4) Roger Rabbit: Toon Platoon
Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit, so innovative when it was first released, was a huge hit with audiences, grossing over $300 million on a $58 million budget (impressive for 1988). Obviously a sequel would be the right way to go, especially as far as the money men were concerned, so the creatives behind the film got to work on developing something new right away.
Ever since, people have been working on trying to get a follow-up made. And it got close back in 1998, before Disney’s Michael Eisner shut the production down. The reason being that the projected budget was well over $100 million, with costs spiraling as Zemeckis made clear his intention to do Roger Rabbit 2 as a mixture of live-action, traditional animation, and CGI.
Arguably, it would have been worth the cost: Roger Rabbit: Toon Platoon was a prequel set in 1941, and saw the animated protagonist and his human friend traveling to WWII-ravaged Europe, to save the future Mrs. Jessica Rabbit from the clutches of dastardly Nazis. Roger would then have returned home to a hero’s welcome, and become reacquainted with his father, Bugs Bunny.