David Oyelowo has been chatting about The Rocketeer 2, which has been abandoned. Current shifts in DEI are said to be at the heart of why.
David Oyelowo has been chatting about the status of his planned sequel to The Rocketeer, the Disney action adventure favourite that has gained a loyal following in the years since its 1991 release.
We first learned that Oyelowo was attached to produce and star in a Rocketeer sequel back in 2021, with plans for him to play a ‘retired Tuskegee airman who takes up the mantle of the Rocketeer’. No director was announced but the news was certainly welcomed.
Fast-forward to 2023 and Oyelowo told TheWrap that “we have forward momentum,” but here we are in 2025 and unfortunately, from the outside looking in, little forward movement on the project seems to have been achieved.
Speaking to The Los Angeles Times, the Selma star revealed how his upcoming adaptation of Tọlá Okogwu’s Onyeka And The Academy Of The Sun and the long-gestating Rocketeer sequel have both lost momentum as political and cultural headwinds regarding DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) shift.
“Onyeka is an absolute bull’s-eye for what we are looking to make, but it is also symptomatic of the challenge we have,” he told the outlet.
“We gained traction with that project in the wake of the George Floyd murder and in a moment where there was a cultural correction and people seemed to want to do better.”
Podcast: The Rocketeer (1991) and Blockers (2018)
Oyelowo added, “But now we’re in a moment where it’s evident that a lot of that [DEI] was performative and not bone-deep. Projects like that suddenly become challenged. Onyeka being one, Return Of The Rocketeer at Disney being another.”
Despite the new American administration openly attacking the idea of DEI, Oyelowo and producing partner Jessica Oyelowo intend to keep focusing on work that promotes those ideals. “Attack on DEI or not, we’ve been doing it before there was all this energy around it and we will be doing it after,” he adds.
The original take on The Rocketeer was set in 1938 California and starred Billy Campbell as a stunt pilot stumbling across a Howard Hughes prototype rocket pack.
While it didn’t set the box office alight for the Disney, the action adventure has retained a solid fanbase in the years since. The score to it remains gorgeous as well.
We suspect that plans to make the film for a streaming release were in place, but this is also a strategy that has come in for something of an overhaul in recent years too. What this all means for a sequel to The Rocketeer, we don’t know, but when and if we do hear more, you’ll learn about it here.
