20 Things You Didn’t Know About Midnight Express
3. There Was Supposed To Be A Sequel
After the success of Midnight Express, there were talks of a potential sequel. As the movie ended with Billy’s escape from Sagmalcilar, the sequel might have gone into further detail about the convict's passage back to America.
By the early 1980s, the team behind the movie were all involved in newer and larger projects and the real Billy Hayes had spoken out against the movie’s anti-Turkish tones. These factors seemed to work against the idea of a sequel being made.
It was reported in an Oliver Stone biography that Miramax had intended to make a sequel using another Billy Hayes memoir as its source material. The movie, planned for a 2003 release went under the working title of ‘Escape,’ but never materialised.
Billy Hayes helped produce a quasi-sequel documentary in 2007, entitled Midnight Return. The documentary focuses more on Hayes’ opinions of the fictionalised account of his time in prison, with him returning to Turkey to apologise thirty years after he had escaped.
In 2013, Hayes also released an anthology of the original letters he had sent whilst imprisoned in Turkey. While enrapturing the moments of prison life as they happened, these raw materials could have been used in a movie to expand upon his time in jail.
Midnight Express remains a controversial topic in the history of Hollywood, so perhaps a remake might be better received than a sequel.