It Can Take Forever For Movies to Be Made in Hollywood, If At All

[Classic Speedy]

Was reading a 1993 Game Players issue and came across this nugget:

So yeah...
- Black Panther didn't come out until 2018. No Wesley Snipes.
- X-Men didn't come out until 2000.
- Elektra... 2005.
- Ghost Rider... 2007.
- Cage: I don't believe this was ever made.
- Dr. Strange: 2016. Also directed by Scott Derrickson, not Wes Craven.
- Hulk got two movies, but the first didn't come out until 2003.
- Blade: This one's a LITTLE better, as it would only take five years since this was written. But it was Wesley Snipes in the lead role, not LL Cool J.
- Daredevil: 2003. A ten year gap.
- Tomorrow Man also didn't get made, I think.
- Black Widow: This is the worst one. 2021. Almost THIRTY YEARS later. And it wasn't a TV series but a film.

Anyway, just thought I'd share this "hilarious in hindsight" article.

 

[Dantheman]

To be fair, Marvel was selling the film/TV rights to their characters to anyone willing to buy them, as long as the check cleared. They only really got hyper-focused in that regard after their bankruptcy in the '90s.

 

[Pooky]

Most famously (outside of the Cameron treatment) Cannon films almost made Spider-Man in the 80s. There were two scripts written, general consensus is that the first was pretty good, the second not so much.

Some other well known unmade films;
- Turn Left or Die; Comedy about air traffic controllers that was at one point was set to star Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi before the later died. It was greenlit multiple times since but never got made; I suspect the broadly similar Pushing Tin being made was the final nail in the coffin. It helped establish the writing due of Michael Grais and Mark Victor who went on to write Death Hunt, Poltergeist, Marked for Death, Sleepwalkers and Cool World
- Man to Man; high concept movie that was kind of like Lethal Weapon or Midnight Run with an alien, supposed to be made in 1988, perhaps didn't get made because of The Hidden and/or Alien Nation which were kind of also like that. Joel Silver was producing, Arnold Schwarzenegger and then Dolph Lundgren attached to play the alien. Written by Randy Feldman who went on to do Tango & Cash and Metro.
- Crusade; another Arnold project, this was supposed to reunite him with Paul Verhoven, and was cancelled by Carolco for being too expensive, although given that they shortly went on to make Cutthroat Island, maybe they should have just rolled the dice.

 

[Dantheman]

Before the Tim Burton version got made, there were a number of Planet of the Apes remakes in development at 20th Century Fox, with directors like Oliver Stone and Arnold Schwarzenegger attached to star. I remember reading they had ideas like an ape civilization on another planet that was about as developed as ours, with ape versions of popular movies like Home Alone and such.

Before Superman Returns, everybody knows about the Kevin Smith written, Tim Burton-directed Superman Lives that was supposed to have happened. But at one point, J.J. Abrams was attached to write and direct a Superman movie, where Krypton didn't explode, Superman's costume was supposed to be a Venom symbiote-like living thing, and he fought a Kryptonian villain named Ty-Zor. But the coup de grace of this was that Lex Luthor appeared as a CIA agent who turned out to be Kryptonian, as well! Maybe we should be thankful it didn't get made.

 

[Classic Speedy]

Speaking of Arnold, he was also slated to star in a Sgt. Rock movie that never came to fruition. I think he even mentioned on one of the late night talk shows that they were in the process of filming it.

 

[Dantheman]

Before Star Trek: The Motion Picture, there were a number of attempts to being back Star Trek as either a feature film of TV series (Star Trek: Phase II is the most well-known TV attempt), but plans for movies included Planet of the Titans, and a Gene Roddenberry-scripted treatment where the crew of the Starship Enterprise encounter God... and then proceed to kill Him.

Between that, and his idea for the Star Trek movie sequels where in order to correct the timeline, they have to let JFK be assassinated, maybe it was for the best that Gene Roddenberry was taken off the Trek movies after TMP.

 

[Zorak Masaki]

If you read 90s issues of Wizard, Starlog, Comics Scene, etc, you'll see LOTS of comic/genre movies that were "in development" that never came to pass.

 

[Dantheman]

If you read 90s issues of Wizard, Starlog, Comics Scene, etc, you'll see LOTS of comic/genre movies that were "in development" that never came to pass.

Yeah, I remember reading about the planned Jan DeBont Godzilla that never got made in Wizard back in the day.

 

[Pooky]

They were trying somewhat seriously to make a sequel to the Emmerich film, or it at least got to the treatment stage. The weird thing is it was going to start with Matthew Broderick and Maria Pitillo's characters getting married, but then Pitilo's character would disappear from the rest of the film, and at the end Broderick would be handed a letter informing him that the marriage has been annulled. I guess they were contractually obligated to involve Pitilo but wanted to involve her as little as possible?

 

[Dantheman]

They were trying somewhat seriously to make a sequel to the Emmerich film, or it at least got to the treatment stage. The weird thing is it was going to start with Matthew Broderick and Maria Pitillo's characters getting married, but then Pitilo's character would disappear from the rest of the film, and at the end Broderick would be handed a letter informing him that the marriage has been annulled. I guess they were contractually obligated to involve Pitilo but wanted to involve her as little as possible?

Sounds like how Margot Kidder's appearance as Lois Lane in Superman III was a glorified cameo, because she wanted as little to do with the Salkinds as much as possible, after they sacked Richard Donner.

 

[Zorak Masaki]

Heck, I remember reading one of those rumor columns that claimed Robin Williams was going to play Riddler in Batman Forever.

 

[Dantheman]

Years ago, I remember reading online someone review a draft of an Iron Man screenplay, where after a battle scene, Tony Stark goes to Pepper's house and collapses in her driveway while in the Iron Man armor, and she has to get some jumper cables and attaches them from her car to his armor to power it back up.

It played like a less-funny version of the scene where Pepper has to switch the arc reactors out of Tony's chest in the first Iron Man movie.

 

[harry580]

the boogeyman had a example of a crazy production history, announced in 2018 by 20th Century Fox, its was originally cancelled after disney buyout of fox, but revived by the same company and released in 2023

 

[Pooky]

In the late 80s Sylvester Stallone was attached to make a film version of the extremely prolific Mack Bolan The Executioner series of pulp novels and magazines, with William Friedkin attached as director. While it seems like something I certainly would have enjoyed, I don't know if I can honestly say this left much of a void in the world, the books are kind of basic and pretty similar territory has been covered in films like the Death Wish series, The Exterminator and countless similar movies, to some extent including some of Stallone's own films like Cobra, and while Friedkin certainly earned legendary status, his filmography after the 70s was uneven to say the least. What's a little more interesting here is that Cynthia Rothrock, noted female Karate champion and an action star in her own right, was attached as co-star. This would have been far more mainstream and big budget than any of the US films Rothrock actually made, so it's interesting to think how this may have changed her career and any possible knock-on effects this might have had on female-led action films.

There were also announcements c.2014 that Todd Phillips was going to make an Executioner movie with Bradley Cooper in the lead role, but that too seemed to fizzle out.

 

[John Pannozzi]

- Cage: I don't believe this was ever made.

We did eventually get the Luke Cage series on Netflix, FWIW.