**UPDATE: **All involved might want to hold off on ordering Christmas decorations and tracking down fake angel's wings: Paramount, the rights holders for the original It's A Wonderful Life (and its source material) have informed Variety that the production companies have yet to request a licence to make any follow-up. Until that happens, if Star Partners and Hummingbird Productions go ahead, expect things to get legal...
Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat and that also means festive films are just around the corner. Unless you’re certain channels, in which case you’ve been showing them non-stop since late October. One hardy perennial, the movie that beat the odds to become a beloved classic, looks set to get the follow-up we’re not sure anyone asked for. Still: are you ready for **It’s A Wonderful Life: The Rest Of The Story?
Star Partners and Hummingbird Productions are the companies which believe that every time a bell rings a classic film should get a sequel. They're putting together the new tale, which will follow the grandson of Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey, who just so happens to bear his grandfather’s name, and what happens when he meets an angel who helps him realise he’s been wasting his life. This time around, the main character will be doing everything wrong and, much like Scrooge, will be shown the error of his ways. Oh, and to maintain some extra connectivity to the original, Karolyn Grimes – who played Bailey’s daughter Zuzu in Frank Capra’s 1946 original – will be the angel.
“The new film will retain the feeling of the original, and it simply must be shared,” Grimes says in a statement picked up by Variety. “I’ve probably read close to 20 scripts over the years suggesting a sequel to It’s a Wonderful Life, but none of them were any good. The script by Bob Farnsworth and Martha Bolton was wonderful, and I wanted to be involved with his version of the film immediately.”
Producers Farnsworth and Allen J. Schwab are now looking to find a director and a cast, aiming to have this one ready for Christmas 2015. Because that year doesn’t have enough films in it already…
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