Most of the time that we’re talking about ‘An American Werewolf In London‘ these days it is related to the reboot that Max Landis is doing. However, John Landis had originally been working on a sequel to the original which sounds like something I would have been much more excited for than his son redoing the property. In it, we would have seen all of the main characters return and likely wouldn’t have butchered the memory of the original the way that ‘An American Werewolf in Paris’ did.
Ten years after the original, John was asked to create a sequel that had a specific concept in mind. The word came out by a new tribute to the original film written by Paul Davis and titled ‘Beware the Moon: The Story of An American Werewolf in London.’ This limited edition paperback is full of fun little facts about the original and had a couple of juicy tidbits as to what could have been.
According to Landis:
“I was asked to do a sequel by PolyGram in 1991. The company, under Jon Peters and Peter Guber, made something like 10 or 12 movies, and the only one that made money was American Werewolf.
They then left the company and were replaced by a guy called Michael Kuhn. He called me and said that they were interested in making a sequel. I entertained the idea for a little bit and then came up with something that I liked and wrote a first draft of the script.
The movie was about the girl that the boys talk about at the beginning of the movie, Debbie Klein. She gets a job in London as a literary agent and while she’s there, starts privately investigating the circumstances surrounding the deaths of Jack and David.
The conceit was that during the time in the first film where Jenny goes to work, and David is pacing around the apartment, he actually wrote Debbie Klein a letter. It was all to do with this big secret that David had never told Jack that he had a thing with her.
She tracks down Dr. Hirsch, who tells her that Alex now lives in Paris because she was so traumatized by what happened. She went back to the Slaughtered Lamb, and everyone is still there! I think the only changes were a portrait of Charles and Diana where the five-pointed star used to be and darts arcade game instead of a board.
It’s then when she speaks to Sgt McManus, the cop from the first movie who didn’t die, that she finds out that Jenny is still in London. She calls her and leaves an answer phone message, which we then reveal is being listened to by the skeletal corpses of Jack and David, watching TV in Alex’s apartment!
The big surprise at the end was that Alex was the werewolf. It was pretty wild. The script had everybody in it from the first movie – including all the dead people!”
Honestly, that sounds as if it could have been a ton of fun to see. Also, it sounds a Hell of a lot better than the other movie mentioned above which I hate to even think about. But as to why this one never made it to the big screen? Apparently, Kuhn has terrible taste:
“I gave the script to Michael Kuhn, and he loathed it! He absolutely hated it and was actually pretty insulting about it. Clearly, he would have hated the script for the first movie, because like that, it was funny and scary – and if anything, a little wackier.”
I’m totally shocked that the studio couldn’t make money on their films if this was the person leading it down the road to failure. I mean if he enjoyed the idea of ‘An American Werewolf in Paris’ over this? The guy had no right to be in charge.
Are you devastated that we’ll never see what should have been the sequel to ‘An American Werewolf in London’? Do you think Landis had a creative idea that would have been fun to see play out on the big screen? Share your thoughts below!
Source: Digital Spy
