Welcome to Script to Pieces, a recurring feature at Wicked Horror where we look at the best, most interesting and at times most unbelievable horror movies that never happened. Sometimes these will be productions that never came together at all, other times, they will be original incarnations that were completely different from what we wound up with. Each should be fascinating in its own way, because the stories of movies that never see the light of day can sometimes be even more interesting than the stories of those that do.
After the success of The Lost Boys, a sequel seemed kind of inevitable. Which is why it’s so strange that it took twenty years to get one, and by the time we did, it was just slapped straight-to-video. This wasn’t a modest hit that just sold better on video and made more sense going the DTV route. Lost Boys was a hit. So why go down that road after so long, if you’re going to make a sequel at all?
Well, the truth is, it wasn’t for lack of trying. We’ve previously covered one attempt at a sequel in Lost Boys: The Beginning. Admittedly, there was more information out there about this script, which was incredibly exciting in that it was written by Near Dark’s Eric Red and told the tale of how David and the lost boys became vampires in the first place, set against the backdrop of the turn-of-the-century San Francisco earthquake. But there was another attempted sequel that was in development for even longer: The Lost Girls.
Just as the title suggested, Lost Girls would have seen a spin on the all-male dynamic of the first film. A group of girl vampires partying at night and luring in a young woman to their ranks would immediately have a different perspective and subtext than the original. The prospect of going in this direction was definitely interesting, even if there was never much information revealed about what the story would have really entailed. It’s still a project that just in its concept alone had a ton of potential.
This was initially developed in the late ‘90s, after Warner Bros ultimately passed on bringing back Kiefer Sutherland and crew for Lost Boys: The Beginning. It’s possible that the script was too ambitious, but more likely that Sutherland and the gang simply got older the longer the script took to get off the ground, making a prequel a little harder to believe as time passed. In fact, Sutherland has never been shy about his openness in returning to The Lost Boys, even has he became bigger and bigger after the first film. There was even talk, initially, of revealing that David actually survived being impaled on antlers at the end of the first film so that he could return for The Lost Girls.
Schumacher himself even wanted to come back to helm the project, thinking that it was a great idea. “I told them to do Lost Girls and not do a Lost Boys sequel,” Schumacher said in 2007. “There is no Lost Boys sequel. All the boys are dead. But the Lost Boys are all dead. The Coreys are too old. So what would be the movie? You’d have to make up a whole new set of characters.”
He also went on to add that, “It’d be great. I said, ‘Do gorgeous teenage biker chicks who are vampires. It’ll be great.’ But they don’t listen to me.”
While it’s hard to track the full history of the project, it looks to have originated around 1997, with a script for Lost Boys 2 by Jeffrey Boam. That would have taken on a more direct sequel approach, with Sam, Grandpa and the Frog Brothers taking on an entirely new crew of vampires, all of them female. Lost Girls seemed to organically grow out of that, where it seemed the returning characters from the original were simply phased out over time.
In 2000, Schumacher began attempting to develop Lost Girls on his own. In 2001, he offered a very similar quite to what he said in 2007 in an interview with Empire Magazine. “What I suggested to them was that they do Lost Girls, because I thought girl vampires on motorcycles would be sexy and funny and something that I’d like to see. They are working on that and they made me an executive producer because I made the first one, but I won’t be directing.”
There wasn’t much talk at the time as to who was being considered to direct, but rumors spread like wildfire as to who the titular Lost Girls would be. In probably the most 2001 assortment of actresses, everyone from Rachel Leigh Cook to Tara Reid and Britney Spears were rumored to star. None of them were ever substantiated.
Around this time, there was more and more talk of Sutherland still being involved with the film, but possibly in a different role. This continued to push Lost Girls further from a true sequel into something much closer to a reboot of the original with a predominantly female cast. Throughout the early 2000s, though, talk simply fizzled out and the project failed to get off the ground.
In 2008, we were treated to the first of two direct-to-video sequels, Lost Boys: The Tribe. It featured the return of Corey Feldman as Edgar Frog, alongside Jamison Newlander and Corey Haim in post-credits cameo appearances. Lost Boys: The Thirst followed in 2010, again starring Feldman and Newlander as the Frog brothers.
It didn’t make any kind of resurgence until 2016, when it was announced as being in development by WB during the hype—and controversy—surrounding the release of the all-female Ghostbusters film. Surprisingly, original star Corey Feldman was not a fan of that announcement, and noted his concern, saying, “That sounds like a gimmick. And that doesn’t sound like a good reason to go there. If there was a good storyline, that happened to take place in a sorority… I don’t know… but if it were a brilliant script, I would certainly consider it. But I think even as I say it, that it’s not right to even go there.”
Honestly, it would have to seem that most of the industry shares Feldman’s opinion, or we would have seen The Lost Girls years ago. The only thing that could have kept this from being made really could only be a lack of confidence that a movie like this could be primarily driven by women. The insane backlash against 2016’s Ghostbusters also without a doubt had something to do with it. Fans did not want to see their favorite films recast with women in the lead roles, and Warner Bros. recognized and catered to those demands. Lost Boys has again made a resurgence now that a pilot has been ordered by the CW, and it looks to return to the status quo that the fans are happy with, with male vampires and a plot that seems to stick very closely to the original film.
Luckily, an official comic book sequel from DC last year gave us at least a glimpse of what Lost Girls could have been. The 2011 German film We Are the Night also feels very much like an all-female Lost Boys reboot. But I think, ultimately, that those are as good as we’re ever going to get.
Even though the idea for Lost Girls had been circulating for twenty years before the unexpectedly controversial new Ghostbusters, the announcement of Jason Reitman’s return to a “true” follow up to that franchise has definitely proven that the age of the female reboot is over. And I have no doubt that even if someone had the right pitch, the right idea, that Warner Bros. would not consider Lost Girls remotely worth the inevitable backlash that would follow its announcement.
