Development Hell / Animated Films

• Disney and Pixar have their own page.
• The Thief and the Cobbler: At 29 years, it is one of the longest film productions ever, most of which was spent in and out of development, much of it owing to Richard Williams's insistence that the animation for his self-proclaimed masterpiece be absolutely flawless. He took to self-funding it with odd jobs after repeatedly missing deadlines for potential investors, and an ever-rotating staff, some of whom were fired before even starting, added bits and bobs to the film, much of which Williams eventually scrapped when he felt it didn't meet his standards. In the early 90s, following the success of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Miramax offered to help complete the film, so long as it was completed for a specific budget and met an exact deadline. Williams did neither, the studio fired him, and a hastily completed version was eventually released. Both Williams and his admirers disowned this version and, in 2013, it was announced that the film would never be completed, leaving what was finished stuck here forever. Fortunately in the intervening years, the fans would take it upon themselves to cobble together (pun intended) an alternative cut of the film much closer to what Williams envisioned which was released online in 2006 with additional revisions since then so that at least viewers could appreciate what was originally meant to be.
• The Movie of Clerks: The Animated Series. Originally planned as Clerks: Sell Out, wherein Dante and Randall decide to make a movie about their escapades in the Quick Stop, this got an animation test in 2006 and was supposed to go straight to DVD a little while after Clerks II. However, according to Kevin Smith, Disney still owns the rights to the series and all designs related to it, which essentially negates all possibility of there being a movie any time soon.
• The California Raisins. Plans for a California Raisins movie was considered in 2001 but it was scrapped, possibly due to Will Vinton losing his animation studio in 2002, followed by the death of the lead vocalist Buddy Miles in 2008. In 2015 it was announced that a Live-Action/CGI film adaptation was in the works and may be released in 2016 or 2017 but no further information on the progress of the project or who's starring in it.
• The Bone adaptation. Partially delayed in Jeff Smith's refusal of Nickelodeon's demands of putting pop music in, apparently the rights are now with Warner Bros.. According to the latest news, it's in early stages of development. Smith doesn't seem very involved as of yet and makes very little comment on the animation/design, saying only that it is dynamic.
• A CGI The Legend of Spyro film was announced in late 2007, and posters emerged in early 2009 which slated the film for a Christmas release. The feature never came out, and it was later cancelled.
• Dragon's Lair: Don Bluth tried to get an animated film adaptation of the game off of the ground for decades, and was able to successfully crowd-fund the budget to make a pitch reel for it in 2015. It was then announced in 2020 to instead be a live-action movie with Ryan Reynolds in talks to star.
• The CGI ThunderCats film, which was supposed to be made by the art director of Halo, which apparently reincarnated in the form of new Animated Series Thunder Cats 2011, which premiered in July 2011 on Cartoon Network.
• The Samurai Jack Movie. It seemed to be seeing the light of day again... in 2009. It ended up being secondary to a continuation of the TV series for [adult swim].
• The Fairly Oddparents also had an animated film in Development Hell for a while. That Other Wiki says the "Wishology" specials may have started out as that movie; a live-action FOP TV movie that was meant as a conclusion to the series was eventually released in 2011, with a sequel released in 2012.
• DreamWorks Animation has had a few:
  • Truckers: DreamWorks was supposed to do an adaptation of Terry Pratchett's book with Academy Award winning writer Simon Beaufoy writing the script and a set release date of 2012. The talks of making the film seemed to die down once the script was completed and everyone has since moved on. According to A Life With Footnotes, someone at DreamWorks proposed using the plot for the Trolls movie, which was enough for Sir Terry to withdraw the rights entirely.
  • They purchased the rights to make a film adaptation of the comic strip Pearls Before Swine in 2006, shortly before they released their adaption of fellow comic strip Over the Hedge. Since then however, nothing has come of it.
  • An Aardman/DreamWorks project retelling "The Tortoise and the Hare" that might have featured Michael Caine as one of the voiceover performers withered on the vine.
  • Dreamworks also planned to adapt a character from the extremely obscure 1980s black-and-white furry comic Tales From The Aniverse in the early 2000s, but reps had a hard time comprehending the treatment that the comics' creator gave them.
  • Me and My Shadow, a film about a man's friendship with his Living Shadow that would have featured a unique blend of 3D and traditional animation, was scheduled to be released in early 2014 but seems to have fallen through the cracks after DreamWorks' split with Paramount.
  • B.O.O.: Bureau of Otherworldly Operations, a film centering on an agency of ghosts, was set to be released in the summer of 2015. It has now been put on the back burner due to DreamWorks' restructuring plans.
  • The fifth Shrek installment. Circa 2004, Jeffrey Katzenberg revealed that Shrek was envisioned as a pentalogy, with Shrek Goes Fourth and Shrek Pleads the Fifth following Shrek the Third. Since Third ended up being a Contested Sequel, however, they decided to rework the fourth film into a Series Finale, Shrek Forever After, to keep things from going sour. Then in 2014, Katzenberg conjectured about a possible revival of the project, a rumor furthered when DreamWorks Animation was sold to NBCUniversal, which expressed an interest in making a sequel. Shortly after, Eddie Murphy stated that a Shrek film would see release in either 2019 or 2020, which, needless to say, didn't happen. A screenwriter and an executive producer were attached at some point, but there was no concrete news about the film until April 2023, when sister studio Illumination Entertainment's head saying DreamWorks is now actively working on a fifth film, spearheaded by both renewed interest in the series and the huge critical and commercial success of Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.
• Blue Planet, a CGI sci-fi action project planned by now-defunct Rainbow Studios (later acquired by THQ), with a video-game tie-in. A trailer was released, to widespread acclaim, which showcased the for-the-time high-quality CGI, parodies of Pixar's Toy Story and A Bug's Life characters, and a soundtrack featuring "More Human Than Human" by Rob Zombie. Much of the already-shot footage was recycled for the tie-in game, which was eventually released as Deadly Tide.
• In the late 1990's, Fox and Matt Groening signed a deal to make three films based on The Simpsons. The first film was released in 2007. In 2017, it was said that a sequel was in "the earliest stages of development." Here's hoping it comes out soon...
• Around 2003, 20th Century Fox planned to make an animated adaptation of the children's novel The Wainscott Weasel. They finally dropped the idea in 2006.
• In 2001, Shrek producer John H. Williams founded his own studio, Vanguard Animation, which created Valiant, Happily N'Ever After, Space Chimps, and a direct-to-video sequel of the latter. Their website shows several other projects in the pipeline, such as The Nut House (a heist film parody involving squirrels and acorns; no connection to The Nut Job), Rotten Island (adaptation of a book by William Steig, who also wrote the books that inspired Shrek), an adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Twits, and many more are mentioned in a 2010 press release. However, other than the October 2011 announcement of The Nut House, it seems Vanguard has vanished.
  • Fortunately, The Nut House has been Saved from Development Hell in the form of Get Squirrely, though it's been relegated to a Direct to Video release in the US.
• Paramount announced plans for a sequel to Rango in late 2011 but despite the film grossing over $100 million and winning an Academy Award, it looks like the sequel is no more due to Disney buying Industrial Light & Magic (who did the animation).
• In June 2011, Paramount announced to develop an animated film based on the Penny Arcade comic strip The New Kid with Gary Whitta (The Book of Eli) penning the script and with Mary Parent and Cale Boyter of Disruption Entertainment producing the flim. There has not been any new updates about this project since.
• Henry Selick's Shademaker began development in 2010 at Disney as part of a new foray into stop-motion animation for the studio with a set release date of 2013. Disney even set up a new animation studio in San Francisco for Selick to do the film and future projects. But in the summer of 2012, Disney dropped the film for no apparent reason and gave the rights back to Selick. Not long after, Disney closed the animation studio and now the film's future is up in the air.
• A Phineas and Ferb theatrical film was announced in 2011, but there have been barely any details about it except that the film would somehow combine live action and animation. The creators have even stated that the project is in "development hell". One possible culprit for Disney's reluctance has been the failure of their Teacher's Pet movie killing off the the concept of making movies based on animated TV shows.
• Ever since The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat came to an unceremonious end, Felix the Cat has had numerous projects on the backburner.
  • In the early 2000s, three holiday films featuring Felix were announced. Only the Christmas installment was released in 2004, while the Valentine's and Halloween entries were never heard of again.
  • In September 2008, former rights-holder Don Oriolo stated that an All-CGI Cartoon revival of Felix was in the works, but nothing more came out of it. Oriolo sold the rights to the character to DreamWorks Animation in 2014, which in turn was taken over by NBCUniversal two years later, presumably canceling the project.
  • By March 2016, more talk of another Felix series (under DreamWorks) began to surface, with DHX Media (who currently represents the brand on behalf of DreamWorks/Universal) being involved.
• In 2012, Universal announced that they would produce a live-action/CGI hybrid movie based off Clifford the Big Red Dog, with David Bowers attached to direct and Matt Lopez to write. It was scheduled for release in April 2016, but was pushed back to July 2017. Nothing more was revealed after that. Eventually Universal's rights expired and handed over to Paramount with Walt Becker directing, and the live action/CGI feature was released in November 2021.
• Similarly, Universal planned to produce a Cat in the Hat CGI film via Illumination Entertainment in response to the box office success of The Lorax. Due to the continued success of the Despicable Me franchise, and the terrible reputation of their live-action take of the story, Universal shelved the film for years. The rights were ultimately passed on to Warner Bros., who announced in 2018 that it would be the exclusive production house of Dr. Seuss adaptations. On the other hand, the setback allowed Universal to move onto production of Illumination's take on How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. In March 2024, it was announced the film, starring Bill Hader as the titular cat, Quinta Brunson, & Bowen Yang, would be released on March 6th, 2026, as part of a slew of Seuss based adaptations. ^note  Which include a solo Thing-One & Thing-Two spinoff the same year and a film adaptation of Oh the Places You'll Go in 2027 both made by J. J. Abrams. Seriously.
• According to this 1996 article, the Sega Genesis game Vectorman was supposed to get an animated movie adaption, but it never materialized.
• A Darker and Edgier CGI version of The Wind in the Willows was supposed to come out in 2012. 2012 has been and gone, and nothing's happened, so it's presumably stuck in this state.
• Yuriy Norshteyn's The Overcoat, a stop-motion film using cutouts. Largely a single-man project, with the man working on a lot of other projects and suffering from severe perfectionism. Probably the current record holder, being in production since 1981; as of 2004 only 25 minutes out of planned 1 hour were ready. A number of preview fragments have been released.
• Disney's remake of Yellow Submarine, cancelled after the record-setting box office failure of Mars Needs Moms.
• Seth MacFarlane has been in talks to make a Family Guy feature film since 2007. He stated in 2008 that he planned to produce the project within the next year, and has given similar responses to the feature's production in recent years.
• A Marvin the Martian hybrid CGI/live-action film was announced in 2008, with Mike Myers voicing Marvin. It was planned to come out in late 2011/early 2012, but vanished without a trace. The only thing to materialize out of it since was some leaked test footage.
• Along with the Marvin the Martian film, a Hong Kong Phooey CGI/Live-action film was also announced along side it, with Eddie Murphy to voice the title character. Test footage was released in 2012, but nothing else had came of the film until casting information sprang up in late 2014.
• In August 2012, Variety announced that Paramount Animation was developing a film adaption of Monkey Quest along with several other animated movies. No new information has been shared since then and given it's been years since the game went defunct, it's safe to assume it has been cancelled.
• The Waterman Movie, based on the Flash animated web series Waterman, has been in development hell since at least 2010. The film was announced in 2007 and was financed through crowd funding. What makes the film notable is that it is the last film appearance of the late Leslie Nielsen, who had recorded all his dialogue for the film before his tragic death. Many planned release dates have been made, going back as early as Winter 2007, and as late as Christmas 2012. As of March 2015, no information on the film has come up since June 2011.
• A CGI animated adaptation of the popular comic The Goon, with the voices of Clancy Brown as The Goon and Paul Giamatti as Franky, was announced back in 2010, with a fully animated and voiced trailer being released. An official poster was also released claiming the film will be released theatrically. Due to financial troubles, Blur Studios launched a Kickstarter, which it successfully reached in late 2012. No information has come up since then. In March 2015, Blur Studios had an update on the Kickstarter project claiming it was close to finishing the movie.
• A UK animation studio named Kaleidoscope announced in 2013 a Toy Story-like film called Once Upon a Time in the Kitchen, starring Nicholas Hoult, Gemma Arterton and Stephen Fry. The main premise was to be "a kitchen divided between everyday utensils and the snooty best silver from the other side of the table". The film was aimed for a late 2014 or early 2015 release, but with almost no signs of movement and them missing the release dates, it seems to have fallen into Development Hell.
• The New York Institute of Technology set out to create the world's first feature-length All-CGI Cartoon called The Works, being worked on sporadically between 1979 and 1986. Unfortunately, the poor commercial performance of TRON, competition from Lucasfilm, and an increasing lack of interest by the creators brought production to a halt, but the goal of a feature-length CGI animated film was eventually met with Pixar's Toy Story.
• The film adaptation of Tailchaser's Song has become this. Announced in 2011, it's stated to be an All-CGI Cartoon adaptation. It was supposedly going for a 2016 release however nothing has been heard of it for years. The official Twitter is active as of 2018, but it hasn't mentioned any news about the film in several years.
• This page gives details about a number of animated films and shorts from 2007, including the concept for something named Bones Story by Pierre Coffin (one of Despicable Me's creators), and a CG film about Crazy Frog, the infamous ringtone mascot from the mid 2000s, that was to be preceded by 52 one-minute shorts. None of them were ultimately made.
• A trailer released by Sony back in 2014 revealed plans for a Sly Cooper feature film slated for a 2016 release. Due to a lack of new footage or information combined with how Ratchet & Clank bombed at the box office, many fans speculated that it was pulled altogether. In June 2017, the film was confirmed cancelled. It was instead reworked into an animated series.
  • Blockade Entertainment, the studio who was tasked with producing the aforementioned films, later consulted with ZeptoLab to develop a feature-length film based on Cut the Rope in 2015, with an expected release date of late 2016. Nothing ever came to light after the initial announcement other than this teaser poster◊.
• Disney and Mandeville Films announced a live-action/CGI hybrid adaptation of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers in 2014, to be directed by advertisement director Robert Rugan. Nothing else was heard about the project until a trailer dropped in February 2022, with the finished film, now helmed by The Lonely Island crew, releasing later that year.
• Heathcliff:
  • Heathcliff: Bad Kitty was an All-CGI Cartoon film meant to revitalize the franchise. Only the initial teaser is known to exist despite distribution rights being discussed and it having a $5 million budget. Bad Kitty was supposed to come out in 2011; however, it and its cartoon series have seemingly been quietly canceled.
  • Waterman Productions (who produced Casper, Alvin and the Chipmunks and Stuart Little) made a deal in 2012 to make a live action/CGI hybrid film of Heathcliff. Nothing has been heard since.
• Fox announced an adaptation of the Maxis Studios video game Spore in 2009, a year after the game was released, with Blue Sky Studios producing and Chris Wedge directing. There have been no subsequent announcements since then, and with the underperformance of the later spin-off Darkspore, its future is in doubt.
• An untitled Nicktoons crossover film directed by Jared Hess was in development, but nothing had been heard of it since then and Joe Murray (creator of Rocko's Modern Life) eventually confirmed that Paramount rejected the pitch.
• Blue Sky Studios:
  • They've had a Mutts adaptation in the works several years.
  • There was a bird-themed film in development in the early 2010s. Aside from concept art, nothing else has surfaced. It may have evolved into Spies in Disguise, which stars pigeons.
  • An adaptation of NIMONA was reportedly 75% complete when Disney formally merged Blue Sky with its in-house production. As part of that merger, Nimona was canceled, as the studio felt the film was not worth the additional effort to complete. However, in April 2022, it was announced that Annapurna Pictures had picked up the film and would finish the film and release it on Netflix in 2023.
• Ralph Bakshi liked to talk about doing a sequel to Wizards from time to time, which has been stonewalled due to numerous other projects Bakshi had in the pipeline and 20th Century Fox not wanting to collaborate with Bakshi following the catastrophic bomb Cool World. By 2015, Bakshi had a screenplay for Wizards II and with The Last Days of Coney Island finally completed, Bakshi seemed to be ready to start work on the sequel. Two years later, however, Fox was bought out, along with the Wizards IP, by Disney. Between Bakshi's utter dislike towards Disney and his deteriorating health, it's not clear whether or not a Wizards sequel will ever be made.
• Sony Pictures Animation:
  • Sony picked up the rights to produce an adaptation of Rollercoaster Tycoon in 2010. Nothing else has been heard from it since.
  • Sony put the All-CGI Cartoon film adaptation of Popeye on hold after director Genndy Tartakovsky left the film's production. He cited Sony Pictures' Executive Meddling as a result of the hacking scandal as a reason for leaving the film, irritated that despite very positive reception to the film's test reel Sony's executives would not give the go ahead to start production. Several years later, King Features commissioned Wildbrain to produce a new web cartoon called Popeye's Island Adventures in December 2018, suggesting that Sony's rights to the character expired and that the film had been canned for good. Then, in May 2020, Tartakovsky announced he had rejoined the movie and that it would restart production without Sony's involvement.
  • The setback of Popeye initially allowed Tartakovsky to move onto developing his original film, Can You Imagine?. However, there was no further news since its announcement and he later confirmed its cancellation on July 2017.
• Fox picked up the film rights to Mr. Men in early 2015. As of this writing (February 2019), no new information has come out. Additionally, Disney took over Fox that year, leaving the film in uncharted waters.
• Don Bluth planned a film called The Little Blue Whale, which was basically Bambi UNDERWATER! However, Robert Towne said he had to write the final script, and then Sullivan Bluth Studios gave the project to Towne in the late eighties. Nothing has been heard about the movie since.
• After Fox let the film rights to Garfield lapse, Alcon Entertainment announced plans in 2016 to reboot the film franchise as an all-CGI animated film. Mark Dindal (The Emperor's New Groove, Chicken Little) was attached to direct the film in November 2018, with Garfield creator Jim Davis (who had no involvement in the Fox films) as executive producer. The following summer, however, Davis sold the Garfield IP to Nickelodeon, and Dindal left to work on a film based off the Funko Pop! toys for Warner Bros., leaving the film's fate in limbo for two years, until November 2021, when more news of the movie surfaced: it was announced the movie would be distributed internationally by Sony Pictures and that the titular cat would be voiced by Chris Pratt. Garfield's design for the movie was also revealed alongside those news.
• The poor box office performance of The LEGO Ninjago Movie and The LEGO Movie 2 led to Warner Bros. shelving a number of LEGO movies in development, such as a sequel for The LEGO Batman Movie and the long-awaited The Fast and the Furious-esque parody spin-off The Billion Brick Race. Given that Universal Studios would subsequently take over production of LEGO movies, it's plausible they'll never get made at all.
• In 2015 Warner Bros. and Cartoon Network announced a planned Adventure Time movie in response to the success of Paramount and Nickelodeon's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water, with Chris McKay of The LEGO Movie to produce it. No more news of it have been revealed since then, and with the main show ending in 2018, it might have been scrapped in favor of the four specials on HBO Max.
• Redwall has had plans for an animated film adaptation in Development Hell for years now, with the movie rights having rotated between Molitor Productions (who planned to make an animated film much like the TV series they co-produced), Nelvana (the TV series' producers, who were going to co-produce a film adaptation with The Gotham Group with a script by Andrew Marlowe), Steven Spielberg, Imagen Films (Brian Jacques denied they had the rights), and finally RegalWorks.
• There was going to be an animated Frog and Toad movie produced by The Jim Henson Company, slated for a 2013 release date with Craig Bartlett writing the script. However, the movie never materialized and nothing of it ever came since it was announced.
• A second Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie called Death Fighter was announced in 2008. In 2015 series creator Dave Willis confirmed it was cancelled due to budget concerns but expressed interest in funding it with Kickstarter. In May 2021, a new Aqua Teen project was announced as part of a trio of new films [adult swim] greenlit for direct-to-video, but it is unknown if it is Death Fighter or an unrelated project.
• Hungarian director Marcell Jankovics spent much of the early 1980s preparing an epic and faithful animated adaptation of The Bible, co-funded by an unnamed American investor. After thousands of designs and storyboards were done, the investor vanished, forcing the director and studio to adapt the Hungarian classic The Tragedy of Man as a backup plan, a Troubled Production that lasted from 1983 to 2011. To salvage at least part of the never-made Bible film, the Genesis chapter was made into an animated special in 2015, released together with Jankovics's own Bible picture book containing his character sheets and old storyboards. God was played by the same voice actor as in The Tragedy of Man. With the director's other commitments and his passing in 2021, no further segments were animated.
• In The '90s, there were talks about a film based on Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century. They ultimately never came to fruition, with Warner Bros. instead settling to make a TV series. According to Bob Bergen, some footage from the film made it into the show's intro.
• An animated adaptation based on Funko's popular Funko Pop! figure line was first announced in 2019 to be produced at Warner Bros. with Mark Dindal attached to direct and Teddy Newton to helm the script, but no further news has come about the project since. In June 2022, it was reported Funko was looking into developing the project into a streaming series instead, effectively leaving the project's future in question.
• A movie adaptation based on the Candy Land board game has been in development since 2009 but has never officially started production. It first hopped from Universal to Columbia Pictures (Sony) with Adam Sandler attached as star. Then a lawsuit over the rights to the Candy Land property stymied production even longer. But things soon went downhill when Sony executives refused Sandler's demands to fund the movie with a $200 million budget. With the film having fallen behind schedule, Sony's rights expired and reverted back to Hasbro, who then licensed the rights to Warner Bros., though with Sandler still attached. Nothing more has come out since then.
• In 2000, Nelvana announced plans to produce an animated film adaption of Rupert Bear, slated for a 2002 release, but it was not implemented.
• A CGI movie adaptation of German children's comic book "Fixund Foxi" was in development since the early 2000's but only resulted in a short trailer. No movie adaptation has been planned since.