Casablanca may have ended with the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but that hasn't stopped filmmakers from trying to drag the story out. Most recently, director Cass Warner of Warner Sisters has decided to tackle Return to Casablanca, a tale focusing on the son of Rick and Ilsa (raised by Ilsa and Victor Laszlo) who sets out to find his real father.
Obviously, film buffs are not feeling it, but Warner isn't onto anything new: this is just the latest in a long line of Casablanca follow-ups, beginning as early as 1943, just a year after the original film's release. For reasons we probably don't have to explain, none of the sequels have been particularly successful.
Brazzaville (1943)
Shortly after Casablanca won the Best Picture Oscar, Warner Bros. announced plans to release a sequel titled Brazzaville based on the further adventures of Rick and Captain Renault. But the studio rejected the story that writer Frederic Stephani outlined — which intended to reveal that Rick and Renault had secretly been Allied operatives all along — and the idea of a sequel was soon scrapped altogether.Casablanca TV series (1955-1956)
For ABC's "Warner Bros. Presents," the studio's first foray into television, execs conceived a Charles McGraw-starring prequel to Casablanca, set in the years before the events of the original. In a strained bid for credibility, minor actors from the film were cast in major roles for the series, including Dan Seymour (who played a bodyguard in the film) as Ferrari, and Marcel Dalio (who played a crooked roulette table operator in the film) as Captain Renault. The series was mercifully canceled after one low-rated season.
Check out eight more terrible ideas that didn't amount to a hill of beans, on The Week. Link