The Cliffhanger Sequel You Never Got: Fred Dekker’s Lost Cliffhangers

Fred Dekker is one of those filmmakers whose original ideas absolutely sing — House, Night of the Creeps, The Monster Squad, If Looks Could Kill, Ricochet — but sequels keep doing him dirty. RoboCop 3 and The Predator? Not exactly fan favorites. And now we find out he wrote a Cliffhanger follow-up that never even made it to camera. Yep: a scrapped sequel called Cliffhangers.

Quick refresher: the 1993 Cliffhanger

Renny Harlin directed from a script by Sylvester Stallone and Michael France. Stallone played Gabe Walker, a mountain rescuer who answers what looks like a routine distress call and instead walks into a trap set by international baddie Eric Qualen. Cue cash, chaos, and a lot of ice as Gabe tries to outsmart a better-armed crew at terrifying heights.

Hollywood kept trying to make more Cliffhanger

For three decades, this thing has been climbing around development. The short version:

• 1994: Sequel announced as Cliffhanger 2: The Dam, with Stallone back as Gabe taking on terrorists at the Hoover Dam.
• 2009: Producer Neal H. Moritz starts building a reboot; Joe Gazzam is hired to write in 2014.
• 2019: Ana Lily Amirpour signs on to direct a female-led reinvention.
• 2023: Momentum shifts to a Stallone-led sequel. Ric Roman Waugh is attached to direct from a script by Mark Bianculli. His pitch: Gabe now runs a mountaineering company in the Italian Alps with his daughter and a protégé; a tragedy echoes the original movie; they face their trauma, and then bad guys show up and, well, things go boom. Waugh exits, Jean-Francois Richet steps in, and then the whole plan collapses.

Sequel out, reboot back in

After the Stallone return fell apart, Gabe Walker was written out and the project reset as a straight reboot. That film is finished and headed to theaters on August 28, 2026. Jaume Collet-Serra directed from a screenplay credited to Ana Lily Amirpour, Sasha Penn, Mark Bianculli, and Melanie Toast. Pierce Brosnan and Lily James star.

The new setup: Ray Cooper is a veteran climber running a luxe chalet in the Dolomites with his daughter. A weekend outing with a billionaire’s son goes sideways, kidnappers hit, and Ray’s daughter Naomi — still haunted by a past climbing accident — bolts into the mountains and has to survive both the elements and the people hunting her. If that sounds a lot like the 2023 sequel idea with the names changed, you are not alone.

So where does Fred Dekker fit into this?

Somewhere in that script shuffle, Dekker wrote his own follow-up for producer Neal Moritz, titled Cliffhangers. It had a completely new set of characters, not Gabe Walker. It never got made, and he only recently learned it was even being referenced because the Writers Guild of America sent him a credit arbitration packet for the upcoming movie that cited his script.

"Make no mistake, my script was abandoned and the new film was entirely re-imagined from scratch by others. I sincerely wish them well."

— Fred Dekker, on Facebook

Dekker also dropped the logline for his version in the comments: a group of prison inmates on a mountaineering field trip stumble into a high-altitude gold heist. That is a wild swing — and, honestly, a fun one — that we will now never see.

The odd part

Because WGA arbitrations pull in earlier drafts for comparison, Dekker got a heads-up that Cliffhangers is officially part of the paper trail even though it was tossed. He’s clear the finished reboot isn’t based on his material and wishes Moritz and the Original Film team well. Still, that’s a lot of behind-the-scenes shuffling for a franchise that started with one very simple idea: put Stallone on a mountain and make it hurt.

Would you have watched Dekker’s inmates-on-ice gold-heist version? Or are you more curious about the new Dolomites run with Brosnan and Lily James?