There Were Multiple Botched Attempts to Make A ‘Gilligan’s Island’ Movie

Considering that so many sitcom contemporaries of Gilligan’s Island — The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, Beverly Hillbillies, Get Smart, The Addams Family — were made into feature films, it’s kinda weird that the show’s exotic locales and inherent live-or-die stakes didn’t get the same treatment. As it turns out, it wasn’t for lack of trying.

There have been multiple attempts to bring Gilligan and pals to the big screen, but like the S.S. Minnow, every one of them crashed into the rocks. For example, when the show’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Hall of Fame in 2008, he announced that he and his son Lloyd had just inked a deal for a Gilligan’s Island feature film. The agreement “just happened in the last 48 hours,” Schwartz told TV Guide. “I can’t take this much excitement at my age.”

Maybe because the elder Schwartz was 92 years old at the time, he was delusional about who he’d be able to cast in the film. Landing Shelley Long to play Carol Brady in The Brady Bunch Movie was one thing, but Schwartz thought he could convince Beyoncé to play movie star Ginger Grant. Dawn Wells, who played Mary Ann in the original series, thought it was a great idea: “There isn’t anybody sexier than Beyoncé!”

A slightly more sane idea: Schwartz wanted to cast up-and-comer Michael Cera as the bumbling Gilligan. But it never came to be, likely just another Hollywood deal that never made it out of development hell.

More promising was Warner Bros.’ 2013 attempt to make a Gilligan movie starring Josh Gad, a man with a Gilligan personality trapped in a Skipper body. That project was sunk when screenwriter Travis Dunson sued the studio for the new project’s similarity to his script, Gilligan's Island: 7 Stranded Castaways from the Hood. Warner Bros. executives had read the script and “loved it,” according to Dunson’s agent, making the lawsuit plausible. The studio argued back that Dunson didn’t have the rights to adapt Gilligan’s Island in the first, but the project quietly fell off the schedule.

Other adaptations over the years had their fair share of kooky casting rumors, from Jim Carrey or Jamie Kennedy as Gilligan to Donald Trump as Thurston Howell III. But the most fun version would have been based on the script James Gunn and Charlie Kaufman were working on in the late ‘90s. Instead of living in a land of plentiful coconuts, fish and crazy, Professor-created inventions, this group of castaways would be “starving and desperate,” with the main island activities consisting of “killing and eating each other.” 

Believe it or not, Warner Bros. was into the bleakly comic concept. But, not surprisingly, Schwartz was not. According to Gunn, Schwartz said “No way,” to his dark vision for the castaways. Maybe if Gunn would have pitched Beyoncé as one of the cannibals?