Saved From Development Hell / Live-Action Films

• Alita: Battle Angel, the Live-Action Adaptation of Battle Angel Alita by director James Cameron. On again and off again with rumors as far back as the early 2000s including supposed casting calls for a little girl who could move like a cat ... then nothing. Then he said he was waiting for the technology to catch up to his vision. Then Avatar. Word of God has stated that after he was done with Avatar he still did not believe the technology was ready yet. After multiple delays and Cameron being way too busy with the Avatar Sequels, he officially passed the project off to Robert Rodriguez to direct (with Cameron still producing). Rosa Salazar has been cast in the title role (beating out Maika Monroe and Zendaya), and 20th Century Fox began negotiating the budget down from the $170-200 million range before they could officially green-light the film. The film was finally released on February 14, 2019.
• The fourth Spider-Man film went through this later on, to the point where Columbia and director Sam Raimi ended up canceling the project altogether in early 2010, with Raimi announcing that he could not meet the May 2011 release date. At the same time, Columbia announced a reboot was to begin development shortly, and The Amazing Spider-Man was released in July 2012.
• Two adaptations of Andrew Lloyd Webber, Evita (which Alan Parker even thought about making in the 1970s before Fame, only to take the project in the 90s after Oliver Stone left) and Cats (which almost became an animated film in the 90s before hitting theaters in 2019).
• Apocalypse Now. In the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, which chronicles the Troubled Production, it's mentioned that Orson Welles planned to adapt Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in 1939, but it was abandoned in pre-production (Welles made Citizen Kane instead). Francis Ford Coppola started planning Apocalypse Now in 1969, the idea being to film it in Vietnam. Unsurprisingly, the studio thought it was too dangerous, what with The Vietnam War still going on at the time. The plans were revived in 1975 following Coppola's successes The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. The movie was released in 1979, ten years after Coppola conceived of it and forty years after Welles' initial plans to adapt the novel.
• Plans for the film adaptation of Artemis Fowl were announced as early as 2001, but nothing came of them until 2013 when the film rights passed to Disney. The film release was announced in 2017 to be scheduled for August 2019. Despite this, the release still became an issue, as it was moved to and pulled from a theatrical May 2020 release date to a digital release on June 12, 2020.
• An adaptation of The Art of Racing in the Rain was in development at Universal in 2009, but was put in turnaround after they couldn't find a director. The project later moved to Disney in 2016 with Neal H. Mortiz producing, but it also didn't go anywhere at the studio. A year later, 20th Century Fox (who would later get acquired by Disney during production) picked it up with Mortiz remaining on board; filming began on May 2018, and it's set to be released on September 2019.
• It took over a decade for The A-Team film to be made, and the movie went through 11 scripts. In the first script, the team members were supposed to be veterans of the First Iraq War!
• The film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. There were two failed attempts in The '70s to turn it into a Mini Series — the first one fell through when Ayn Rand wasn't able to secure final script approval, while the second one had a finished script (with Rand's approval) written by Stirling Silliphant (writer of In the Heat of the Night, Route 66, Village of the Damned, The Poseidon Adventure, and The Towering Inferno) and was gearing up for production at NBC, but that too was halted after Fred Silverman came to power at the network. Rand started work on her own script, but she died with only a third of it finished. The film rights switched hands multiple times in the ensuing decades, and at one point such stars as Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, and Russell Crowe were all attached. All of their deals, however, fell through, and the current rights-holders rushed through an independently-financed production in order to prevent the film rights from reverting to the Rand estate. The result, released in 2011 as Atlas Shrugged: Part I, was critically thrashed and went largely ignored even by the conservatives and libertarians that its marketing aggressively courted. Still, the filmmakers managed to get the second and third parts of the trilogy out the door in 2012 and 2014, albeit with even smaller budgets (the third film was made for just $5 million) and recast actors in every film.
• James Cameron wrote the script for Avatar in 1994, and planned for a 1999 release. It took ten years for technology to advance to the point where he could convincingly and reasonably depict another planet with CGI. He succeeded. Since it was already written at the time, he even snuck a reference to Avatar into Titanic (1997).
• AVP: Alien vs. Predator is probably the most famous film case of development hell. It was finally released in 2004 after more than a decade of different scripts, changes to the cast, false starts, orphaned tie-ins, several series of video games, and even promotions of the believed-to-be-coming-soon movie.
• Barbie went through several attempts at a live-action movie adaptation. The earliest effort was in 1986 when The Cannon Group planned to produce such a film, but was scrapped following the poor reception of their Masters of the Universe movie. In 2014, playing Follow the Leader with The LEGO Movie, Sony announced plans to adapt Barbie on the silver screen, with the unexpected choice of Amy Schumer in the title role, and Diablo Cody hired to write. Cody eventually left due to scheduling conflicts with Tully, though Cody has also said she had trouble conceptualizing a film adaptation for the character, especially in trying to emulate The Lego Movie's balance of reverence and satire, and never even finished a screenplay draft before she quit. Schumer dropped out in 2017, and Anne Hathaway was tentatively named as her replacement, with Gal Gadot also under consideration. Sony still earmarked the film for a 2020 release. But in 2019 Mattel's newly created film division announced that it had struck a deal with Warner Bros., and had signed Margot Robbie to star (with Robbie's production company LuckyChap also co-producing). Greta Gerwig was chosen to direct, and the new film dropped Sony's earlier concepts in favor of a new script written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. While the COVID-19 Pandemic delayed production, an All-Star Cast headed up by Ryan Gosling joined Robbie and Gerwig for filming in 2022, and the film finally got a hugely-hyped release on July 21, 2023.
• The whole idea for there to be a Batman movie that wasn't inspired by the TV series was first announced in July 1980, and Tom Mankiewicz wrote a script, titled The Batman, in 1983. Numerous actors were considered for the part of Bruce Wayne/Batman, and several rewrites were done by as many as nine different writers before Tim Burton latched onto the project in 1986. After several film treatments, Sam Hamm wrote an almost entirely new script, Michael Keaton was cast in the title role, and overall three years would pass before Batman was finally released in 1989. Three sequels later, the failure of Batman & Robin caused many projects for a fifth Batman movie to not take off (including a full-fledged sequel, an adaptation of Batman: Year One, and a Batman Beyond film) until a new one debuted eight years later.
• Peter Sellers read Being There circa 1972 and immediately visualized a film adaptation he could play the lead role of Chance the Gardener in; it didn't come to pass until 1979 (he had to rebuild his box-office clout, for one thing).
• The Belko Experiment was a script written by James Gunn in 2007 (inspired by a nightmare he had about being locked in an office where all the employees were forced to kill one another), but while the film was greenlit the following year, with plans of it being shot in Brazil, Gunn decided to put the project on hold as he ended up going through a divorce and wanted to be around family, with the movie's premise being something he really didn't want to have to focus on for many additional months of his life. He later admitted he'd "kind of forgotten about it", and it wasn't until he finished Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and received a phone call from MGM where he was prompted on still doing the film. Production finally began in 2015, and while he had to sit out the director's chair due to other obligations (Greg McLean took his place), Gunn stayed on board as producer.
• The film version of the Dave Barry novel Big Trouble had been filmed, had a star-studded cast and was looking to be a big box-office hit...and then September 11 happened a week before the film was to be released. Being a comedy about a plane hijacking with a subplot about two teenagers playing a large-scale tag game called "Killer", the movie was shelved indefinitely. It finally appeared in theaters with little promotion in April 2002. Despite decent reviews, it failed spectacularly at the box office.
• Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter spent years saying that they were eager and willing to make a third Bill & Ted film. A screenplay was completed and gone through several rounds of rewrites, and there was a production company willing to front at least part of the budget. Unfortunately, none of these were with the company that owns the actual rights to the franchise and everything kept hitting a roadblock over who pays for what and gets how much of the resulting pie. Fortunately, it was announced on May 8, 2018 that the third film is now in production for real, although a release date wasn't announced at the time. On March 20, 2019, Reeves and Winter announced that production had started and that the film, later titled Bill & Ted Face the Music, was released in August 2020.
• Blood & Chocolate (2007): There were plans to make a movie adaptation of Blood and Chocolate (1997) as early as when the book was first published back in 1997, but it was delayed for years due to multiple directors and screenwriters dropping out. Production finally got into full swing in 2005/2006; filming was completed in 2006 and the film was released in January 2007, a full decade after the book's publication.
• After the success of the British film adaptation that was released in 1949, several Hollywood studios were interested in Henry De Vere Stacpoole's best-selling novel The Blue Lagoon. The first attempt to adapt the novel into a major motion picture by a Hollywood studio was in 1955 when the rights were optioned by Warner Bros., and the project was announced the following year as part of a three-picture deal for Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood, with Raoul Walsh to direct, however, Hunter's agent turned down the project and was quietly shelved. Columbia Pictures purchased the rights to the novel from Warner Bros. in 1971, not long after the success of Love Story, went through many iterations, and the finished product was released to theaters in the summer of 1980.
• Warren Beatty spent most of the 1960s trying to make Bonnie and Clyde, even pitching the idea to French New Wave directors François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
  • Beatty also planned a Howard Hughes biopic after seeing him in a hotel lobby in the early 1970s and being fascinated by him. Initially planned as a companion piece to Reds, it was finally made as Rules Don't Apply in 2016.
• The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day. The original came out in 1999, and by 2002 had finally received backing for a sequel. Planned for release in 2005, the film didn't come out until 2009, ten years after the original.
• The film of Richard Matheson's short story Button, Button became the Chinese Democracy of the film world during its nearly four decades in development hell (though it saw a TV adaptation for The Twilight Zone (1985) in the meantime). It would eventually be released in 2010 as The Box.
• James Clavell's Tai-Pan and James A. Michener's Caravans had their film rights bought up by MGM, with the 1967 promotional short "Lionpower from MGM" announcing both as future projects. But MGM was falling apart and ultimately both books reached the screen through other means. Caravans arrived in 1978 via Universal, and Tai-Pan in 1986 through De Laurentis Entertainment Group.
• A Cats & Dogs sequel was intended for release in 2005. After some story rewrites, it was finally released in 2010.
• Chaos Walking (2021). Lionsgate bought the movie rights back in 2011 and the first draft of the screenplay was written in 2012. Nothing else came of it until 2016 when Doug Liman was announced as director; principal production finally began in 2017. That wasn't the end of the film's troubles, though, as it got delayed again for reshoots. It has finally gotten a release date for early 2021.
• It was also around the Turn of the Millennium that the prospect of a new adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory began development in earnest, going through several potential directors (Gary Ross, Martin Scorsese) and a gigantic list of potential Willy Wonkas (Will Smith, Robin Williams, Nicolas Cage, Marilyn Manson, etc.) before settling on Tim Burton as director and from there Johnny Depp as Wonka.
• The Brazilian film Chatô had a long process that started in 1994, with Guilherme Fontes acquiring the film rights to the acclaimed novel (a biography of media mogul Assis Chateaubriand, who introduced TV to the country), then production started in 1995 with help from none other than Francis Ford Coppola with him promising the press that it would be the greatest film in Brazilian history. Principal photography started in 1998 and then suddenly stopped the next year. That was when the government of Brazil started an investigation which ended with Fontes and the production company being jailed for improper use of funds, as most of the budget came from the Ministry of Culture, and failure to deliver a film project. They were then sentenced to 3 years in prison (later changed to community service) and had multiple court hearings condemning them to return the money used for the film. And then in November 2015, after years of failed promises and controversies, the film was released. It received decent reviews, but barely got distributed - possibly due to being Overshadowed by Controversy.
• Carl Sagan wrote the 100-page film script for Contact in 1985. When it went to Development Hell, he just made a book out of it. The film was finally released in 1997.
• For Cry Macho, N. Richard Nash's original script got repeatedly rejected by several big studios since 1975. He died in 2000, and it took twenty-one more years for it to be adapted, when Clint Eastwood got the gig.
• The production of Dangerous Men began in 1984, and was continuously worked on until its limited release in 2005.
• The truly bizarre story of Dark Blood: The movie was, by director George Sluizer's estimation, "80 percent finished" when shooting wrapped up for the night on October 30, 1993, the night that the film's star, River Phoenix, died of a drug overdose. Much of what was left to be filmed consisted of interior shots requiring close-ups of Phoenix's character, so the filmmakers and the insurance company were left to conclude that there was no cost-efficient way to salvage the movie, at which point the investors were paid out and ownership of the movie transferred to the insurers themselves. In 1999, no longer willing to pay to warehouse the film, the insurance company was set to destroy it, but Sluizer somehow rescued the footage. Flash forward to Christmas Day, 2007. Sluizer collapses suddenly while vacationing in the French Alps and was evacuated to a local hospital, then driven five hours to a cardiovascular hospital to be treated for...an acute aortic dissection, which normally kills a person within five minutes. While he's recovering, he comes to the decision that he has to complete this movie, and starts soliciting donations on what amounts to the Dutch equivalent of Kickstarter. Ultimately, the decision was made to fill in the narrative gaps using a voiceover, with Sluizer considering using an actor but eventually deciding to do it himself. The film premiered at the Netherlands Film Festival on September 27, 2012—nearly nineteen years after the death of its star.
• DC Extended Universe:
  • Plans for a Wonder Woman movie have been in various stages of production since the 1990s, with creators ranging from David E. Kelley to Joss Whedon attached at various points. In October 2014, WB finally announced that a Wonder Woman movie was in the works, which opened to great success in 2017. Additionally, the character first made her film debut in 2016's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, portrayed by Gal Gadot.
  • The previously planned Justice League film (a serious case of What Could Have Been) petered out after a year in development. In 2007, pre-production got underway, with many major names attached to star in the film (including Adam Brody as The Flash, Common as Green Lantern John Stewart, and Michael Gough as Alfred [reprising his role from the Batman Film Series). Numerous problems happened during pre-production (the film's costume designer passed away, a Hollywood writer's strike derailed the script development and there were rumors that director George Miller had been canned from the project). Finally, the film was delayed less than a month before it began shooting and become effectively moribund. Then, with the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, specifically The Avengers, the studio began again to make the film happen, with 2013 rumors of releasing Man of Steel first leading into an Avengers-like team-up of Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman and The Flash. Then, the Man of Steel sequel, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was made as a Backdoor Pilot to Justice League (to the point its subtitle is "Dawn of Justice"). The Justice League film was then released in 2017, after a Troubled Production that led to Joss Whedon taking over directing duties from Zack Snyder (from both Man of Steel and the sequel) to retool the movie. It resulted in mixed-to-negative reviews. Due to fan pressure, a version of the film that adhered closer to what Snyder and screenwriter Chris Terrio intended, Zack Snyder's Justice League, was eventually released in 2021, and was much better received.
  • Dwayne Johnson was cast as Black Adam as far back as 2007. He never gave up on the film project and it ended up being made in 2021.
• Dead Air, which had been pushed back twice. It eventually got released.
• The Deadwood movie finally came out after over a decade of on-again-off-again news about its production. Apparently, trying to round up all the actors of the ensemble cast and aligning their schedules was an enormous challenge for David Milch and HBO.
• The American adaptation of Death Note. It was announced by Warner Bros. in 2008 after a huge bidding war and said to be released in 2011 (with a rumor around that the protagonist would be played by Zac Efron). Shane Black had been announced as the director, but he left the project in July 2014, citing Creative Differences (read: he wanted to stay more faithful to the manga; the studio wanted to change everything). Gus Van Saint was rumored to be directing, but the currently attached director is Adam Wingard (Godzilla vs. Kong). Nat Wolff and Margaret Qualley were cast in roles for the film, and production was moving along smoothly until Warner canceled the project in their decision to release fewer films per year following the disappointing numbers of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. However, they allowed Wingard to shop the project elsewhere, and Netflix picked up the rights, with Keith Stanfield, Paul Nakauchi, and Shea Whigham joining the cast and Jeremy Slater writing the script. Filming officially began in Vancouver on June 30, 2016 for a 2017 release.
• Doctor in Clover was hoped to have been produced in 1961 but took until 1964 for production to begin.
• Although it eventually got a 2005 release in the wake of Doom³, the Doom movie first began its life as a rumor shortly after the runaway success of the first game, and then a flurry of studio developments, press releases and wild fan rumors after Doom 2 proved even more successful. At one point, according to the stories, Terry Gilliam was interested in directing, and Arnold Schwarzenegger would have starred as the space marine, but then it sank back into development hell for another decade.
• A Dora the Explorer movie was announced in 2012, but nothing came of it until 2017 when it was announced that Michael Bay would be working on it. That film became Dora and the Lost City of Gold.
• The 2014 film Dracula Untold has been tossed around in one form or another since 2007. Initially called Dracula Year Zero, Sam Worthington was set to star before development hell set in and the film restarted under a new name with a new lead. Alex Proyas, director of The Crow (1994), was originally lined up as director.
• A live-action Dragon Ball movie was announced in 2002, but didn't get out until 2009 as Dragonball Evolution.
• Ender's Game was written in 1985, and author Orson Scott Card started writing the screenplay for the movie in 1996. The film was finally released in November 2013. Here are more details of its very long development.
• The 2012 movie Dredd became an Acclaimed Flop, so plans for sequels were shelved despite many of the creators repeatedly asserting that they wanted to do a continuation and were "in talks" with various studios. Eventually a spinoff series, titled Judge Dredd: Mega-City One, was greenlit in 2017 as an in-house production by Rebellion.
• In a unique example of development hell continuing into post-production, the film Exorcist: The Beginning had completed filming and was having some final SFX work done when the studio fired Paul Schrader and replaced him with Renny Harlin, who recast almost all of the supporting characters, changed the context of the scenes he didn't have reshot, and completely rewrote the film's climax. After Harlin's film bombed, Schrader was allowed to finish his version with a very limited special effects budget, and it received a theatrical release under the title Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist, and did a little better critically (due to a limited release, the gross was even shorter).
• The Fantastic Four reboot was announced by 20th Century Fox in 2009, but the film languished in limbo until a cast and director were finally chosen in 2014, and it was released in 2015. Unfortunately, it was a critical and financial failure, so now, another reboot is being planned... but by Marvel Studios, thanks to Fox's purchase.
• The Fighter was in limbo for four years. Mark Wahlberg began training (boxing) for the role in 2005. Throughout the various production delays, Wahlberg continued to train every day so that he could be ready for filming. Filming finally began in July 2009.
• First Blood got Hollywood's attention upon release, but Warner Bros. repeatedly couldn't adapt it, having gone through 13 different screenplays and various possible stars across 8 years before selling the rights to Mario Kassar and Andrew Vajna. Both brought in Sylvester Stallone, the big name attracted investors, and the adaptation finally came out in 1982, eventually starting the successful Rambo franchise.
• Five Nights at Freddy's was announced to be getting a film adaptation at Warner Bros. in 2015. Two years later, Warner Bros. canceled the film and placed it into turnaround due to Executive Meddling causing the budget to rapidly increase after the staff was forced to restart from scratch. Blumhouse Productions then bought the rights shortly thereafter, and Chris Columbus was attached to direct, write and co-produce. By 2021, Columbus was no longer involved with the project. During this period, the film juggled no less than three scripts, all of which were vetoed by series creator Scott Cawthon (while nothing has been stated publicly, it's been alleged that WB took one of the scrapped scripts and retooled it as The Banana Splits Movie, a horror film featuring the titular Hanna-Barbera characters). Production only really kicked in by late 2022, when a new director (Emma Tammi) and the main cast was announced. Filming began in February 2023, and the film was finally released in time for Halloween 2023.
• A Footloose remake was first announced in 2007, with Kenny Ortega as the director and Zac Efron as Ren. Early reports indicated that it was to be an adaptation of the stage musical. Both Ortega and Efron dropped out in 2009, the former due to disagreements with Paramount over the budget and the latter due to Efron not wanting to be typecast in musicals. Then Efron's replacement, Chace Crawford, backed out due to scheduling conflicts. It finally got to theaters in October 2011, now a straightforward remake rather than a musical.
• Freddy vs. Jason:
  • If AVP is the most famous case, this is likely the second most famous, as the film was also famously mired in development hell for years; originally, the studios who owned the two franchises involved with the titular crossover had wanted to make it for years, but could never agree on how to make it (each studio wanted to license out the other's character and do the film their way). When New Line Cinema bought the rights to the Friday the 13th franchise, the film stayed in development hell as New Line went through numerous screenwriters and even more script ideas...until the two men who ended up writing the script for the film threw out every other script that came before them and set a list of rules to follow that respected both parent franchises involved as they wrote their script. The film was finally released in 2003, and ended up making more money than any other film in either of the parent franchises.
  • The story of the film's stay in Development Hell—and the numerous script ideas that came before the final script—is a bonus feature on the movie's DVD.
• There was talk around 2008-9 of a live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell (1995), possibly produced or even directed by Steven Spielberg, but he seems to have passed on it in favor of other projects. It finally got a director, writer, and production team in 2014 with Dreamworks distributing (Paramount overseas) and Scarlett Johansson and Pilou Asbæk attached to star. It officially began filming in early 2016 and released in 2017.
• Ghostbusters 3. The story behind the third film is as strange as it gets. Rumors of multiple scripts and new Ghostbuster cast members have floated around the internet for years. To give you some perspective as to how long this was going on, Chris Farley was being considered as a supporting character back in the '90s. Dan Aykroyd has reportedly written several scripts over the years, all of which failed to ignite enough interest to start pre-production. At one point, there was apparently a script written where the original team journeyed to a hellish Alternate Universe New York City called "ManHellton" (which, in turn, prompted the Russian video game studio ZootFly to produce a Gears of War-esque tech demo based on this proposed script in the late '00s). This, in turn, spurred the development and eventual release of Ghostbusters: The Video Game, which (according to Aykroyd) may as well be the canonical third film.
  
  And yet, script and cast rumors still continued to float around — Ben Stiller, Bill Hader, and Eliza Dushku have all been rumored to be potential replacement candidates. In January 2010, Ivan Reitman announced he was directing the film, and Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky (The Office (US)) reportedly wrote a script with Aykroyd and co-creator/co-star Harold Ramis, that all were very happy with. Yet, still there was no word for years on the status of development. A major part of the delay seemed to involve Bill Murray — as of early 2011, it appeared the production was only waiting on Murray to approve the script before they moved forward with pre-production. The film was slated to start production in 2012, but that year came and went with no news other than the report that new writers were hired to craft yet another script, as well as more back-and-forth on whether Murray would return. Then Reitman began talking about the possibility of a remake for a while, before Aykroyd shifted attention back to the third film in March 2013, in an interview on Canadian television (for a charity project he was doing), saying they have a script (penned by Etan Cohen), they are planning to begin production in fall 2013, and Bill Murray will not be a part of it at all... more or less, what he'd been saying for the past three years. Fall 2013 came and went with very little new news from Aykroyd — the script was being rewritten again, and this time actors Jonah Hill and Emma Stone were being considered as part of the "new" team of Ghostbusters being brought in alongside the older generation (minus Murray). Then Harold Ramis died in February 2014.
  
  Then in Late July 2014, Aykroyd was on NBC's Today and again claimed that production would begin in Spring 2015, though he was cryptic about it and said it was uncertain who would be involved with it. So, doubt still remained when the development hell would end. And then, it was reported that director Paul Feig was in talks to direct a Continuity Reboot, starring a female crew of Busters. This Ghostbusters began filming in June of 2015 and was released in July of 2016.
  
  That film, however, ended up getting a poor response and flopped at the box office, which pretty much ended the rebooted franchise. In 2019, it was announced that Jason Reitman was developing a film that would be a sequel to the first two films, titled Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Basically, the film that fans had been wanting for decades, a sequel to the original films, was finally coming into fruition. Arriving in November 2021, it was a hit, and spawned a sequel, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which was released in March 2024.
• The first American Godzilla movie was first suggested way back in the 1970s. Of course, due to things like budget, rejected scripts, and the like, it wasn't until 1998 that the movie was finally released.
• R.L. Stine's Goosebumps books made a successful '90s TV series, but there were also numerous attempts to adapt them into a feature film long before the 2015 version. As far back as 1998, Tim Burton was tapped to produce a big-screen adaptation that never materialized, partly due to financial turmoil at Twentieth Century Fox, the cancellation of Fox Kids (which produced the series), and the books' loss of popularity. In 2008, after the Horrorland revival series, Columbia Pictures announced a new Goosebumps movie, but the movie was sent to development hell, with various producers and writers attached at different times. Then in fall 2013, Jack Black became attached to star as an Author Avatar of Stine. Principal photography officially began in April 2014 and completed in July 2014; Goosebumps was released to theaters in October 2015.
• The Godfather Part III went into development shortly after Part II's release in 1974. Unfortunately for Paramount, neither Francis Ford Coppola nor his cast showed any interest in continuing the franchise, which didn't stop the studio from trying. This LA Times article details some of the many prospective stories mooted during the '70s and '80s: depending on the script, the Corleone family becomes involved with the CIA, South American drug lords, African-American gangsters and/or Third World dictators; a few were In Name Only sequels focusing on Michael's son or long-lost relatives. One script written by Thomas Lee Wright was even retooled into New Jack City. Finally, in the late '80s Coppola and Mario Puzo agreed to revisit the series, mostly due to financial woes. After sixteen years, Part III was released in 1990 to a decidedly mixed reception.
• Grown Ups was supposed to be made in the late 90s, and starring Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Chris Farley, David Spade, and Rob Schneider, who were all known as "The Bad Boys of SNL" in the early 90s. However, after Farley's death in 1997, it got put away before it was finally made in 2010 with Kevin James in the role meant for Farley.
• In 2007, Platinum Dunes announced the "Groundhog Day" Loop horror film Half to Death, which they eventually ditched after rewrites. Nearly a decade later, the guy responsible for the rewrites was reminded of the film by the original producer, gave his script to Blumhouse (he worked there in the Paranormal Activity sequels) and it was greenlit, eventually being released as Happy Death Day in 2017.
• The remake of Hellraiser. Mostly due to the fact that the Weinsteins keep rejecting the ideas of every writer and director that has ever been attached to the project. One of the projects was turned into a sequel so that the company can keep their hold on the franchise, returning the remake into development hell. In 2022, the remake was finally released.
• One of the earliest examples of this was Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels, which, due to Hughes' perfectionism and insistence on the latest film technology, took three years and a budget of $3.8 million to create, something unheard of at the time (and equaling somewhere on the order of $225 million in today's money). Two decades later, Hughes would take seven years to complete a similar film, Jet Pilot.
• Highlander: The Source stalled for several years and went through several writers and numerous script rewrites before the final project was made. Fans hoped it would improve the thing, but it was still terrible.
• The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy was announced in 1982, but filming did not begin until 2003, two years after series creator Douglas Adams died from a sudden heart attack. Adams said of his experience trying to get the film made, "Getting a movie made in Hollywood is like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it." For several years, the About the Author blurb in Adams' books included the line (in the context of discussing the Hitchhiker's series) "A major motion picture is currently in development hell and should be coming out any decade now." This no doubt helped popularize the term.
• The Hobbit had to resolve some serious legal issues before it could be green-lit, delaying production until 2009 despite the fact that Jackson had been seeking an adaptation since 1995. The film then suffered creative control problems — such as the studio's refusal to film in New Zealand (the location for the LOTR films) — which caused then-director Guillermo del Toro to leave the project. Fortunately, Peter Jackson managed to retake control as both director and producer and the first of three Hobbit films came out in December 2012.
• Hounddog by D. Kampmeier. The script was originally written in the nineties, but the project hasn't found financing until 2005. When production started in summer 2006, it was overshadowed by accusations of sexual exploitation of the child actors involved. The film was shown at the Sundance Festival in early 2007, booed and basically sent back into Development Hell. It was finally ready in 2009 but was almost completely pulled from distribution at the last moment (only having 22 screens at most). It's been available on DVD since fall 2010.
• Hulk: Development began in the 1990s, but the film was not released until 2003.
• Inception:
  • It went through a stint in development hell that was actually self-imposed; Christopher Nolan saw the film as his personal opus and spent ten years revising the script until he was sure it was the absolute best he could make it, and everything in the complicated story made sense.
  • He was also waiting until he had enough clout in Hollywood to get the budget he wanted. After the success of Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, he was essentially given a blank check to do what he wanted... that being "create a highly rated film that made everyone lots of money". Good things do sometimes come to those who wait.
• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It took a long time before George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford agreed on a script - and thus the Trilogy Creep came 19 years after Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, with a fifth film scheduled for 2023.
• Quentin Tarantino announced his plans to shoot a WWII movie titled Inglourious Basterds shortly after the 1997 release of Jackie Brown. As of 2007, he was still working on the script, but in late 2008 it began shooting and was released in August 2009.
• The adaptation of In the Heights started development at Universal in 2008 with Kenny Ortega as the director. But months before production would've started, the studio pulled the plug in spring 2011 due to budget concerns. In 2016, Lin-Manuel Miranda announced that he would produce the film with Harvey Weinstein over at his studio with Jon M. Chu helming production. However, development again came to a halt a year later when news reports came in about Weinstein's many sexual harassment allegations against him and the rights were given back to the other producers. Fortunately, by that point, Miranda became a huge star after the massive success of Hamilton and his reputation got multiple studios interested in the project with Warner Bros. winning the rights in a bidding war. Filming started in April 2019, and it arrived in June 2021.
• In the early Nineties there were talks of a film adaptation of the musical Into the Woods by Columbia Pictures, where Robin Williams would have played The Baker and Jim Henson Productions deal with the effects. It was eventually dropped by the studio by the end of the decade. Then in 2002, the success of Chicago made Rob Marshall approach creator Stephen Sondheim towards adapting one of his musicals, with Sondheim suggesting Into the Woods. He accepted, but Marshall postponed the film until he finished Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides in 2011, leading him to pitch the project to that film's studio. Disney accepted in early 2012, filming begun in 2013, and Into the Woods finally hit theaters at Christmas 2014.
• James Bond:
  • The biggest cases are GoldenEye (which emerged from the failed third Timothy Dalton film, the pre-production of which was derailed by legal issues between EON and MGM after the latter briefly came under the ownership of an Italian huckster, Giancarlo Parretti, who attempted to flog the international TV rights to the franchise at low prices without EON's permission; the six year gap is still the longest between installments^note five months longer than the time until No Time to Die, which also owes to over a year being delayed by the COVID-19 Pandemic) and Skyfall (EON started to arrange things. Then MGM got into financial problems, and it was kept on hold until the studio solved them).
  • On Her Majesty's Secret Service is a minor case: it was first announced as a successor to Goldfinger (Thunderball came instead due to lawsuits and such), then after Thunderball (but the winter locations made producers prioritize You Only Live Twice).
  • Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman intended to follow You Only Live Twice with The Man with the Golden Gun (as it was the most recent book published), inviting Roger Moore to the Bond role (as Sean Connery wanted out after YOLT). However, filming was planned in Cambodia, and the Samlaut Uprising made filming impractical, leading to the production being cancelled.
  • For Your Eyes Only was supposed to be the next film after The Spy Who Loved Me, but due to the success of Star Wars, EON wanted to ride the sci-fi wave and made Moonraker, instead.
• The film adaptation of Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter of Mars series probably holds the record for the longest time a property has been in Development Hell before being released. Originally conceived as an animated film by Bob Clampett in 1931 (which would have made it the first-ever animated feature film), it was handed from company to company for decades. At various points in the 2000s, Robert Rodriguez, Kerry Conran, Jon Favreau, and Brad Bird had been attached to direct the project. In 2006, Disney acquired the rights after Paramount's attempt at filming it failed, Paramount having acquired the rights from Touchstone (a Disney label) in 2002. Actual filming began in January 2010, and was released in March of 2012 — 81 years since the movie was first mooted and just in time for the 100th anniversary of the first published John Carter story (a DVD extra is even titled "A Century Into Making"). The Mockbuster version by The Asylum actually came out a full three years before the official adaptation did. And because of an abysmal US marketing campaign coupled with mediocre reviews, it was a spectacular box office failure. Perhaps its time in Hell was warranted. The film's failure also gave the Burroughs estate the perfect excuse to claim that they now have the movie rights and are planning a reboot (the franchise is actually in the public domain given it started in 1912, rendering any claims of exclusivity on the part of the Burroughs estate moot).
• A fourth Jurassic Park was initially intended to begin production in 2004 for a summer 2005 release, but soon entered development hell. The producers even considered pulling the plug once Michael Crichton died in 2008. Then in 2011, Steven Spielberg confirmed the fourth movie was on the way, and in 2013 the eventual director of Jurassic World was hired. The film was eventually released in June 2015, being as much of a box office behemoth as the original.
• It took about ten years to Alexandre Astier to get the Kaamelott movie project off the ground. He faced a number of issues, including losing the rights (which he regained in 2015) and finding ways to finance it. In January 2019, a trilogy was eventually announced and the first film, Kaamelott: Premier Volet, was released in July 2021.
• Kick-Ass 2, originally subtitled Balls to the Wall. The film was intended to be ready in time for a 2012 release but had been put on hold due director Matthew Vaughn being busy with other projects and star Aaron Johnson wanting to be closer to his family. Vaughn decided to only produce, Cry_Wolf director Jeff Wadlow took over, and the film was released in August 2013.
• A live-action adaptation of Kiki's Delivery Service has been rumored since (according to IMDB) 2005. In April 2013, it was announced that Takashi Shimizu (the known director of Ju On) will direct it, and rather than being a remake of the Studio Ghibli movie, it's a more direct adaptation of the illustrated novel by Eiko Kadono. The Japanese release occurred in March 2014.
• An adaptation of the 1997 novel The Moon and the Sun starring Pierce Brosnan, Kaya Scodelario, and Benjamin Walker had its principal photography held in April and May 2014 and was announced by Paramount to release on April 10, 2015. However, three weeks before its wide release, Paramount canceled it, supposedly due to the film needing more time in post-production for its special effects. After being renamed in 2020 to The King's Daughter, its distribution rights were picked up by Arclight Films, but it changed hands again in October the following year to Gravitas Ventures. The King's Daughter was finally released on January 21, 2022, to disappointing critical and box office reception, making only $750,000 during its opening weekend.
• The Live-Action Adaptation of Saint Seiya, Knights of the Zodiac was in development as far back as 2015, but didn't receive so much as a casting announcement until September 2021. This ended up causing the 2019 Netflix reboot, which took elements from the film's story, to release before it did.
• The remake of Last Holiday was originally intended to be made in 1985 with John Candy set to star. However, the project got put on the back burner and after Candy's passing, the role was rewritten to be a female (played by Queen Latifah). The film was finally made and released in 2006.
• After Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood (2003), treatments were written for ideas with the Leprechaun encountering spring breakers or pirates, even a Wild West setting. Though star Warwick Davis and director Brian Trenchard-Smith were keen on another installment, Lionsgate dragged their feet for years. Instead of making a direct follow-up, Lionsgate ultimately produced Leprechaun: Origins in 2014, a Darker and Edgier franchise reboot starring Dylan Postl (WWE's Hornswoggle), without the involvement of Davis or other members of the original franchise.
• It appeared at one point in time that The Lone Ranger would never be made due to its budget coming in at well over $200 million, in part due to the poor performance of Cowboys & Aliens. As late as fall 2011 Disney announced it had shelved the project, though production picked up again a few months later, and the film rode into theaters in 2013.
• The rights to a live-action adaptation of The Lord of the Rings were sold to United Artists shortly before J. R. R. Tolkien's death in 1973. Although scripts were intermittently under development and two animated adaptations made it to the screen despite their own development hells, the conventional wisdom was that the trilogy as written was unfilmable due to its sheer length and complexity. Studios were extremely reluctant to green-light scripts that would obligate them to more than one film. Even one-film scripts (adapted almost beyond recognition) came with 3-hour running times, well beyond what studios believed moviegoers would be willing to sit through. It wasn't until 1994 that Miramax gave Peter Jackson permission to move forward on a 5-hour, 2-movie script. By 1999, with shooting not even started, the studio had lost confidence and Jackson had to shop the script around again. New Line not only picked it up but also approved the third film, bringing the total running time to 7 hours. Jackson and his writing team, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens had to completely revamp the script during shooting to meet the new parameters. ^note In the directors' commentary track and making-of documentary footage from the Extended Edition DVD releases, Jackson and the writers point out several plot elements (such as Arwen rescuing Frodo at the Ford) that were originally created to get around time constraints but were retained for other purposes (such as increasing the prominence of female characters) or that might have eventually been removed if they hadn't run out of time for rewrites. The first film was not released until 2001, 28 years after the film rights were sold...but finally redeemed Lord of the Rings from Development Hell with blockbuster success.
• Mad Max: Fury Road was in development hell for almost a couple of decades. It was preparing to start filming in 2001 when the September 11th attacks made it unfeasible for the production crew to travel to Australia. By then, Mel Gibson lost interest in reprising the role and dropped out of production, which seemed to have made filming almost unlikely until reports in 2009 posited that it would be made without Gibson's involvement. The title role was recast (Tom Hardy replaced Mel Gibson) and started filming in July 2012, where principal photography rolled in Namibia. Filming wrapped up in December of that year and spent almost three years in post-production before it was finally completed in time for a May 15, 2015 release. Critical and public reaction was almost unanimous in praise, and as a result the Mad Max franchise was successfully rebooted and a fifth film began production almost immediately after Fury Road's success. Though said sequel is unfortunately in a Development Hell of its own, owing to creative dramas and the decision to split the movie into two, one focusing on Max and the other on Furiosa (the latter is currently on track for a 2023 release).
• The Man Who Killed Don Quixote by Terry Gilliam has been trapped in Development Hell for over two decades coupled with a Troubled Production in 2000. Gilliam eventually released a documentary about making the film (appropriately titled Lost in La Mancha), but the original incarnation of the film itself was never completed.
  • Pre-production resumed in 2009, but as of late 2010, the project was shelved again due to a collapse of funding.
  • In 2014, Gilliam's seventh attempt at production was underway, this time with John Hurt as Quixote and Jack O'Connell as Toby Grisoni, whose character travels back in time and replaces Sancho Panza. Filming was set to begin in January 2015, with the film being released in May 2016. Filming was suspended again in fall 2015 after John Hurt was diagnosed with early-stage pancreatic cancer and he was forced to leave the project. Hurt passed away in January 2017.
  • After more delays, Gilliam was able to regain funding for Quixote in 2016 with Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce taking over the lead roles of Toby and Quixote respectively. Principal photography finally restarted on March 2017 and wrapped up on June 2017, fulfilling Gilliam's desire to get his dream project off the ground. The film was released in 2018 from Amazon Studios.
• John Huston had wanted to make The Man Who Would be King since the 1940s. The proposed stars went from Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart, to Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, to Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, to Paul Newman and Robert Redford, to finally, Sean Connery and Michael Caine.
• Plans for a movie adaptation of The Marsh King's Daughter (2023) began not long after the book's 2017 publication, but development stalled for a few years, with both the lead actress and director changing in that time (originally, Alicia Vikander was set to star in and executive produce the film, while Morten Tylsdum was set to direct, with both dropping out and being replaced by Daisy Ridley and Neil Burger, respectively). Things finally went forward in 2021, with filming beginning in June and wrapping up in August of that year. It's release was delayed until 2023 due to issues finding a distributor.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • An Iron Man film adaptation was in development since 1990 when Universal Studios bought the rights. The film then went through several changes in studios, writers and directors for more than a decade until 2005 when Marvel Studios reacquired the rights and put the film in production as their first independent feature. The film finally released on May 2, 2008, to great success.
  • Thor: Sam Raimi originally envisioned making a Thor movie after Darkman. He met Stan Lee and pitched the concept to 20th Century Fox, but they did not understand it. The project was abandoned for a while, but the success of X-Men in 2000 helped it gain some momentum. The film went through several writers, directors, and studios before the rights went back to Marvel in 2006, who finally produced the film and released it in May 2011.
  • Yet another Marvel property, Captain America, also languished in development hell as far back as 1997. In May 2000, Marvel teamed with Artisan Entertainment to help finance the film. However, a lawsuit arose between Marvel Comics and Joe Simon over the ownership of Captain America copyrights, disrupting the development process of the film. The lawsuit was eventually settled in September 2003. The rights were later acquired by Marvel in 2005 who were planning to independently produce several films with Paramount Pictures distributing, and the film finally saw release on July 22, 2011.
  • A Doctor Strange film has been considered for three decades, with big names like Neil Gaiman and Guillermo del Toro attached. An adaptation of sorts did get off the ground under Full Moon Features, but hastily became a Captain Ersatz product when they lost the rights, becoming Doctor Mordrid. But as soon as the MCU started up properly, production streamed through from 2010 onwards and a movie of the Sorcerer Supreme was done as part of Phase Three of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and directed by Scott Derrickson, hitting theaters in late 2016.
  • Wesley Snipes began campaigning for a Black Panther film in 1992, and even after he was cast to play the title character in the popular Blade Trilogy, the project was still in various stages of production throughout most of the '90s and the Turn of the Millennium. Avi Arad announced a Black Panther movie as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe way back in 2005, but nothing came of it until late 2014, when Marvel officially confirmed that a Black Panther movie starring Chadwick Boseman was released in 2018. Like the Wonder Woman example below, Marvel first introduced the character in another movie (Captain America: Civil War) before spinning him off into his own film in 2018.
  • A Black Widow film was first considered when Lionsgate commissioned a script from David Hayter back in 2004 before dropping the project, and once Scarlett Johansson became the MCU's Natasha Romanoff in 2010, Kevin Feige and Marvel were soon discussing making a solo movie. The movie finally got announced in July 2018, with Jac Schaeffer tapped to write and Cate Shortland as director. Filming eventually started in early 2019, and the movie was ultimately made, but ended up being one of the many projects screwed by the COVID-19 Pandemic hitting less than two months before its original scheduled debut, forcing three delays. The movie finally hit theaters (and streaming) in July 2021.
  • Attempts to get the ball rolling on a Shang-Chi movie date back to the 1980s, when Stan Lee reportedly met with Brandon Lee about possibly playing the character. In 2003, a Shang-Chi film was announced to be in development at DreamWorks, with Hong Kong action legend Yuen Woo-Ping directing and Ang Lee producing. The production soon fell by the wayside and the character’s rights reverted to Marvel, who subsequently mentioned Shang-Chi as one of the projects being developed for the nascent MCU back in 2006. Despite this, the movie wouldn’t officially pick up steam until a writer was hired in late 2018, which was followed by director Destin Daniel Cretton signing on in 2019. The resultant movie, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, would finally be released in 2021, with Simu Liu starring in the title role.
  • The third Guardians of the Galaxy was placed on indefinite hold after Disney executive Alan Horn fired director James Gunn in July 2018 for some nearly decade-old offensive jokes made on Twitter (that he's sincerely apologized for). Although Disney and Marvel kept Gunn's script out of goodwill, the film lost its original 2020 release date when it became clear no director wanted to take over in light of the controversy, and several cast members, most notably Dave Batista, threatened to leave in protest of Gunn's dismissal. Worse, it turned out that the jokes were dug up by alt-right trolls trying to smear Gunn for his political views, thus discouraging anyone from associating themselves with the film. Three months after his firing, Gunn was hired by Warner Bros. to write and direct a new Suicide Squad film, making him even less likely to come back to MCU. Gunn's dismissal also led to the scrapping of many of the cosmic storylines that would take place after Avengers: Endgame, since he was supposed to oversee them. Although Gunn was rehired in March 2019, his commitments to The Suicide Squad and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed filming alone to 2021, with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 finally landing a mid-2023 release date.
• Mary Poppins:
  • Walt Disney had first considered making a live-action adaptation of Mary Poppins as early as 1938, but author P.L. Travers didn't think it could do justice for her books, mainly because Disney hadn't done any live-action films at the time. After sales of the books started declining, Mrs. Travers finally met with Disney to discuss a movie treatment, and the story finally reached theaters in 1964.
  • Plans for a sequel, based on some of the later books, date back to at least 1965, with an actual outline prepared during The '80s. However, Creative Differences with Mrs. Travers caused it to become shelved. (Among others, Mrs. Travers wanted the sequel to feature Mary Poppins taking Jane and Michael Banks on further adventures, while Disney wanted to explore the possibility of a grown-up Jane or Michael hiring Mary Poppins as the nanny of her or his own children.) Production on the sequel, now titled Mary Poppins Returns, resumed in The New '10s (following Disney's own idea of an adult Michael hiring Mary Poppins as nanny of his own children), with a December 2018 release date.
• A film adaptation of the Les Misérables musical was discussed for many years; the 1991 souvenir program for the stage show claimed it was coming out in 1993 via TriStar Pictures. Universal Pictures was the studio that finally brought the movie to the light of day in December 2012.
• Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: In 1939, the film rights for the novel were bought, and production was about to begin when World War II started, throwing everything into a spin. The movie was shelved. They tried again in 1954, but nothing came of it. The movie finally was released in 2008. Nearly seven decades after the movie rights were purchased. A sequel is now in the works. Let's see how long the development period will be on that one.
• A live-action film based on the Monster High franchise was announced around 2010 and was allegedly going to come out in 2012, but fell by the wayside soon after. Later, Universal bought the rights and recruited Ari Sandel (The Duff) to direct and set it for an October 2016 release. However, with DreamWorks SKG jumping ship from Disney to Universal that year, its release date was snubbed in favor of DreamWorks' The Girl on the Train. Eventually, the film came out in 2022, now directed by Todd Holland.
• Peter Jackson purchased the film rights to the novel Mortal Engines in 2009, but the project was put on the back burner due to Jackson and his production company already being busy making The Hobbit trilogy. Production would officially start in 2016, with the final film being released in December 2018.
• Following the failure of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, a third movie based on the games but independent of that languished for decades, including a project that was supposed to be filmed in Louisiana until Katrina ravaged it, and another that would follow the interest raised by Mortal Kombat: Rebirth. Only in 2019 did a new Mortal Kombat finally started filming, hitting theaters in 2021.
• Shane Black wrote the first version of The Nice Guys in 2002. In the intervening years, where he even begun directing with Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, he tried reworking the screenplay into a TV pilot, only to have its questionable content halt any network ambitions. Then after 2013's Iron Man 3, Black decided to make The Nice Guys - which by this time had been changed from a contemporary work to a period piece set in The '70s. It was announced in 2014, filmed the following year, and released in 2016.
• Sergio Leone's gangster epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984). Leone read Harry Grey's novel The Hoods in 1967, and wanted to adapt it as a follow-up to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. It took Leone 17 years of planning, arm-twisting, fund-procuring, and numerous screenplays to bring The Hoods to the big screen - during which time he directed two other films and produced several others.
• The rights to the movie One for the Money, based on the book of the same name by Janet Evanovich, were bought in the late 1990s by TriStar Pictures. In early 2010, Lions Gate Entertainment announced that they were going to make the movie with Julie Anne Robinson directing and Katherine Heigl as the main character. The movie was shot from July to September 2010, but for whatever reason wasn't released until January 2012. The movie ended up bombing in theaters and was critically panned.
• Ophelia: According to Lisa Klein, author of the YA novel the film is based upon, the movie rights were first optioned when the book was published in 2006, but it took nearly ten years for it to be greenlit. Filming concluded in 2017 and it premiered at Sundance in 2018, before getting a wider theatrical release in 2019.
• The Other Side of the Wind, Orson Welles' last completed film, began shooting throughout 1970-1976, but endured a Troubled Production due to financial problems and a legal tangle of epic proportions. The latter especially would lead to the film not being released until 2018, after a team that included actor Peter Bogdanovich ^note who starred in the film and had since become a director and Amblin Entertainment's Frank Marshall^note for whom the film was his first gig in the industry worked with Netflix to get the film out of legal hell and finally finished, premiering at the 75th Venice International Film Festival before appearing on Netflix later that year. The critical reception was well worth the effort, but a gap of 42 years from start to finish is nothing to sneeze at.
• Director Michael Caton-Jones originally optioned the film rights for The Sopranos (Warner) with his own money when the book was first published in 1998 and spent the next twenty years trying to get the project off the ground, the resulting film Our Ladies (2019) was released in August 2021.
• Patton. Producer Frank McCarthy first mooted a biopic of George S. Patton as early as 1953. Then the project was repeatedly delayed due to studio politics, budget issues, rotating stars (with everyone from John Wayne to Burt Lancaster to Rod Steiger attached at various points) and script disagreements. The main obstacle though was the opposition of Patton's family. McCarthy and 20th Century Fox ended up securing rights to Omar Bradley's memoir A Soldier's Story and Ladislas Fargo's Patton: Ordeal and Triumph to skirt their resistance, and the movie was finally released in 1970.
• This happened to the 2002 Peter Pan. The original plans were made by producer Lucy Fisher who acquired the rights in 1980.
• The movie adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera was being talked about at the end of The '80s but didn't arrive until 2004.
• One of the strangest cases of development hell occurred with the film Phone Booth. Writer Larry Cohen began work on the project in the 1960's as a project for Alfred Hitchcock. After Hitchcock died, the screenplay was shelved until Joel Schumacher read the screenplay and shot the film on a low budget for two weeks in 2000 (with a then-unknown Colin Farrell and Ron Eldard as the villain). After seeing a rough cut of the film, Fox shelved the project and re-shot Eldard's scenes with Kiefer Sutherland. While the film was on the shelf, Cohen reworked parts of the Phone Booth screenplay, updated the technology and sold Cellular to New Line Cinema (which was released in 2004) with Chris Evans in the lead role. Eventually, Fox scheduled Phone Booth for November 15th, 2002, only for it to be delayed to April 4th, 2003 following the Washington, D.C. beltway sniper attacks, and the film managed to become a hit at the box office.
• The rumors of a remake/reboot of The Pink Panther were first floated around the turn of the millennium, with everyone from Kevin Spacey to Chris Tucker to Mike Myers reportedly being considered for Inspector Clouseau.^note Myers was apparently the favorite of the studio, but his asking fee was too high. It filmed as a reboot in 2004 with Steve Martin, but wasn't released until early 2006, largely due to a studio merger in the interim. There was also some editing done, in order to re-cast it as a family-friendly comedy rather than the more ribald, raunchy film of its original iteration.
• In 1988, Fox got interested in making a new Planet of the Apes with Adam Rifkin (who would later write Mousehunt and Small Soldiers, among others). New executives made the project crash. Peter Jackson, Oliver Stone, Chris Columbus, Arnold Schwarzenegger and James Cameron were involved with the movie in the following years. It only took off after William Broyles, Jr. (Apollo 13, later Cast Away) wrote a script in 1999, which attracted Tim Burton, and led to the film released in 2001.
• Predators was based on a 1996 script by Robert Rodriguez. The finished film was released in 2010.
• William Goldman tried to get his book The Princess Bride made into a movie for about a decade. He had a deal with one studio, but the CEO was fired and the first thing the new guy does, according to Goldman, is to cancel all projects in progress (so the old guy doesn't get any credit if any of them are hits). He made another deal with a different studio, only to have the entire studio shut down.
• In 2014 Italian comic book author Zerocalcare mentioned that his comic book La profezia dell'Armadillo ("The Armadillo Prophecy") was being adapted into a movie. Nothing else was said again until late 2017, where the film was confirmed but seemingly without Zerocalcare's involvement. When the film actually came out in September 2018 (again without comment from Zerocalcare), it was clear why: it was a very poor adaptation that lasted a very short time in theaters and was totally forgotten afterwards.
• George Lucas began development on Red Tails in 1988, but could not get any studio to produce the film (due to studios being uneasy on an adventure film with a mostly black cast). Finally, he decided to finance the film himself and had most of it filmed between 2009 and 2010. Then the film entered post-production hell due to the many scenes of visual effects, the difficulty in finding a distributor, and the film's director being unavailable for reshoots (due to his work on the show Treme). The film was finally released in 2012.
• The Revenant, a revenge drama inspired by the legend of Hugh Glass and his tale of survival after being mauled by a bear, had been in development since 2001. In its first inception, director Park Chan-wook was originally in line to make the project with Samuel L. Jackson to star and David Rabe to write but left and the project went into limbo for a while. In 2007, a new script was written by Mark L. Smith and wound up on the Hollywood Blacklist of best unproduced scripts. In 2010, the project gained tract again with director John Hillcoat (The Proposition, the film version of The Road) and Christian Bale but after that fell through, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Leonardo DiCaprio joined the project a year later and began filming in 2014 after Iñárritu was finished with Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). After a long and much-noted Troubled Production, the film finally came out on December 25th, 2015 to box office and critical success, finally earning DiCaprio his Best Actor Oscar while Iñárritu picked up another Best Director Oscar in row after his Birdman win.
• Screen Gems announced interest in a RoboCop remake as early as 2005. MGM announced an interest in reworking the franchise three years later. Three more years later, a director (José Padilha of The Elite Squad) was hired, and another three were necessary for said remake to hit theaters.
• When Martin Scorsese is determined to make a film he follows through, no matter how many decades or how many films he makes in-between, he will eventually make his passion projects:
  • The Last Temptation of Christ was first recommended by actress Barbara Hershey (who eventually played Mary Magdalene 19 years later) to Scorsese during the making of Boxcar Bertha. Scorsese had always planned on making a film about Jesus, and initially, he even considered adapting Robert Graves' King Jesus before settling on Nikos Kazantzakis' unusual take. The Last Temptation actually entered pre-production in The '80s with Aiden Quinn as Jesus and Sting in key roles but Paramount pulled off and canceled the film. Scorsese then made After Hours and followed with The Color of Money whose box-office success he parlayed, successfully, into getting The Last Temptation of Christ off the ground by the end of the decade.
  • Gangs of New York was planned since The '70s before finally entering production in the late 90s, releasing in 2002. A good deal of his DVD Commentary on the film is devoted to explaining the arduous process. Scorsese's initial plans were considered radical and ambitious. In the 70s, he planned to make it a collaboration with The Clash, making it a punk musical starring Malcolm McDowell and Robert De Niro. In The '90s, he considered making it a trilogy. He also stated that it was his hope that the film launch a new genre, a 19th Century Urban Western, with many films set in nascent conurbations, but it didn't quite take off as he expected.
  • Silence his adaptation of Shusaku Endo's novel was planned since The '90s (after Cape Fear) and entered production in 2015 and set for a 2016 release. The film was always regarded as "uncommercial" and Scorsese has hinted in interviews that several films made in The Noughties were essentially Money, Dear Boy projects to finally give him the cash to make Silence. It was planned to be produced after The Departed with Benicio del Toro and Daniel Day-Lewis but finally had Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and Liam Neeson take over.
  • Scorsese and Mick Jagger had talked about making The Long Play in The '90s, a movie about the music business, its ups and downs. Eventually, the ideas behind it got repurposed for HBO and it became Vinyl, which has been canceled after one season.
  • The Irishman was rejected by theatrical studios for a long time due to its humoungous cost (its Digital De-Aging technology in particular) and niche market prospects. Netflix ended up financing it.
• Scream (2022). The fourth film was supposed to be the start of a new trilogy (with Kevin Williamson writing outlines for the next two films), but after it failed to make money at the domestic box office (though it did well overseas), the Weinsteins decided not to make it a top priority. However, they kept dropping hints that it was still going to happen, possibly as the conclusion to the whole franchise (since the fourth film ended on something of a cliffhanger). Williamson has said that he's not writing the fifth film, likely because of the Executive Meddling that occurred during the fourth. MTV went on to air a television adaptation with a completely different storyline and set of characters, and then the Weinsteins said there will be no fifth film. Then Wes Craven (director of all four films) died. Then the TV series itself was completely rebooted with the third season, ending its original story on a cliffhanger. A year after the TV series ended, a fifth film, simply titled Scream, was finally announced to be in development, with Williamson executive producing and the three main actors (Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courteney Cox) all returning. Filming was finished in November 2020, and it was released in 2022, after the COVID-19 pandemic delayed it by a year.
• Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, which was supposed to be released in 2008, finally came out in 2014. This caused several cases of The Other Darrin since some actors had died in the intervening years.
• Sonic the Hedgehog, based on the video game franchise, had been on and off in production since the early 1990s but it seemed that it would never be realized. The rights were first picked up by MGM, and a treatment was written and submitted to the studio before MGM and Sega got into some financial and legal problems. Eventually, MGM lost the rights and the film went into hell, only for Ben Hurst, a head writer for Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM), to negotiate the rights so that he could do a continuation of what was supposed to be the third season. This ran into problems when Ken Penders, then-head writer of the comic book series, tried to intervene and make the movie himself. It was placed in hell once again when Sega decided to place more interest in Sonic X. It seemed to finally get off the ground once more as Sony eventually bought the rights and assembled Neal Moritz and Tim Miller as producers before Sony canceled the project after placing it into turnaround due to Lone Star Funds pulling out of their financing deal with the studio and studio head Tom Rothman having no confidence with the film. Luckily, Moritz had just bailed Sony for a new first-look contract at Paramount around the time of cancellation so he and Paramount negotiated the rights away from Sony, taking much of the movie's staff with them and finally sending the movie back on track. Filming began in July 2018 and the movie finally came out on February 14, 2020.
• The rights to the remake of the 1976 movie Sparkle were bought by Whitney Houston's production company in the mid-90s, and Aaliyah was intended to be cast as the lead. However, after Aaliyah's death in a plane crash in 2001, the film was not produced. In 2005, interest in the remake started again with Raven-Symoné in talks to star. In 2011, Mara Brock Akil and Salim Akil, the producers of Jumping the Broom, took on Sparkle as their next project (with Jordin Sparks in the lead and Houston as her mother) and filming ended in November 2011. The movie was released on August 17, 2012 (sadly, Houston had passed away earlier that year).
• The Speed Racer live-action film was first announced in 1992. Four directors later and through many casting, studio, and writer changes, the film was released in May 2008.
• A Spider-Man film was released in 2002, after the filming rights jumped through several companies for 20 years: Cannon Films, which almost made a low-budget flick in the vein of Superman IV; Carolco Pictures, which even considered a screenplay by James Cameron before suffering financial and legal troubles; and MGM, which traded the rights with Columbia for the rights to Casino Royale.
• A film adaptation of Stargirl was announced in 2015. It spent years in development hell but was finished filming in 2019. However, it stayed shelved until it was greenlit for a Disney+ release in 2020.
• Star Wars:
  • The prequels only started development in 1993, 10 years after Return of the Jedi (and the first reached theaters six years later), as George Lucas felt audiences still had interest in his saga, and Jurassic Park showed effects were advanced enough to make his ideas easy to film.
  • The Sequel Trilogy was planned since 1975, as Lucas' original idea was for 9 movies (with the first filmed being the fourth). After later being abandoned and denied for several years - ultimately during production of the prequels, as Lucas stated he had no interest in continuing the story as the hexalogy provided a complete Hero's Journey for Anakin/Vader - the trilogy was brought back in 2012 after Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm. Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens was released in December 2015, Episode VIII: The Last Jedi was released in December 2017, and Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker was released in December 2019. In-between the regular chapters, Disney released Spin Offs, with Rogue One in 2016 and Solo in 2018.
• Steven Spielberg's busy schedule lead to many instances of this.
  • A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: the story that inspired it was published in 1969, Stanley Kubrick begun thinking about adapting it in the early '70s (complete with bringing the author to adapt), brought in Spielberg to the project in 1985, and many false-start announcements appeared through the '90s. Then he died in 1999, Spielberg assumed control of the project, and the film finally took off.
  • Since A.I. was mentioned, two films Spielberg considered directing at the time: Minority Report (announced as early as 1998 - postponed twice, first by A.I., then by Tom Cruise's M:I:2) and Memoirs of a Geisha (eventually released in 2005, but only produced by Spielberg).
  • The Adventures of Tintin (2011), which has a story very close to Indiana Jones: Steven Spielberg met the comic after Raiders of the Lost Ark was compared to the series, tried to make a movie but became dissatisfied and did Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade instead, and finally started motion capture (with Peter Jackson's assistance) after Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was finished.
  • Spielberg got interested in Lincoln after the writer revealed the biography Team of Rivals in 1999 and purchased the rights two years later. The book came out in 2005, and the film released in 2012.
  • The concept for the film Interstellar was first concieved in the early-to-mid 2000s by black hole physicist Kip Thorne and film producer Lynda Obst, who had been friends since Carl Sagan set them up on a blind date decades earlier. The idea attracted Spielberg and development began in 2006, but the project got sent into a spiral when Dreamworks shifted distributors from Paramount to Disney, unmooring Spielberg from the project. The film was finally released in 2014, directed by Christopher Nolan.
• For some unknown reason, there was a 14-year gap between the fourth St. Trinian's movie (The Great St. Trinian's Train Robbery, 1966) and the fifth (The Wildcats of St. Trinian's, 1980). But there's no mystery why there was a 27-year gap between Wildcats and the sixth (St Trinians, 2007); Wildcats was reportedly so dire that it's the only one not available on DVD.
• Superbad was written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg in the mid-'90s, as a way to prove that they could write a movie script. Years later, after working with Judd Apatow on the short-lived TV series Undeclared, they pitched the script to him. Originally, Seth Rogen was to play the role of Seth, and he recorded a script reading of the lines back in '02. During the early and mid-2000s, they could not find a company who wanted to distribute the film. The script also went through a few revisions, the whole idea of Seth and Evan going to separate colleges, and the emotional friendship stuff was added in a later revision. Anyway, after the success of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Apatow and Rogen pitched the script to Columbia Pictures, and they accepted it. But by this time, Rogen looked too old to play the role of Seth, so they had then-unknown Jonah Hill take the role.
• The fifth film in the Superman franchise was stuck in pre-production for nearly two decades. The first part of this was mostly the producers wanting to distance themselves from the failure of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, while the latter half was due to Executive Meddling driving director after director after director away from the project. Its proposed sequel similarly became mired in development hell, after Superman Returns' lackluster performance at the box office caused a sequel to be put on the back burner, and Bryan Singer abandoned the project to direct Valkyrie instead. When a Superman film finally came back into production, it was as a Continuity Reboot, Man of Steel, with a new cast and director Zack Snyder, producer Christopher Nolan, and writer David Goyer. The latter two were responsible for the successful reboot of the Batman franchise, incidentally... (see below)
• The 2000 film Supernova (not to be confused with any of the many other films with that title) was in development for 12 years and cost an estimated 60 million dollars. Although the theatrical version runs only 87 minutes (the director's cut is 91), reportedly several hours of completed footage exists, much of it self-contradictory due to changes made to the script during the filming stage. Both Francis Ford Coppola and H. R. Giger were involved at one point.
• The Terminator franchise post-T2:
  • Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, helped by the collapse of Carolco, complicating an already complex rights ownership situation. Rights bought in 1997, Schwarzenegger hired in 2001, the movie came out two years later.
  • Terminator Salvation, which also burned in said Development Hell during its production as well. There were seven writers of the script when you include Jonathan Nolan and the two guys who actually did the original script, and the ending was fundamentally altered after test audiences reacted negatively.
  • Terminator Genisys, helped by Salvation's production company going bankrupt. The hedge fund they owed money to became the rights holders before selling them to Megan Ellison's Annapurna Films in 2012. Ellison's brother David and others from his Skydance Productions agreed to co-produce the film, which came out three years later.
• This Means War (2012)'s initial script goes back at least a decade, with screenwriter Larry Doyle claiming he read an early draft of the script in 1998. Seth Rogen, Bradley Cooper, Sam Worthington, Chris Rock, and Martin Lawrence all declined roles in the film. It was finally released in 2012 starring Tom Hardy, Chris Pine and Reese Witherspoon.
• Trick 'r Treat went through post-production hell. It was supposed to have been released in 2007, but was eventually released in October of 2009 on DVD. Some saw this as a punishment to Bryan Singer from Warner Bros. who was disappointed with Superman Returns.
• Due to several directors dropping in and out in the course of making the film, the movie adaptation of Uncharted had percolating in various forms for over a decade. The film spent most of 2019 picking up steam with full casting for a shoot that Fall when the director, Travis Knight, had to drop out due to his and star Tom Holland's clashing schedules. They found another director, Rueben Fleischer, and cameras were supposed to start rolling in Spring 2020 with the cast and crew assembled in Berlin. Then everyone got sent home and production was shut down until July due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Production wrapped on October 29 that year, and Uncharted hit theaters in February 11, 2022.
• V for Vendetta and 'Watchmen were both announced as films in the mid-1980s and were mired in development hell well into the 2000s, due to budgetary concerns, the difficulty of finding suitable directors, and Alan Moore's complete unwillingness to participate in adaptations of his graphic novels. V for Vendetta eventually saw release in 2006, and Watchmen'' was released in 2009. Both these films seem to have come to fruition due mainly to the enormous clout of The Wachowskis and Zack Snyder.
• The planned Warcraft film adaptation has been mired in development problems for years. The rights to the franchise were acquired by Legendary in 2006, and Blizzard brought on Sam Raimi to direct. According to interviews, the first script (which was written by Blizzard's in-house writers) didn't go over well with Raimi, and a second script (written by Raimi and screenwriter Robert Rodat) wasn't accepted by Blizzard, who wanted the story to go a different way. After months of back-and-forth, Raimi walked from the project, blaming mismanagement on Blizzard's part. As of early 2013, Legendary announced that Duncan Jones (Moon) became attached to direct and it all became smooth, yet also painfully slow, sailing. The Warcraft film was finally released in June 2016.
• The Warrior's Way was meant to come out early 2008... almost 3 years later it finally found itself in cinemas.
• Woody Allen wrote the screenplay of Whatever Works in the 1970s, with Zero Mostel in mind for the main role. After Mostel died in 1977, Allen shelved the project for more than thirty years. The film was eventually released in 2009, starring Larry David.
• The film adaptation of the Whiteout comic book finally got released in 2009 after having been announced nearly 10 years ago.
• When We Were Kings, an American documentary film about the "Rumble in the Jungle" heavyweight championship boxing match that took place 1974, took its director Leon Gast 22 years to edit and finance before it was finally released in 1996. Critics overwhelmingly felt it was worth the wait though and it also took in the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature of 1996.
• Tom Clancy's Without Remorse had its filming rights bought shortly after its 1993 release by Savoy Pictures, who couldn't get the project done by its bankruptcy four years later. Paramount, who repeatedly adapted Clancy's Jack Ryan, eventually got the project but couldn't get it off the ground until Michael B. Jordan got attached to Without Remorse in 2018, and the film adaptation hit Prime Video in 2021.
• The Wolfman (2010) was planned out and was to be directed by Mark Romanek (of One Hour Photo fame), but he left due to not being able to make changes during the writer's strike at the time. Joe Johnston took over and shot the film in spring/summer of 2008 for a fall 2008 release, but was held back until 2010 due to re-shoots by demand of the studio.
• The X-Files: I Want to Believe suffered a similar ordeal but in a smaller scale and shorter time period.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Throughout 1989 and 1990, Stan Lee and Chris Claremont were in discussions with James Cameron and Carolco Pictures for an X-Men film adaptation. The deal fell apart when Cameron went to work on Spider-Man, Carolco went bankrupt, and the film rights reverted to Marvel Studios. In December 1992, Marvel discussed selling the property to Columbia Pictures to no avail. Meanwhile, Avi Arad produced X-Men: The Animated Series for Fox Kids. 20th Century Fox was impressed by the success of the TV show, and producer Lauren Shuler Donner purchased the film rights for them in 1994. The film went through a number of scripts and actor and director changes and was eventually released in July 2000, starting a long-running film series and spawning a reemergence of superhero films.
  • The Deadpool (2016) movie was announced as far back as 2000; when 20th Century Fox got their hands on the project, they originally planned it as a spin-off of X-Men Origins: Wolverine with Ryan Reynolds reprising his role as the title character. The overwhelmingly negative reception to Origins nipped these plans in the bud, and though various screenplays still floated around, it wasn't until 2014 that Fox finally gave the project the green light (thanks primarily to the overwhelmingly positive response to some leaked test footage which had been sitting on a shelf since 2012), with the film finally released on February 2016 to enormous success. And in case you're wondering, no, the final film is not connected to Origins in any way (besides taking multiple potshots at it); it helps that X-Men: Days of Future Past gave Deadpool (2016) a major out by outright retconning Origins out of the X-Men Film Series movie canon.+

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