When Fred Dekker crafts an original story, he has gifted us with some awesome movies: House, Night of the Creeps, The Monster Squad, If Looks Could Kill, Ricochet… but he doesn’t have much luck with sequels. RoboCop 3 and The Predator did not go over well (to put it mildly), and Cliffhangers, the sequel he wrote for the 1993 Renny Harlin / Sylvester Stallone action film Cliffhanger, didn’t even get made!
Cliffhanger
Directed by Harlin from a script by Stallone and Michael France, Cliffhanger had the following synopsis: For Rocky Mountain Rescue, the mission is almost routine: locate five climbers. With the woman he loves and his best friend, Gabe Walker braves the icy peaks only to discover that the distress call is really a trap set by merciless international terrorist Eric Qualen. Now millions of dollars and their own lives hang in the balance. Against explosive firepower, bitter cold, and dizzying heights, Walker must outwit Qualen in a deadly game of hide-and-seek.
Follow-Ups
There have been multiple attempts to bring a follow-up to the screen over the decades, starting with the 1994 announcement of a sequel called Cliffhanger 2: The Dam, which would have seen Stallone reprising the role of Gabe Walker to fight terrorists who took control of the Hoover Dam. Producer Neal H. Moritz started developing a reboot in 2009 and hired Joe Gazzam to write a script in 2014. Things really started picking up steam when Ana Lily Amirpour was hired to direct a female-led reinvention in 2019… but there was a stretch of time in 2023 when it looked like Stallone was going to come back for a sequel that would have been directed by Ric Roman Waugh from a script by Mark Bianculli. The set-up, as described by Waugh: “Gabe Walker – he’s got a daughter, he’s got an heir apparent, pseudo son, and they have a mountaineering company, Italian Alps. Tragedy strikes that’s very similar to what happened in the original movie, so that father and daughter have to deal with that and how to overcome tragedy. How do we get through traumatic experiences and fight to move forward? It’s what extreme sports like climbing are all about. And of course, there might be some nefarious bad guys that show up in the Italian Alps, and all hell breaks loose.” Waugh eventually dropped out and was replaced by Jean-Francois Richet… then the whole thing crumbled.
So, Gabe Walker was written back out of the script and the project became a reboot again. The Cliffhanger reboot has made its way through production and is set for an August 28, 2026 theatrical release. Jaume Collet-Serra directed the film from a script by Ana Lily Amirpour, Sasha Penn, Mark Bianculli, and Melanie Toast. Pierce Brosnan and Lily James star, and the synopsis lets us know that Ray Cooper is a seasoned mountaineer who runs a luxury chalet in the Dolomites with his daughter. When a weekend excursion with a billionaire’s son turns violent, they are targeted by a group of kidnappers. As the attack unfolds, Ray’s daughter, Naomi, still haunted by a tragic climbing accident, escapes into the mountains and must fight for survival against both nature and her pursuers. So, it sounds like it’s the same story that the sequel would have been, but with “Gabe Walker” replaced by “Ray Cooper.”
Fred Dekker
While we wait to see how this reboot has turned out, Fred Dekker has revealed that he was involved with the property at some point when it was playing musical chairs with screenwriters. He wrote on Facebook, “It’s a sad fact in Hollywood that many of the projects we work so hard on never see the light of day. There are also projects we work on that are taken away from us and made by others… Such is the case with a sequel to Cliffhanger which I wrote years ago for producer Neal Moritz. It was called Cliffhangers and introduced an entirely new story and set of characters than the Renny Harlin/Sly Stallone film… but alas, it never saw the light of day. The only reason I know this is that the Writers Guild of America sent me a letter citing my script in the arbitration materials for the upcoming release of the new, cleverly-titled Cliffhanger. Make no mistake, my script was abandoned and the new film was entirely re-imagined from scratch by others. I sincerely wish them well, especially Neal and the gang at Original Film.“
In the comments, Dekker revealed that the script he wrote was about a group of prison inmates on a mountaineering field trip stumbling into a high altitude gold heist.
Would you have like to have seen Fred Dekker’s Cliffhangers idea make it into production? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.
