Bette Midler did a Reddit Ask Me Anything interview on November 6, 2014, and many of the questions focused on her 1993 movie Hocus Pocus. Will there be a sequel? Kathy Najimy was quick to chime in that she was up for it and SJP tweeted a few days later that she was in. (SJP is Sarah Jessica Parker). Now it’s just up to all of us to pressure the Walt Disney Company to get someone to write a script and make the movie! In researching for this blog, I found 13 fun facts about the movie and my favorite was that none other than Leonardo DiCaprio was asked to play the role of Max Dennison.
Here’s my imaging of the sequel. Hocus Pocus 2 – The Musical.
Kenny Ortega, the original director and the director of High School Musical, directs and choreographs the numbers. All original casting except Leonardo DiCaprio plays Max Dennison and Mena Suvari plays Allison, Max’s love interest. She took the role because she had so much fun upstaging Thora Birch in American Beauty.
After finishing high school in Salem, Max moved back to Los Angeles to attend UCLA film school. He graduates but fails to make anything of himself. We get cameos from both Penny and Garry Marshall rejecting his scripts and telling him he has no career. Max sings a sad ballad because he’s still a virgin and about to turn 40. He realizes that the only real time he ever had a chance with a girl was when the Sanderson sisters were terrorizing Salem. Max and his best friend, the trusty Zippo lighter that he talks to (like Tom Hanks in Castaway) head back to Salem.
Max’s mother (Jenny) still lives in Salem. (We are never told what happened to his father.) Because of residual effects from the witches’ spell at the Halloween dance, Jenny continues to believe that she is Madonna. She now operates Salem’s only combination Kabbalah/yoga studio and imports South American boys to sleep with her. Through a montage of Madonna songs, Jenny sings about the candle she found one day. Even though she has never been able to light it, she believes that it has mystical powers to keep her young and beautiful,
Max arrives home for the first time in years and is surprised to find that his mother thinks that she is still young and beautiful when in reality, she looks like chicken jerky. Max tracks down his former flame, Allison. She has married Jay, the floppy-haired blond bully. Jay is bald. Allison is fat. And their three kids are brats. Max and Allison sing a duet about how things might have been. At the end, Allison agrees to help Max find the black flame candle so that she can once again be young and beautiful.
Max had buried the book of spells in the hole they had dug in the cemetery and surrounded with Morton salt. Max and Allison dig up several bodies in trying to find the book, and when they eventually find it, the bodies they’ve uncovered do a rendition of Thriller because the Michael Jackson Estate will pimp out poor Michael’s songs at any opportunity.
Max and Allison take the book back up to Max’s bedroom in the attic. They open the book, and it tells them that the candle is also in the house. The book and candle are united, and because Disney is planning a limited Blu-Ray release of this animated classic, a Beauty & the Beast dance number ensues. Max lights the candle, and the Sanderson sisters are reconstituted from the dust.
The Sanderson sisters are no longer stuck in a world where they care about being young and beautiful. They only care about being rich. They immediately fly on Dyson vacuum cleaners to Germany and start a pharmaceutical company. Bette Midler gets to reprise my favorite song from Beaches, “Oh Industry”. Their goal is to use the spell book to cause worldwide pandemics that can only be cured with lifelong drug cocktails that their company manufactures.
Because Allison has a fear of flying, she and Max have to take a cruise ship across the Atlantic to get to Germany to fight the witches’ evil plan of world domination. On the bow of the ship, Max and Allison sing, “My Heart Will Go On,” causing half of the people on the ship to jump overboard to avoid having to hear that song one more time. This causes the ship to veer off course where it hits an iceberg. To flee the freezing water, Allison gets on the lifeboat with the other women and children, allowing Max to survive because he is able to find a floating piece of wood that he can climb onto.
After Max and Allison have been rescued, they reunite and continue in their plan to stop the witches. The Sanderson sisters, however, have split up.
The Witch Sarah (played by SJP) has fallen in love with an artist and moved to Paris. Max and Allison track down Sarah and and rescue her from an abusive relationship before vanquishing her to TBS where she will live day after day in reruns.
The Witch Mary (played by Kathy Najimy) has moved to a rural town in Texas where she is a substitute Spanish teacher. Avoiding another disaster at sea, Max calls his sister Dani (played by Thora Birch) and convinces Dani to go after Witch Mary. Dani recruits her friend Whoopi Goldberg, and they dress up as nuns to surprise Witch Mary. They take a couple of popular hits and make them about the Lord and Witch Mary eventually denounces the ways of Satan and they all end up joining a convent.
Max and Allison can finally go after Winifred (played by Bette Midler). They track her down at her luxury penthouse in Berlin, but when they arrive, they discover a hundred Bette Midler impersonators. The real Winifred escapes and sings a new song that Bette Midler has written just for the movie so that she can finally win an Oscar.
THE END