4 Awesome Sequels And Spin-Offs (We All Missed Out On)

4 The Catwoman Meets The White Lotus Tim Burton Spin-Off

In case any of you missed this hilarious satire show last year (that will be given us a second season somewhere in the near future), here's a quick trailer to get you up to speed not only with this analogy but also just good television:

Without spoiling much else, the show features some dark turns, including a heist and an actual murder. And yet, it’s all done in a quirky, oftentimes hilarious tone that makes the dark palatable and downright enjoyable to watch. It's kind of how we felt watching Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, which is why we’re totally on board with Batsy writer Daniel Waters’ original idea of having Burton direct a Catwoman spin-off that sees her dealing with some dodgy resort folks.

Waters’ script — that he penned years ago — follows the ending of Batman Returns with Catwoman (still to be played by Michelle Pfeiffer, originally) all beaten up and suffering from amnesia, checking herself into a desert spa resort. As she recovers and sips on whatever cocktail has milk in it, probably, she learns that the resort is run by a bunch of dodgy superheroes who are the opposite of the good kind, even though they’re called — no jokes — the Cult of Good. As Selina takes up work at the resort’s casino, she slowly regains her memory while enduring these scummy people until she finally remembers who she really is and starts doing what she does best. Honestly, who wouldn't want to see Catwoman claw someone to smithereens on a massage table? 

Best of all, the script was intended as a satire of the superhero genre. It would basically have been Catwoman meets The White Lotus meets The Boys, if Hollywood actually had the guts to produce such a glorious project. The resort itself was kitted out with billboards telling guests to “Relax!” and “Be Happy!” while they lounge around between incredibly phallic superhero statues adorning the grounds. There was a strong feminist angle, too, with a whole bit about a post-feminist academic arguing ‘The Catwoman Complex,’ at one point saying:  “Catwoman is just the ultimate example of every ‘powerful’ woman. A raging psycho who can’t admit she needs a hug.”

Having Michelle Pfeiffer perform the role of Oasisburg Catwoman would’ve ruled — her campy take on mousy-haired Selina Kyle turned sultry, deadly Woman Who Thinks She’s A Cat would’ve been the perfect fit for this dark comedy idea that got stuck in development hell before eventually being abandoned. Pity, because if ever there was a character who deserved their own sequel, it was Pfeiffer’s Catwoman. Burton didn’t end his movie like this for nothing:

3 A Friday The 13th Movie That Goes Back To Its (Motherly) Roots

Do you like scary movies? Let’s play a game: Name the killer in Friday the 13th. If you said Jason, then congratulations, you’re Drew Barrymore in that movie where she gets offed in the first ten minutes by a guy wearing a stupid mask because she got the answer to this question wrong, too. No, Friday the 13th — the iconic slasher franchise featuring a killer in another stupid mask — started off not with Slasher Jason but with Slasher Jason’s Mom, Pamela Voorhees.

It’s like Psycho, only with less drowning and more actual Killer Mom vibes. Mama Pam is the overarching antagonist of the franchise, appearing in the sequels as a figment of Jason’s imagination and, that one time in the third film, a reanimated corpse. But it all started with Mother, so it’d be fitting for the franchise to go full circle if it had to make another movie … which Tom McLoughlin, writer and director of Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, has wanted to do since forever. He’s got scripts ready to go, and one of them is titled, Diary of Pamela Voorhees.

McLoughlin told Bloody Disgusting in 2020: “When James mentioned wanting to do a story that starts with the birth of Jason, my head exploded with so many episodes and character events we can create. We both just took off on it. The objective was also to reveal how they became the iconic horror legends they are. In fact, we created so many characters and storylines we realized we had a Limited Series as well as a feature-length movie.”

The story for the potential prequel that could either be a film or a limited series goes something like this: It’s Middle America in the aftermath of WWII, and people are cynical, skeptical, and generally paranoid (more than usual). Pamela Voorhees is an abused teenage girl who, on the night of June 13, 1946, gives birth to Jason, a little boy with a facial disfigurement and mental problems. The next decade sees single mom Pam having just the worst time, shunned by everyone and ridiculed for having a kid that backward people think is an abomination. Mother Pam doesn’t overcome, though. She turns dark and starts killing anyone and everyone who just looks at Jason funny. We also see the dynamic duo move around in search of a place to call their own, and the movie ends with the Voorhees Fam arriving at Camp Crystal Lake in May 1956. 

And through it all, we get glimpses of Mrs. Voorhees’ diary. As McLoughlin explains, using a diary format “allows us deeper insight into how she feels. It’s particularly even more unsettling as we hear her psychopathic and sociopathic thoughts and plans. I wanted to approach this as if this was a true story. Every event and character are believable. No supernatural aspects. As extreme as her murders are they are passion kills.”

Not only do we see Mommy Voorhees slowly losing her nuts trying to protect herself and her son from the viciousness of others, but we also see Jason observing his mother. “There’s also a deeply disturbing and creepy aspect seeing the child Jason watching, maybe learning from his mother’s savage murders. Blood splattered; Mrs. Voorhees embraces her son with a genuine mother’s warmth. Gently explaining to him why these wicked people need to die. ‘If we don’t kill them, Jason, they’ll keep hurting more people like us. There’s no God who will punish them. Only us, Jason.’”

Yep, that sounds like a Friday the 13th entry we want. After all, we saw the concept work with the five-season Bates Motel (that was probably two seasons too long). We could totally see this work as a limited series. If you listen closely, you could hear the hockey masks fly off the shelves already.

2 Time Bandits Would’ve Seen The Bandits Save The New Millennium From A Psycho God

Terry Gilliam’s 1981 fantasy film involving dwarves time traveling and stealing treasures from different historical eras is regarded by many as a childhood classic. It’s got a Labyrinth vibe to it; if Labyrinth was more sci-fi and less revelations of how bangable Bowie was to literally everyone.

It’s understandable, then, that when word got out of there being an idea for a sequel, fans of the movie where John Cleese says “Jolly good” just so you’d be sure it’s British were pretty stoked to learn that it was even more bonkers than the original. The main plot involved the good guys saving the world from a God who’s basically trying to Y2K the planet. Yeah, it sounds pretty great, especially when you learn that this God would have preceded Mr. Garrison and his hand puppet from South Park.

Said Gilliam: “God had bottled out on the first 1,000 years because he was going to destroy the place, it was a disaster, and now come 2000 he’s finally going to do it. Actually, God is a total schizophrenic at this point; he’s got a devil hand-puppet that he talks to all the time … And there were going to be new Time Bandits, the daughters of the old guys who have worked their way up through the creation departments and are finally getting equal pay as women. It’s a really good tale.”

Yeah,  that sounds positively splendid. The breakdown of the script can be found online, but it involves some Raiders of the Lost Ark throwbacks, the four horsemen of the apocalypse, Joan of Arc, pirates, and a conspiracy involving faking the death of Julius Caesar. The sequel was on its way to being made, but after a couple of the original actors passed away, Gilliam decided to rather can it. Fast forward to 2019, and announcements were being made of a Time Bandits series for Apple TV+ with Taika Waititi as director … only Gilliam had to find out about it online, like everyone else, and it now seems negotiations to bring back our favorite time-traveling bandits have subsequently stalled.

Or maybe it’s because Apple doesn’t think a Psycho God would fit well with their brand aesthetic.

1 There Have Been Numerous Sequel Scripts For Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (But No Sequel)

Could you imagine them announcing a sequel to the greatest live-action and animated movie of all time? We would all go totally ballistic, much like the cartoons in this greatest live-action/animated film of all time.

It’s kind of a bummer, then, to hear Robert Zemeckis say he’s been trying to do a sequel of Roger and those Toons for a while, but to no avail. A script for a sequel called Roger Rabbit II: The Toon Platoon was originally written and centered around Roger searching for his birth mother, but Spielberg wasn’t into it. Some more scripts were floated, none really hitting a note with anyone … until around 2016, when Zemeckis revealed that they were finally onto something good. The new story would see Roger and Jessica Rabbit move "into the next few years of period film, moving on from film noir to the world of the 1950s."

Unfortunately, it seems Disney won’t be making such a sequel any time soon, either. Would society be able to handle a Jessica Rabbit right now? Zemeckis himself said that “the current corporate Disney culture has no interest in Roger, and they certainly don't like Jessica at all.”

This may be why Disney did a full revamp of Jessica’s character in her new Disneyland feature. It’s simply their attempt at “rehabilitating” her image with the public. Now she just looks like a female (still sexy) version of Dick Tracy.

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Thumbnail: Warner Bros. Studios