Is Forrest Gump 2 happening? Trailer & rumors explained

Is Forrest Gump 2 coming out in 2025, or have people been duped by another fake trailer? Well, as a great man’s mama once said, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

Tom Hanks’ titular character famously said, “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get.”

Well, he was right, because I wasn’t expecting to see people excited about Forrest Gump 2 on social media today. After all, the original movie came out in 1994, and Hanks, director Robert Zemeckis, and co. have been open about why plans for a follow-up fell through.

Nevertheless, something has sparked hype for a new movie that’s apparently hitting cinemas next year – prepare to be disappointed.

Fake Forrest Gump 2 trailer goes viral

Forrest Gump 2 definitely isn’t coming out in 2025 – in fact, it’s not happening at all. Unfortunately, a fake trailer is to blame.

Fake movie posters and trailers have gone viral on the internet since the early days of social media; how many people remember the fake Carnage posters for Spider-Man 4, or the Nightwing movie supposedly starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt after The Dark Knight Rises?

This time, your finger should be pointed at KH Studio, which produced a fake teaser trailer for Forrest Gump 2 that’s been viewed by more than 1.5 million people (and many more on Facebook, especially after LADbible wrote an article about it).

The account openly states that it’s a “concept trailer created solely for artistic and entertainment purposes”, but people have still lapped it up like it’s a real movie.

The trailer envisions a sequel starring Timothée Chalamet as Forrest’s son, struggling with a relatable teenage crisis: not knowing what he wants to do with the rest of his life.

“I don’t know about y’all but there going to be a Forrest Gump 2 in 2025 the teaser trailer made me cry,” one user wrote. “I just seen the trailer for Forrest Gump 2 can’t wait to watch it,” another commented.

“Oh dear god save me from the idiots in Hollywood with absolutely no imagination or original ideas… why oh why would anyone imagine that we would want to see Forrest Gump 2?” a third user wrote, while a fourth added: “I just saw the previews of Forrest Gump 2 on YouTube the boy is all grown up and looks like it’s going to be pretty good.”

Why Forrest Gump 2 never happened

Believe it or not, Forrest Gump 2 was in active development after the first film’s Oscar-winning success, not to mention its $678 million at the box office.

Winston Groom wrote a sequel to his original 1986 novel, titled Gump & Co, tracking Forrest’s life through the ’80s. As you’d expect, he inadvertently tangles with history; he helps create New Coke, takes part in a mission to Iran where he meets Ronald Reagan, and (in a meta twist) he meets the actor starring in Big.

This served as the basis for Eric Roth’s screenplay, set to pick up directly where the first movie ended: with Forrest waiting for his son to come home from school.

Paramount Pictures

He turned in a draft the night before 9/11. “We sat down, Tom [Hanks] and Bob [Zemeckis] and I, looked at each other and said, we don’t think this is relevant anymore. The world had changed. Now time has obviously passed, but maybe some things should just be one thing and left as they are,” he told Slash Film.

Six years later, CinemaBlend reported that interest in a sequel had recharged at Paramount, but it never amounted to anything.

In 2022, Hanks insisted that while he “took a stab at talking about another Forrest Gump, that lasted all of 40 minutes.”

“I say, ‘Hey Bob, I’ve got a question for you. Is anybody going to care about this movie?’ This guy sitting on a thing in these goofy shoes and this cuckoo suit with a suitcase full of Curious George books and stuff like that… are we doing anything here that is going to make any sense to anybody?” he said, as per Variety.

“And Bob said, ‘It’s a minefield, Tom. It’s a minefield. We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction. Any footstep we take can be a Bouncing Betty that’ll blow our nuts right off.’

In the meantime, you can find out what we know about Tom Hanks’ next movie and check out our list of the best action movies ever made and the best movies of 2024 so far.