Demolition Man 2 Might Have Cast Meryl Streep as Stallone’s Daughter

It was the movie that saw Sylvester Stallone frozen and thawed out to do battle with Wesley Snipes in a future city run by lilly-livered pacifists. It co-starred Sandra Bullock as a plucky cop sidekick, and British thesp Nigel Hawthorne, of all people, as one of the bad guys. It also floated the ongoing mystery of the three seashells.

Demolition Man arrived in 1993, and with Cliffhanger, helped put Stallone back at the top of the box-office tree. It was also a really fun, silly sci-fi action flick that, if there was any justice, would’ve received a sequel.

Here’s some great trivia for you, though: had the sequel happened, it might – just might – have co-starred the Oscar-winning Meryl Streep.

According to the Projection Booth – and picked up by Slashfilm – Demolition Man producer Joel Silver and co-writer Daniel Waters had actually talked about a sequel and what Stallone’s hero, John Spartan, might get up to. And one of the threads in that sequel would’ve seen Spartan track down the daughter he’d left behind when he was frozen in 1996; by 2023, the year he woke up, she’d of course grown into a full-grown woman. 

That woman, if Joel had got his way, would’ve been played by Meryl Streep, star the acclaimed Kramer Vs Kramer, Sophie’s Choice, Out Of Africa and so forth.

“I get a call from Joel,” Waters said of this short-lived project. “‘What do you think of this? Meryl Streep is Stallone’s daughter for the sequel. What do you think?’ I’m like ‘Okay, you get Meryl on the set and I’ll come out.'”

Regrettably, Silver’s plans for Demolition Man 2 never panned out, and it isn’t clear whether he even approached Streep for the role of Spartan’s daughter, who we like to think was called Sophie Spartan.

Streep wasn’t exactly enjoying the most financially successful period in her career back then, though, so who knows? Had Demolition Man 2 come together, we may have seen her joining forces with Stallone in another futuristic action flick. There were rumors at the time that Demolition Man 2‘s antagonist would have been none other than Jackie Chan. What a glorious movie that would have been.