Filmmakers always have more projects in their heads than will ever make it to theaters. They can be dismissed at any point in the process, meaning some will always be just ideas, while other projects begin production, or otherwise get plenty of publicity before they are eventually scrapped. Afterward, they never have to face the critics, but those projects become part of Hollywood legend. For example, Peter Jackson's movie project based on the game Halo.
After dazzling the world with his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Peter Jackson next sought to oversee the film adaptation of the wildly popular video game series “Halo.” Jackson was executive producing a movie from a script by Alex Garland, who would later find great success in the science-fiction genre with directorial efforts “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation.” Directors came and went from the “Halo” movie, including Guillermo del Toro and Neill Blomkamp, who could have made his feature directorial debut with “Halo.” When the project died, Blomkamp moved on to his breakthrough “District 9.” “Halo” is now in development as a television series for the new streaming service Paramount+.
Or that biopic about Edgar Allen Poe.
Sylvester Stallone has been trying to get a movie about Edgar Allan Poe off the ground for nearly 25 years. As the writer-director-actor once said, “What fascinates me about Poe is that he was such an iconoclast. It’s a story for every young man or woman who sees themselves as a bit outside the box, or has been ostracized during their life as an oddball or too eccentric. It didn’t work for him either…His work was too hip for the room…but he developed the modern mystery story. He was also one of the great cryptologists; there were very few codes he couldn’t crack. He was just an extraordinary guy.”
While Stallone originally wanted to play Poe himself, he later recruited Robert Downey Jr. to star in the title role. “It has [to] be like Downey, I designed it for Downey,” Stallone explained. “Perhaps I could re-work the script. [Maybe] Johnny Depp. It needs a very special actor like that.”
Read about 30 such projects that might've been great or might have been awful, we'll probably never know, at Indiewire. -via Digg