One of the classic lines from Richard Donner's The Goonies is the proclamation "Goonies never say die!" and that's very much a sentiment that's been echoed in the long road that has been taken to try and make a sequel. Every so often we hear news that a new take on Goonies 2 is in the works, but then a bunch of time passes and nothing ever solidifies.
If you're a Goonies fan who has tracked all of these stops and starts and wondered what the hell is going on, you're A) not alone, and B) finally about to get an answer. The subject was recently addressed by executive producer/legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg, and the explanation is that nobody has been able to come up with an idea for a sequel good enough to go the distance and get to the production stage.
As part of a charitable effort to aid The Center for Disaster Philanthropy during the on-going pandemic, star Josh Gad recently organized a special online Goonies reunion, and toward the end of the event Steven Spielberg logged in as a special guest. With the filmmaker on and answering questions, the host took the opportunity to ask about the progress of a sequel, and Spielberg put the situation in plain terms:
[We] have had a lot of conversations about it, and every couple of years we come up with an idea, but then it doesn’t hold water. The problem is the bar that [the cast and filmmakers] raised on this genre. I don’t think we’ve really successfully been able to find an idea that is better than the Goonies that we all made in the '80s. And so until we do people are just going to have to look at this 100 times.
Frankly, it's a perspective on sequel making that you wish Hollywood would embrace more often – and not just for classics developing decades-later followups. We've seen countless examples of the industry rushing projects due to greed and fear of diminishing attention spans, and at the end of the day you can't help but wonder what might have happened had some patience been demonstrated.
Rather than giving us a Goonies 2 that isn't up to the standards of the original, Steven Spielberg & Co. are waiting for the right idea to come along before moving forward, and in the long run we will hopefully be thankful for that approach (whether the film is made or not).
There has been a fair amount of negativity towards the potential of a Goonies 2 in recent years, with Sean Astin saying about a year ago that the movie would probably never get produced, and similar sentiments were shared by Corey Feldman and Martha Plimpton back in 2016. The film industry is a funny business, though, and so it's probably best not to give up on the notion completely.
