Robert Zemeckis and Bob Hoskins Still Planning a Roger Rabbit Sequel?

Harry Knowles has today published a telephone interview with Robert Zemeckis at Aint it Cool. For the most part they talk about A Christmas Carol, detailing the shape the film is in today and how it is going to showcase advances in performance capture technology and so on, but the chatter comes around, with seeming inevitability, to one of Zemckis’ past projects.

Bob Hoskins is appearing in Carol as Fezziwig, past employer of Ebeneezer Scrooge. According to Zemeckis, on set (or, perhaps more properly, “in volume”) conversation touched upon Who Framed Roger Rabbit and a potential return for Eddie Valliant, Hoskins’ character therein.

Here’s the back-and-forth between Harry and Bob, starting with Harry:

Did you have any discussions with him about returning as Eddie Valiant?

Oh yes, he always has them with me. He loves Eddie Valiant and he would love to do it. We talk about it and it’s something we are thinking about.

Something we are thinking about. Really? I do hope so.

There has been talk of a Roger Rabbit follow-up a good few times over the years, and I’ve even read the screenplay for one proposed picture. That one was going to be a prequel that took us from Roger’s early years to his mission to rescue Jessica Krupnick, later his wife, from the Nazis. Toon Platoon was planned as a direct-to-video picture and definitely wouldn’t have been directed by Zemeckis and, frankly, I’m rather grateful it wasn’t made at all. The low point, I think, was the revelation that Roger’s father was none other than… drumroll, please… Bugs Bunny. Ech.

Zemeckis suggests to Harry Knowles that any Roger Rabbit sequel would likely be a few years off, as he’s currently on something of a crusade. After Knowles asks Bob if he has any plans to return to live action film making, the reply comes as follows:

I’m really committed to getting this art form [performance capture] off of the ground, but of course I would and I’m never going to say never to anything, but right now though I really want to make sure that we get this out there so that younger filmmakers have these absolutely breathtaking tools that they can use.

There’s a lot of cynicism about performance capture out there, but I can’t say I share it. Zemeckis really is expanding the filmmakers’ toolkit, and I’m both impressed and actually rather grateful to him for it.