Hollywood is constantly cooking up sequels, and whilst some make it to the screen, many more are instead consigned to the great unmade movie bin in the sky. Whilst many the proposed follow-ups were scrapped for good reason, there are some that are so interesting and bizarre that we can’t help but dream what they might have been like should they have been completed.

Below are some extremely bizarre sequels to beloved hit movies that came close to being made.

10. Ferris Bueller 2: Another Day Off

Much-loved 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was written, co-produced and directed by John Hughes, and starred Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller, a charismatic (and possibly psychotic) teen who decides to take a day off from school in a spectacular fashion.

The success of the original led to Hughes and Broderick planning a sequel which would have seen a now-adult Bueller trying his best to wrangle a day off work. However, the project never got beyond preliminary discussions, and Hughes’ death in 2009 finished it off for good.

9. Close Encounters Of The Third Kind: Night Skies

Night Skies, a proposed sequel to Steven Spielberg’s 1979 blockbuster Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, was a project conceived by Spielberg himself. It was to be a darker, scarier tale of otherworldly visitors, inspired by real-life accounts of farmers who claim they were attacked by aliens.

After spending some time developing the project, it was reworked into the considerably less scary E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, although the Night Skies premise would later be revisited by writer-director M. Night Shyamalan on his 2002 movie Signs.

8. E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears

Steven Spielberg’s E.T. proved to be the highest-grossing film of the entire 1980s, and to this day many consider it the director’s true masterpiece. However, the family-friendly 1982 film might have seen its legacy somewhat tarnished had Spielberg pushed ahead on his initial ideas for a sequel.

E.T. II: Nocturnal Fears would have seen Elliott and his siblings abducted and tortured by evil aliens at war with E.T.’s race. Unsurprisingly, it was deemed to be too scary an idea for a family movie, so the whole project was ditched.

7. Mrs. Doubtfire 2

1993’s Mrs. Doubtfire saw the late, great Robin Williams play a divorced actor who dresses up as a female housekeeper so he can remain close to his children. The studio wanted more, and a sequel was proposed that would have seen Williams once again dressing up as Mrs. Doubtfire so he could spy on his daughter at college.

A screenplay was written but Williams turned it down, later saying “the script they had just didn’t work. They could never write it. They kept trying and it doesn’t work.”

6. Forrest Gump 2

You’ll remember Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 film Forrest Gump as one of the best-loved movies of the 1990s which won Tom Hanks his second Best Actor Oscar. You might not have known it was based on a 1986 novel by Winston Groom – who also wrote a follow-up book.

Groom received a seven-figure payment from Paramount Pictures for movie rights to his 1995 novel Gump & Co, but it was never made after being deemed ‘no longer relevant’ after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.

5. Ei8ht

1995’s Seven (aka Se7en) is one of the most compelling and terrifying psychological thrillers ever made, but it doesn’t exactly cry out for a sequel. Nonetheless, the studio pursued this, and – believe it or not – they entertained the idea of a second film which revealed Morgan Freeman’s William Somerset to be a psychic.

Unsurprisingly no one involved in the original movie would agree to this, and the script was eventually reworked into 2016 movie Solace, which features Anthony Hopkins as a psychic doctor who works with the FBI to track down a serial killer.

4. The Bodyguard 2

Credit: Terry Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty Images

Released in 1992 and starring Kevin Costner and legendary singer Whitney Houston in her first-ever acting role, The Bodyguard cast Costner as an ex-Secret Service agent hired to protect Houston’s pop star. After the first film became a big box office success, Costner had a somewhat surprising suggestion for who he should protect in the follow-up.

It was suggested that The Bodyguard 2 would have co-starred Diana, Princess of Wales as a fictionalised version of herself. As unlikely as seems, Costner says Diana agreed to make the movie, and was sent the script just before her untimely death in 1997.

3. Roger Rabbit II: The Toon Platoon

1988’s groundbreaking live action/animation crossover Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a massive success. Planned follow-up Roger Rabbit II: The Toon Platoon would in fact have been a prequel, following Roger and his animated buddies serving in the US military during World War II.

Unfortunately, producer Steven Spielberg was not on board with this idea; after making 1993’s Schindler’s List, he was uncomfortable with any light-hearted treatment of the Second World War. This and other disagreements with top brass at studio Disney saw the project cancelled.

2. Gladiator 2: Christ Killer

2000’s Gladiator wowed audiences and critics, cleaned up at the box office and the Oscars and made Russell Crowe a superstar. Naturally a sequel was hoped for, but there was a problem: Crowe’s Maximus is inescapably dead at the end of the first film. To deal with this, a script was written (by Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave, of all people) which would have seen Maximus mystically come back to life.

Gladiator 2: Christ Killer then followed a seemingly immortal Maximus through time, seeing him do combat in history’s most memorable armed conflicts, from the Crusades all the way to the Vietnam war. Unsurprisingly, this was considered way too weird to make, and it is not believed that the upcoming Gladiator sequel has anything to do with this script.

1. Indiana Jones and the Monkey King

After the huge success of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the more controversial Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, producer George Lucas and director Steven Spielberg hired up-and-coming screenwriter Chris Colombus to write the third movie, then entitled Indiana Jones and the Monkey King. This would have seen Harrison Ford’s adventurer hit the African jungles, ride a rhino, and battle armies of intelligent gorillas as well as cybernetically-enhanced Nazi super-soldiers.

This script was thrown out for being way too over-the-top and expensive, and screenwriter Jeffrey Boam was instead hired to pen what ultimately became the third film in the series, 1989’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.