef is still very much like Stef, but she’s racking up screentime and anxiety diagnoses at record rates. All of them would be chatting with ChatGPT as often as they text each other.
Is that all kids in the modern era? No. But it’s a lot of them. Maybe The Goonies sequel will be a period piece. We can really only hope.