We here are The A.V. Club‘s Newswire desk have been reporting on various rumors—some more Quixotic than others—about a sequel to The Goonies getting made for more than a decade at this point. Warner Bros. finally tipped things from “rampant, Feldman-heavy speculation” into something like actual reality earlier this year, though, when it announced that it had actually put said sequel into surprising, somewhat desperation-scented development. Now, the film’s credited screenwriter has spoken up about progress on getting a script together forty years after the fact, saying he’s about a draft and a half in, and things are “moving in the right direction.”
This is according to Deadline, which chatted with screenwriter Potsy Ponciroli (probably best known for his 2021 Tim Blake Nelson Western Old Henry) at the Venice Film Festival. Although in town to promote his new film Motor City, a ’70s-set revenge thriller starring Reacher‘s Alan Ritchson, Ponciroli was happy to assure skeptical audiences that Goonies 2 was coming along, and does, in fact, need to exist. “I know there’s a lot of ‘Do we need a new Goonies?'” Ponciroli admitted. “But I’m the biggest fan of the original, it’s my favorite movie of all time. I’d never ‘redo’ The Goonies. To me it was a story that never ended, so this is the movie I want to see as one of its biggest fans.”
And while we’d argue that the story of The Goonies did end—it’s the bit where a pirate ship unconvincingly sails out into the waters off Oregon, before being replaced by a dark screen with names scrolling on it—we can’t fault Ponciroli for his enthusiasm. The writer told reporters, “I have turned in a first draft, which was very well received, and I’m on a second draft and I’m about 95% done with that so we’re moving in the right direction.” No director—or cast, either former or returning, for that matter—has been attached to the project, which Warner Bros. Discovery put into formal development back in February.
