10 Insane Movie Sequels Actors Actually Wanted To Make

It's one of the most universally beloved films of the Hollywood Golden Age with a near-perfect bittersweet conclusion and a final line for the ages, so of course Casablanca's producers almost immediately demanded a second part to screw all that up. Perhaps more surprisingly, though, Humphrey Bogart was up for it.

Shortly after Casablanca made it big in 1943, Warner Bros. announced a sequel, Brazzaville, named for the Free French city to which Claude Rains's Captain Renault suggests they now go in the original film's final scene. They also announced that actors including Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet would be returning.

The movie, which made it as far as a story treatment from Flash Gordon's Frederick Stephani, would have dismantled much of what made its predecessor great with almost surgical precision.

Starting where Casablanca concluded, it would have revealed that Renault and Bogart's Rick were secret agents for the allies all along and gone on to reunite Rick and Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa and give them a romantic happily ever after, essentially completely nullifying the end of the original.

But, while Bogart was only too happy to sign on for more (and ended up making the not dissimilar Passage To Marseille with Rains, Greenstreet and Casablanca director Michael Curtiz), Bergman was less keen and, without her, Warner ended up passing on Stephani's treatment. And that, perhaps fortunately, was the end of attempts to make a direct Casablanca sequel.