What Could Have Been / Unsorted Film

Films with pages

• Sonic the Hedgehog includes information about Sonic the Hedgehog (2020).
• Pokémon includes information on the live-action Pokémon movies.

Examples without pages

• The Addams Family:
  • Ophelia was going to have a brief scene at some point.
  • Tim Burton was slated to direct before he bailed due to conflicts with Batman Returns.
  • Cher strongly lobbied for the role of Morticia, but was ultimately turned down. The studio almost cast Kim Basinger as the role until she left to work on Cool World.
  • There are some accounts that claim Orion Pictures executives wanted Anthony Hopkins to play Uncle Fester, instead of Christopher Lloyd in the finished product, but Hopkins declined and wanted to work on another Orion project. What was that project? Just something about a deranged psychiatrist and cannibal. This was before Orion had to bail on Addams and ship it to Paramount due to the studio's then-ongoing financial meltdown.
  • In a 2012 interview with Vulture, Barry Sonnenfeld stated that his original vision for the film revealed that Gordon Craven wasn't supposed to have been Fester all along, but still an imposter, though the family would've accepted him as Fester anyway, as, in Sonnenfeld's words, "...family wasn't about blood, it was about love." The main cast, especially Anjelica Huston and Raúl Juliá; (who played Morticia and Gomez, respectively), rebelled against the idea (though weirdly, Christopher Lloyd was neutral about it), and in the end, the cast chose ten-year-old Christina Ricci to convince Sonnenfeld to change the ending.
  • The 'Mamushka' dance sequence was originally intended to be much longer, but complaints from test audiences over its length led to it getting trimmed down.
  • When the sequel Addams Family Values received a more positive reaction compared to the first film despite vastly under-performing at the box office, Paramount wanted to produce a third movie, thus making the series a trilogy. The third film was shelved when Raúl Juliá's health went into decline, and it eventually died with him since no one could match his spot-on portrayal of Gomez.
• American Sniper originally had more details regarding the enemy sniper in the film, but it was scrapped due to budget concerns.
• Arrival: The aliens were originally going to resemble enormous floating blue flowers.
• Barbarella:
  • Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren turned down the title role.
  • Ian McKellen auditioned for an unknown part.
• Battle Royale initially had planned for the role of Yoshitoki Kuninobu to be played by Kyo from Japanese visual-kei-cum-avant-garde-metal band Dir en grey, but the role ultimately went to Yukihiro Kotani after the band's management forbade Kyo from accepting the role.
• Ben-Hur (1959): Kirk Douglas was offered the role of antagonist Messala, but he turned it down, not wanting to play a "second-rate baddie". He wanted to play Ben, but that role was already promised to Charlton Heston. The role of Messala went to Stephen Boyd, who won the Best Supporing Actor Oscar for his performance. Douglas ended up making "his own" Ben Hur; partnering with Stanley Kubrick to make Spartacus.
• The Blue Lagoon (1949):
  • Ramón Novarro and Louise Brooks were to be the cousins in the original casting plans, according to producer Herbert Wilcox's 1929 outline.
  • When Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder took over the project in 1938, the lead roles were offered to Margaret Lockwood and Michael Redgrave.
  • When the project was restarted in late 1944, the female lead was given to Shirley Temple. It was only after the first screening of Great Expectations when J. Arthur Rank suggested Jean Simmons as Emmeline to Gilliat and Launder.
• The Blue Lagoon (1980):
  • Cliff Richard and Hayley Mills were envisioned as the cousins after producer Walter Mirisch acquired the rights in the 1960s.
  • When producer Ray Stark and Columbia Pictures took over the rights from Mirisch in the early 1970s, the cousins were to be played by Kurt Russell and Susan Dey. Linda Hayden was also considered for Emmeline.
  • The role of Emmeline was offered to Melissa Sue Anderson (Mary Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie). She was looking to break free of her Little House goody-goody image, but was put off by the amount of nudity the role demanded, so passed. She did soon get her "grittier" role via Happy Birthday to Me.
• The Showtime television film Body Bags was originally intended to serve as a Pilot Movie for a Body Bags television series that would've served as competition for Tales from the Crypt. The final film instead became a standalone horror anthology because Showtime changed their minds about making it a television show once filming began.
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Steve McQueen and Warren Beatty were both offered the role of Sundance. Beatty turned it down, feeling it was too similar to Bonnie and Clyde. McQueen walked away because he refused to accept second billing to Paul Newman.
• Captain Planet and the Planeteers was going to have a 1996 film adaptation titled Planet, revised as Planet or Dark Planet. There was also going to be a 2008 Captain Planet film produced by Warner Bros.
  • 20 years after the show was canceled, the live-action film may be going back into production. The rights are being picked up by Paramount from Turner/Warner Bros., and their choice of producer? None other than noted environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio. Really.
• Cecil B. DeMille's 1949 smash hit Samson and Delilah was originally meant to star Burt Lancaster as Samson, but he declined due to a bad back. DeMille then tried to get a young unknown bodybuilder named Steve Reeves picked up for the role of Samson and came very close to getting him, but both DeMille and the studio were afraid that Reeves was "too muscular" to be attractive to mainstream audiences and begged him to lose weight, assuring him that he would still look as muscular on film as he did in any of his bodybuilding photos due to the old "camera adds ten pounds" thinking (keep in mind that this was back when most people thought smoking was healthier than exercise). Reeves ultimately rebelled and Victor Mature was cast as Samson, whom DeMille grew to dislike because Mature was ultimately found not to be the tough guy he played in the movies. Roughly a decade later Reeves found fame in the B-movie circuit with his portrayal of Hercules in the Italian sword and sandal genre.
• Stanley Kubrick's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. Kubrick actually wanted Spielberg to direct the film. Ironically, both directors envied each other's film styles. Kubrick tried to emulate Spielberg's style while working on AI (hence why certain elements in it seem unusual for a Kubrick film), only for Spielberg to emulate Kubrick's style when finishing the film after Kubrick's death. One wonders what the film would've been like if Kubrick hadn't tried to emulate Spielberg, or if Spielberg accepted Kubrick's offer to direct.
• Sergio Leone had several unmade films:
  • A Place Only Mary Knows: An "Americanized" western co-written with Luca Morsella, and Fabio Toncelli and speculated to be his last western, it would have starred Richard Gere and Mickey Rourke. Set during the height of the American Civil War, the story focused on a Union drafter, Mike Kutcher from Georgia, whose job is to enroll men into the Union army. The other is Richard Burns, a Southern shady businessman transplanted to the North after a successful heist with his ex-lover and partner, Mary. Searching for the buried treasure left behind in an unmarked grave outside Atlanta in “A Place Only Mary Knows”. Joined by a freed slave and an Italian immigrant, Francesco, who arrives via the port of Boston, they try desperately to avoid the battles of the ongoing war between the states.
  • A contemporary adaptation of Don Quixote starring Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach. He had discussed doing the project throughout the 1960s-1970s, and he started seriously considering it towards the end of his life.
  • He was an avid fan of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind and the 1939 film adaptation. His relatives and close friends stated that he talked about filming a remake that was closer to the original novel, but it never advanced beyond discussions to any serious form of production.
  • He was a fan of Louis-Ferdinand Céline's novel Journey to the End of the Night and was considering a film adaptation in the late 1960s; he incorporated elements of the story into The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and A Fistful of Dynamite but his idea of adapting the novel itself never got past the planning stages.
  • He started writing a screenplay based on The Phantom, and scouted locations for the project. Despite this, he never got to make a movie based on the comic book hero. He declared he would have liked to follow this with a movie based on another Lee Falk-created character, Mandrake the Magician.
  • Leningrad: The 900 Days: A war epic based on Harrison Salisbury's non-fiction book The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad. The film would have opened In Medias Res as the camera goes from focusing on a Russian hiding from the Nazis' artillery fire to panning hundreds of feet away to show the German Panzer divisions approaching the walls of the city. The plot was to focus on an American photographer on assignment (whom Leone wanted to be played by Robert De Niro) becoming trapped in Russia as the German Luftwaffe begin to bombard the city. Throughout the course of the film, he becomes romantically involved with a Russian woman, whom he later impregnates, as they attempt to survive the prolonged siege and the secret police, because relationships with foreigners are forbidden. According to Leone, "In the end, the cameraman dies on the day of the liberation of the city, when he is currently filming the surrender of the Germans. And the girl is aware of his death by chance seeing a movie news: the camera sees it explode under a shell .... "
    By 1989, Leone set the film's budget at $100 million, and had secured half of that amount in financing from independent backers from the Soviet Union. He had convinced Ennio Morricone to compose the film score, and Tonino Delli Colli was tapped to be the cinematographer. Shooting was scheduled to begin sometime in 1990. The project was cancelled when Leone died two days before he was to officially sign on for the film. Alex Cox offered to replace Leone as director, but was unable to secure the remaining $50 million required to produce the film.
• Beetlejuice was originally a very serious horror film titled The Maitlands with Beetlejuice himself as a shapeshifting reptilian winged monster who transformed into a small Middle Eastern man. That all changed once Tim Burton and Michael Keaton came along. It was still a horror film, but now it had elements of Black Comedy in it.
• Before Dungeons & Dragons (2000), Gary Gygax attempted to pitch a Dungeons & Dragons movie. Lorraine Williams had also planned on creating a Dungeons & Dragons movie.
• Spy Hunter: Nowhere to Run was going to be a movie franchise based on the game series starring Dwayne Johnson. Thanks to Development Hell the movie died though a Video Game tie-in starring Johnson did not and was released without the movie.
• Salvador Dalí was a big fan of the Marx Brothers, and was particularly fascinated with Harpo for his surrealist charms. After contacting the Bros., Dalí started making plans for a surrealist film starring them, with a big focus on Harpo, Giraffes on Horseback Salda. The film would have taken place at a dinner party with enormous giraffe lanterns looming overhead. It obviously never got made. That doesn't just sound like a good and possibly insane film. That sounds like the greatest film ever made.
• Years prior to her debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was a solo Black Widow film that almost happened. A script was written up by David Hayter before the failures of Catwoman (2004) and Elektra led the executives to conclude that there wasn't an audience for female superhero movies. For a while it looked like the popularity of Scarlett Johansson's portrayal of Black Widow would lead to the film being Saved from Development Hell, but this turned out to be false. Instead, Captain Marvel became the MCU's first female headliner. Black Widow would have to wait until 2021.
• Peter Ustinov was originally going to play Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther (1963), but left over a salary dispute.
• Michael Moorcock has mentioned that, if it weren't for a timely intervention by his lawyers, his famous Evil Weapon Stormbringer might've appeared unauthorised in Red Sonja.
• In A Hard Day's Night, Ringo Starr's parading was originally supposed to have a lot more dialogue. But Ringo came in too drunk to remember lines. This was probably to the greater benefit of the film. Additionally, there was a scene with Paul and a young actress rehearsing her lines in a rather enthusiastic way. The special edition DVD has stills from the scene and an interview with the actress who played the actress.
• Help! included a deleted scene with Frankie Howerd and Wendy Richard. Magical Mystery Tour was to include an accordionist scene, a scene with the one of the buskers (Happy Nat, the Rubber Man) racing around a swimming pool (a scene directed by John Lennon), a scene with the Beatles looking through a telescope, and one where they are passing candy to the bus riders. Also, Traffic and the Jimi Hendrix Experience were to have had their own musical sequences.
  • To elaborate on the Help! example, the scene had the Beatles going to "The Sam Ahab School of Transcendental Elocution", where they are given acting lessons by Sam Ahab (Frankie Howerd). Wendy Richard plays the only other student there, a woman called "Lady Macbeth". Her "transcendental" practices (which are apparently quite noisy) cause George to put in a pair of earplugs. Not long after, the cult plays their hypnotic music which puts everyone except for George (because of the earplugs) into a trance. The cult members try to chop off Ringo's hand to get the ring and George intervenes, which leads to the cult priest tossing an axe which is embedded in a mirror. The cult runs away as everyone starts to wake up and no one believes George. They see the axe in the mirror and John pulls it out, hands it to Lady Macbeth, and asks her "is this a chopper that you see before you?" This explains why the Beatles later know to plug their ears for the cult's music and why George later identifies the cult priest in the Indian restaurant as "the guy who tried to chop [Ringo's] hand off". Incidentally, there were several other deleted scenes for Help! - one in which it is shown that Ringo keeps a live cow in his closet for fresh milk, one which had the Beatles driving around in a quarry, and one which had the last Beatle impersonating Ringo while in a tree house.
• Silver Surfer:
  • In the early 80s, producer Lee Kramer approached Marvel about making a Silver Surfer movie, which would've co-starred Olivia Newton-John as the Surfer's love interest. Envisioned as an epic in the vein of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the film was planned to have an operatic rock soundtrack with 1000 guitars, and Kramer approached Paul McCartney (a massive comic fan) to write music for the project. Due to the Fantastic Four's movie rights belonging to Constantin Films, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby collaborated on a graphic novel called Silver Surfer: The Ultimate Cosmic Experience, a new standalone origin story for the character that was planned to be used as the basis for the film. Despite concept art being created and McCartney expressing interest, the film never got off the ground.
  • Quentin Tarantino approached Constantin Films about making the movie, but was turned down.
  • In 1991, a group of film students finished a short film starring the character, which used then-revolutionary CGI effects. Despite massive interest from various studios and Oliver Stone contacting the students about adapting the short as a feature, the project ended up in limbo.
  • John Turman wrote a screenplay, which featured the Surfer coming to Earth ahead of Galactus' arrival and encountering various quirky human characters, including Alicia Masters. The Surfer ends up stripped of his powers after an encounter with an evil military general, but eventually regains them and is convinced to turn against Galactus by Alicia.
  • In 1999, 20th Century Fox approached a still-unknown James Gunn to write a Silver Surfer treatment. He turned down the project in favor of a Spy vs. Spy film, which also never got made.
  • Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer was supposed to lead to a Silver Surfer spin-off, as well as a third Fantastic Four movie, which would've reportedly featured the Black Panther. In interviews at the time, director Tim Story expressed interest in casting Djimon Hounsou as Black Panther. J. Michael Straczynski was brought in to write the Silver Surfer movie, which would've been both a sequel and an origin story, and would've featured Galactus in his iconic humanoid form instead of as a sentient cloud. The underwhelming performance of Rise of the Silver Surfer ultimately ended up killing both projects.
• Writer and director Dan Gordon conceived Surf Ninjas as a straight action adventure film in the vein of Indiana Jones, just with teenage protagonists. After he was fired over a disagreement about a casting choice, the project was rewritten into a goofy comedy. However, some of the darker elements (particularly concerning the villain) survived, causing serious Mood Whiplash.
• Paul McCartney:
  • He has stated that Franco Zeffirelli offered him the role of Romeo for his 1968 Romeo and Juliet.
  • He was also asked to play Billy Shears in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a role that went to a rather unlucky Peter Frampton when Paul wanted nothing to do with the movie.
• Cases of What Actually Was referencing What Could Have Been:
  • Snake Eyes's epilogue has Nic Cage saying (not verbatim): "I keep having nightmares about that water-logged tunnel, where I drown." Cage was supposed to chase Gary Sinise through various obstacles, including a water-logged tunnel, before Sinise was run over by a large globe that had fallen off a building during a storm. Test audiences didn't like it, so the chase was cut down, the globe gets pushed off course by a wave, and Sinise kills himself.
  • While The Goonies recount their adventure to their parents, they mention an encounter with a giant squid that was cut from the finished film. The scene was shot, and it appears on the DVD release under "deleted scenes" (it has also occasionally been reinserted in some televised presentations). Data manages to fend it off with his walkman. Another deleted scene had Andi being given the Goonie Initiation, which ended with them realizing that they were in a pool filled with leeches. Data saves them by dropping a battery or something.
• The original script of The Lost World: Jurassic Park did not feature the part where the T. rex is brought to San Diego. It instead ended with the characters being rescued from the island and featured Roland Tembo actually getting to use his high-caliber rifle to blow a raptor's head off, as well as a scene with pteranodons that was very similar to the one used in the end of the third movie.
  • The original script of the first Jurassic Park movie followed the plot of the book much more closely, but it was found to be far too long (the total length of the movie would've been close to three hours) so they made a shorter version.
    • The original script was also closer to the bleaker tone of the novel, and ended with John Hammond committing suicide. Which, even though he was actually a bad guy in that version of the story, wasn't exactly the note that Spielberg wanted to end the film on (he wanted it to have a less dark tone, due to having to direct it and Schindler's List back-to-back).
    • The rotunda climax was also in limbo for quite a long while. There were a few endings proposed, including Grant shoving a raptor into the jaws of the T-rex skeleton from a mobile crane, Grant crushing the raptors with the skeletons, etc. There was even one ending that included Hammand shooting the raptors himself.
    • At one point there was talk of eliminating Ian Malcolm from the film and rolling some of his character traits into Alan Grant, much as they did with Ed Regis getting merged into Gennero. This would have resulted in a cocky, more joking Alan.
    • In a related issue, the T. rex's attack on the Jeep originally didn't have Malcolm use a flare to distract the dinosaur so Grant could rescue the kids; Malcolm would have fled much the way Gennero just had. Jeff Goldblum suggested to Spielberg that having Malcolm risk his life would be more interesting.
  • Jurassic Park III was going to be about a group of teenagers trapped on the island (apparently scrapped for being like an episode of Friends — with dinosaurs!) The movie was going to have a climactic battle between the spinosaurus and either raptors or the army, but neither made it to the final film.
  • John Sayles' script for Jurassic Park 4 had been lingering in Development Hell since 2004. Judging by script reviews, it's not hard to see why. The film would start with a Pterosaur attack at a Little League game somewhere in the U.S., which is the latest in an ever-growing series of attacks across Central America and Mexico. The United Nations sends an unemployed soldier-of-fortune named Nick Harris (David Boreanaz was rumored to be interested in the character) to Isla Nublar to retrieve the dinosaur DNA samples stolen by Dennis Nedry. Nick is captured by a top-secret corporation after he retrieves and hides the samples, and he is brought to a medieval castle in Switzerland. And at that castle, he is tasked by the head of the corporation to train a group of genetically enhanced humanoid 'raptor soldiers.
    • And here's leaked concept art of those "raptor soldiers" http://imgur.com/a/gsVLI
  • At least twice has a moment wherein Pteranodons attack and bring down a helicopter been cut from Jurassic Park films. They finally got to use it in Jurassic World though.
  • Speaking of Jurassic World, there were supposed to be human-dinosaur hybrids in the movie, with the in-universe explaanation that they were created because they were more obedient and had better problem-solving skills.
• A Leisure Suit Larry film was considered when Al Lowe demonstrated the first game.
• In the Austin Powers series, the fight with Random Task in the first movie originally took place during the countdown of Project Vulcan, ending with a parody of OddJob's death scene from Goldfinger (where Austin threw a Big Gulp at Random Task's feet, and electrical currents travel through his wet sock and zapped him to death). In the second movie, the scene introducing Felicity Shagwell was different, and preceded by an Overly Long Gag where an assassin nods to someone, who in turn nods to someone else, and it goes on until the assassin finally gets nodded back and proceeds with his mission to kill Austin. Not to mention that Fat Bastard's dialogue was constantly censored. There was even going to be a scene featuring the Guru Pitka from The Love Guru.
• The Cat in the Hat:
  • The original draft for the film was said to be much more faithful to its source material, but executives at Dream Workss KG and Universal decided to give the movie a more modern approach, likely in response to the box office success of Universal's How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, another Dr. Seuss work. The studios hired several former writers of Seinfeld to rewrite the script, and at that point, we all knew what was coming.
  • Randy Newman submitted several songs in a bid to be the film's composer, but the producers disliked his music and instead hired Randy's cousin, David, to compose the score.
  • The title role initially went to Tim Allen, despite Allen admitting that he hated the character as a child. Because of screenplay issues and Allen's previous commitment to The Santa Clause 2, which was going through rewrites of its own, he was let go from the movie. A replacement wouldn't come until several months later, when Mike Myers, a longtime fan of Dr. Seuss, decided to take up the role, though he also had legal issues that would've forced him to do the movie anyway.
  • Director Bo Welch stated that the kid who smacked the Cat's crotch with a pinata bat (named "Dumb Schweitzer" in the script) was to have a bigger, unspecified role in the movie than being a One-Scene Wonder.
  • There are a number of scenes that were deleted from the final film, for various reasons (i.e. keeping the film's PG rating, lack of humor, Executive Meddling and so on). Most of these scenes were shot and can be found on the DVD release. Some examples include:
    • An extended sequence exists where the cat physically examines Sally and Conrad before pulling out the Phunometer.
    • An additional verse of "Fun, Fun, Fun" had the Cat talk about a Know-Nothing Know-It-All and making another Last-Second Word Swap in the end. This was included in the film's soundtrack.
    • After the kids sign the Cat's contract, the Cat ends up running into the Waldens' dog, Nevins. The Cat suddenly panics and jumps into Conrad's arms, exclaiming "A monster! He's gonna murder-lize me!" only for the kids to calm him down and introduce him to the dog proper.
    • The Fish attempting to contact Joan while the Things are wrecking the house. Joan can be seen playing a Game Boy Advance (the same one Conrad played in the beginning of the film) while calling the Fish, not aware of who's calling.
    • After Nevins escapes and both the kids and the Cat go after him, the Cat begins to bounce around in the backyard, then stretches out his arm to close the door. The bit where the Cat closes the door was reversed and utilized in a TV spot.
    • The sequence where the kids and Cat search for Nevins (right before the piñata scene) is much longer, where the Cat and the kids would jump over multiple fences and go down a stream, with the Cat in the latter scenario sitting on a beach chair showing the same picture of Joan Walden that had aroused him earlier in the movie to the audience. The infamous "Dirty hoe!" remark by the Cat is not in this cut.
    • Instead of Larry going straight to Joan's office with an escaped Nevins, he finds his repossessed TV at a store and attempts to cut a deal with the store owner. He leaves Nevins behind by tying him up with a television set plug and throwing him in one of the sets. The kids and the Cat would rescue Nevins here. Additionally, the Cat would disguise himself as a floor mat when the store owner and Larry talk about the deal, and goes through numerous pains such as having a cigarette put on his fur and being stomped on by a group of children before choosing to bail when a man jumping on a pogo stick approaches.
    • An extended sequence at the dance club where Conrad and Sally stop for a moment to watch the Cat dance with Paris Hilton, before Larry comes in, finds the crew and pounces the Cat. Larry accidentally shoves into Hilton, who exclaims "Dude, you must chill!" There's also no talk about the Cat losing his hat at the club (which he never lost to begin with). Perhaps the most infamous part of this scene (and may very well be the reason why it was cut) is when Conrad looks behind him to see his mother's office.
      Conrad: "I think that might be Mom's office."
      Sally: *looks sarcastically at audience* "Ya think?!"
    • Initially, the Things were to distract Joan from reaching the house by creating a flood, instead of disguising as police officers in the final cut. Several ideas on how to create a flood were tossed around, such as blowing up a dam, putting a pill that creates floods in a water bottle, and more bizarrely, drinking hundreds, if not thousands, of water bottles before urinating it all out. All three scenarios were shot but scrapped before the film went to post-production.
    • After being sent out of the Walden household, Larry find Nevins the dog and is about to kick him, only to be attacked by a larger dog nearby and chased off, though not before said dog rips his pants off.
    • Sally makes amends with all her friends she alienated in the past at the business party for Joan's employer, offering them her cupcakes. Dumb Schweitzer appears again and puts a finger over a candle, yelling in a deadpan voice "Ow, hot." In the final film, the friends can be seen in the background during the party, suggesting that this scene is canon.
  • Before the film was released, there was already talk of a sequel based off The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, published a year after the original book, in the works, confirmed by Mike Myers himself. However, the film's critical failure, dismal box office performance, and a mandate by the widow of Dr. Seuss that barred any future live-action films based off Dr. Seuss' works prevented the sequel from ever going forward. What it would have been like is forever a mystery as a script was never written.
• The Wicker Man (1973) and The Wicker Tree were planned to be followed by Wrath of the Gods, making a Wicker Man trilogy.
• The Wizard of Oz underwent about a dozen script drafts and four writers. Early on, the Cowardly Lion was in fact the cursed form of a handsome prince named Florizel (which is the name of the Prince in the Sleeping Beauty fairytale), who would battle the Witch in midair and kill her by cutting apart her broom while Dorothy watched from the sidelines. A female soda jerk was going to accompany Dorothy from Kansas at one point (again, ?!?). Elements from the books floated in and out of the script, and about three characters each served as Professor Marvel's and the Wicked Witch's sounding boards (eventually Professor Marvel talked to his horse and the Witch to the leader of the winged monkeys). One element, however, was in the very first draft and never changed: Kansas in sepia, Oz in Technicolor.
  • A number of MGM executives wanted Judy Garland to wear a blonde wig and "baby doll" makeup, when they weren't considering casting Shirley Temple as Dorothy. The makeup went long past the screen-test stage: it was used for the first several weeks of filming, under the direction of the film's original director, Richard Thorpe. When Buddy Ebsen had to leave the production due to illness (another What Could Have Been: Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies initially played the Tin Man), the producers took the opportunity to sack Thorpe and retool a number of aspects of the production, including Judy Garland's appearance and performance.
    • Ebsen was first cast as the Scarecrow and Ray Bolger as the Tin Man, then the roles were swapped.
  • One early script had Aunt Em as the abusive witch who wanted to kill Toto to punish Dorothy!
  • The best-known deleted idea is perhaps the least interesting out of all of these: Scarecrow's Jitterbug Dance. Strange in that, in the final version of the film, the Witch makes reference to "sending a little insect" to infect Dorothy's friends, which never happens due to the scene and ensuing song-and-dance number being cut. (In later stage versions, "The Jitterbug" was restored. The Witch sends the Jitterbug to wear out Dorothy and her friends — because when the Jitterbug gets you, you can't stop dancing — so it will be easier for the flying monkeys to kidnap them.)
  • A "What almost wasn't" was "Over The Rainbow", which was almost cut because the execs weren't sure about the heroine singing in a farmyard. Fortunately, good judgment prevailed and it stayed.
  • There was also an extra scene back in Kansas at the end of the film which got cut. In it, Hunk (the 'real-life' counterpart to the Scarecrow) was going away to agricultural college and Dorothy was promising to write to him. It basically indicated that the slight romantic vibe some viewers picked up between Dorothy and the Scarecrow had a factual basis.
  • Also, the Wicked Witch was going to be a glamourous Femme Fatale villainess not unlike the Queen in Disney's Snow White, but that idea was scrapped and she became a traditional "old hag" style witch, which caused Gale Sondergaard to quit the part, because she refused to wear the "ugly" makeup.
  • In a bizarre spin on Viewers Are Geniuses, the screenplay called for the final shot to be camera panning down to reveal Dorothy was still wearing the ruby slippers, but the studio believed that audiences were too sophisticated to find the Real After All twist believable.
  • The ruby slippers were initially silver shoes, like in the book, but ruby looked better in Technicolor. The De La Soul music video for their song "Oooh" (off their AOI: Mosaic Thump album) references this when the Dorothy expy is fitted with silver platform heels instead of ruby slippers. It's also a bit of Genius Bonus, as more people are familiar with Dorothy and the ruby slippers, but not the silver ones from the original book.
  • Besides "The Jitterbug" being completely cut, other songs were trimmed. "Lions and tigers and bears (oh my!)" was a song rather than just a chant. The lion's "If I Only Had The Nerve" was longer and the Scarecrow had a long dance sequence in "If I Only Had a Brain". The Scarecrow's sequence still exists and appeared in both 1984's That's Dancing and on the 1989 50th anniversary release (and later laserdisc and DVD releases) as a supplement. In general, the film's music underwent more changes because of a change in the musical director partway through production.
• Blade Runner:
  • The script went through umpteen quite different revisions. The earliest revision around has the climax in which Batty rescues Deckard missing in favor of having the antagonist killed in a slight Rasputinian Death before Deckard saves himself, and then ends up killing Rachael after a scene resembling the theatrical ending.
  • It bears mentioning that Robert Mitchum was the original choice to play Deckard, and when it became clear that he was not going to be involved, Dustin Hoffman became the frontrunner. A number of other actors were considered, including Nick Nolte and, possibly, Al Pacino.
  • Deckard was originally going to be portrayed as super-desperate when he faced Roy, feeling so cornered that he was willing to do anything - even give Roy oral. Ridley Scott chose to portray Deckard as defiant.
• It's not known what the context is, but there is no doubt that the executive letter to Nicholas Ray proscribing a kiss between Jim Stark and Plato is genuine. Given the release date of Rebel Without a Cause, What Could Have Been in this case could have significantly changed the course of gay rights...
• Alejandro Jodorowsky's 14-hour Dune movie would have been... different...
• The Matrix:
  • In The Art of The Matrix, storyboard artist Steve Skroce reveals that many action scenes had to be cut or toned down to fit the budget.
  • The humans in the Matrix were originally intended to have their brains used as parts of a computer network, rather than being used as living batteries. The concept was changed due to the Powers that Be underestimating the viewers' intelligence.
  • To be honest, the film makes a LOT more sense if you assume that was actually the case and the human resistance was just stupid/misinformed/wrong. Scientific impossibility of using humans as a power source when the energy that comes out can never be worth more than the energy going in as food, for a start.
  • That's just cake compared to some of the other changes. The Wachowskis originally envisioned that a prequel would follow the first film, and this probably would have been akin to The Animatrix. The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were originally conceived as one long movie (which explains a lot, frankly; the two films make a hell of a lot more sense if you watch them back to back and ignore such filler as the Zion Rave and Never-Ending Car Chase), and would have been the first film's one sequel. Lastly, Will Smith was considered for the role of Neo, Gary Oldman was thought of for Morpheus, and Sean Connery was meant to play the Architect.
    • Will Smith actually passed on The Matrix to play Jim West in Wild Wild West. He called that choice the biggest mistake of his career.
    • Speaking of, Sean Connery has his own personal What Could Have Been: he said "no" to being in Matrix, but he also said "no" to starring in The Lord of the Rings. Realizing he should probably sign on to a fantastic film series while the gettin' was good, he vowed to star in whatever opportunity came up next — and wound up saying "okay" to the infamous The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen...
  • While a 1996 draft of the script was fairly close to the final film, there were several changes that border on Narm territory:
    • Smith yells, "Nooo!" twice.
    • Trinity's "Dodge This" line was originally, "Dodge this, motherf***er!"
    • The climactic scene of Neo returning to life originally had him getting up, then giving the finger to Smith, who helplessly yells, "Nooooo!" as the elevator doors close.
  • There was originally going to be a scene where Trinity contacted Neo in a 90's chat room - naturally, it would have been full of trolls. At one point, Neo would have remarked that "F***in' idiots don't know s**t."
• Try finding a His Dark Materials fan who isn't the least bit curious as to what the Tom Stoppard scripted version would have been like...or the unedited version of the final script, which was much longer. Especially the original ending, which was unceremoniously lopped off and will likely never be seen. The best people get is what is cobbled together on YouTube.
• Home Alone:
  • According to Chris Columbus, and early promotion posters, the original music score was to be composed by Bruce Broughton, who ultimately got caught up with scoring The Rescuers Down Under, and was unavailable to score this film.
  • Columbus envisioned a scene in which the furnace came to life, gets up on all fours and chases Kevin to the stairs. The scene would have cost over a million dollars, so it was trimmed down to the furnace simply lighting up, and groaning Kevin's name.
  • Tim Allen, Dan Aykroyd, James Belushi, Chevy Chase, Kevin Costner, Michael Douglas, Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, John Goodman, Charles Grodin, Tom Hanks, Mark Linn-Baker, Christopher Lloyd, Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, Bill Murray, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, Dennis Quaid, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Martin Sheen, Tom Skerritt, Sylvester Stallone, Alan Thicke, John Travolta, Robin Williams, and Bruce Willis were considered for Peter McCallister.
  • Kirstie Alley^note  She was busy with Look Whos Talking Too, Stockard Channing, Glenn Close, Jamie Lee Curtis, Geena Davis, Laura Dern, Carrie Fisher, Jodie Foster, Jennifer Grey, Linda Hamilton, Madonna, Daryl Hannah, Marilu Henner, Holly Hunter, Helen Hunt, Anjelica Huston, Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, Maureen McCormick, Kelly McGillis, Bette Midler, Michelle Pfeiffer, Annie Potts, Ally Sheedy, Sharon Stone, Sigourney Weaver and Debra Winger were all considered for Kate McCallister.
  • Harry was written with Robert De Niro in mind. Rowan Atkinson, Phil Collins, Danny DeVito, Bob Hoskins, Jon Lovitz and Dudley Moore were also considered for the role.
  • Uncle Frank was written with Kelsey Grammer in mind.
  • Michael Richards was considered for Marv.
  • Chris Farley auditioned for Santa Claus. This idea became this basis for his iconic "Motivational Santa" sketch for Saturday Night Live.
• Michael Jackson as Jareth in Labyrinth. Jim Henson — The Biography reveals that the original conception of Jareth was simply as another special-effects creation, rather than someone to be played by a real actor. When that changed, Simon MacCorkindale and Kevin Kline were initially considered for the part. Once the creators decided a popular musician should play Jareth and provide songs, Henson initially wanted Sting for the role. It was Henson's sons John and Brian who suggested he should consider David Bowie, arguing that he would have more lasting appeal. Labyrinth went through a lot more than this, though...
  • Originally the story was going to be set only in a fantasyland, with Sarah a Rebellious Princess; this was changed to better distinguish it from Legend (1985). The "real world" setting was originally the Victorian era, but changed to The Present Day because this was seen as easier to market to audiences. And had credited screenwriter Terry Jones had his way, we wouldn't have had any idea what was at the center of the Labyrinth or seen the Goblin King (according to the 25th anniversary retrospective article in Empire) until Sarah got there.
  • In the earliest available draft of the script that Jones and Laura Phillips wrote, Sarah was babysitting Toby (then known as Freddie) when she opened the door to, and let in, a stranger against her parents' warning. He turned out to be Jareth, who kidnapped Toby For the Evulz and was gradually transforming him into a goblin as the story progressed. The divorce of Sarah's parents figured more heavily; the ring she gives the Wiseman as a donation in the finished film was originally a gift from her mother that she was reluctant to part with. The Wiseman and his Hat got a lot more to do, for that matter, wandering through the action and eventually inspiring Hoggle to rejoin the party after he betrayed Sarah.
  • The Bog of Eternal Stench wasn't in early drafts; Hoggle was instead threatened with a water-filled pit. The junkyard was a junk town complete with a bar where Hoggle went to drown his sorrows.
  • The novelization reveals that the unchosen door with a living knocker led to a Crapsaccharine World where nobody can stop laughing; Sarah barely escapes. And the Fireys originally offered to help Sarah find the castle, but they didn't know what one was...
  • Jareth was a very different character in early drafts. As mentioned above, he kidnapped the baby For the Evulz, not because Sarah wished it to be taken away. The white owl was a separate entity rather than his shapeshifted form, while the Junk Lady was a giant puppet he operated from within. His attraction to Sarah was outright lecherous (when she took the big jump in the Escher room she landed on a bed). She had to physically fight him off to rescue Toby, and finally said "I wouldn't want you if you were the last...goblin on Earth!" whereupon he shrank into one himself. And while the points in the story where he would have sung are the same in the early Jones/Phillips draft as they would be in the finished film, their ideas for what he would sing about are completely different from what his songwriter/actor came up with.
• In The Island (2005), Scarlett Johansson wished to go topless for the sex scene with Ewan McGregor's (first) character, but this was vetoed by Michael Bay as he wanted to keep a PG-13 rating for the film. The climactic fight scene between Lincoln and Merrick was also supposed to be much more elaborate and spectacular, but the budget was stretched thin by then and so a stripped down version was filmed instead.
• The Transformers Film Series:
  • The script for Transformers (2007) originally had Soundwave sneaking into Air Force One to hack the military network, once escaping he would mass shift into a Hummer to search for Sam — and Ravage would be tracking down the American soldiers in South America. Once Michael Bay was brought on board he stated emphatically "No Mass Shifting!" The roles were divided into two teams with Blackout (the helicopter) and Scorponok being the closest Soundwave/Ravage analog and Barricade/Frenzy took on the role hunting down Sam and Blackout/Scorponok terrorizing the soldiers in the Middle East. The writers felt the reduced individual time with more robots would not have done Soundwave justice, and they rather not have Soundwave at all than do him wrong.
  • A death scene for the character Fig was filmed and can even be seen in the trailer, and was included in the novelization, but was cut because Bay ended up liking the character and decided to leave his fate ambiguous if he wanted to bring him back for a sequel.
  • Before his Star-Making Role in Parks and Recreation, Aziz Ansari was up for a bit part as an Indian call center employee. He ended up passing on the role because he found the insistence that he had to use a hokey Indian accent (despite being from America) degrading.
  • In Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, numerous rewrites, mostly due to the 2008-2009 writer's strike led to filming beginning with a script that wasn't totally finished, leading to several scenes not making it into the film such as: more explanation for Megatron and the Fallen's relationship and why Megatron is serving him: The Fallen would have promised to make Megatron a Prime for aiding him and killing Optimus, and Megatron, wishing to be stronger, would agree and would turn on the Fallen in the final battle when Optimus revealed to him that only an Autobot can be a Prime. There was also supposed to be a scene where one of the Fallen's minions, Ransack, who turned into both an old bi-plane and a T-model car, would have tracked and attacked Sam, Mikaela, Simmons, Leo, Bumblebee, Skids, Mudflap, and Jetfire in the desert, where he'd unintentionally offend Bumblebee by calling Jetfire a 'yellow-bellied traitor', Jetfire would have held Ransack off and defeated him by crushing him to death, thus explaining Jetfire's absence for a portion of the film and Ransack nearly made it into the final film, as a character model was made and this scene made it into the novelization, but it's unknown if it was ever filmed. Another scene would have had Leo figure out that Alice was a Decepticon in disguise by seeing an ad on TV for a new Alice in Wonderland attraction with an animatronic Alice that looks just like..., well, Alice. The film also would have had a cliffhanger, with Megatron rising up a protoform army, which was briefly seen earlier on when he entered the Decepticon ship and confronted Starscream. Most of these scenes were retained in the novelization and comic adaptation. Also, there were meant to be more Autobots such as Springer, Depth Charge, and Breakaway.
  • In Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Sentinel Prime was originally going to be named Ultra Magnus. This was changed because they didn't want Magnus' name to be tarnished by betraying the Autobots. Alternatively, he just couldn't deal with that now. Also, Wheeljack/Que had a different death; being dragged underwater into the Chicago river by hidden Decepticons and Mirage/Dino also would have died, having his head torn off by Starscream. The ending would have also been changed to Megatron, after helping defeat Sentinel, would offer Optimus a truce, the terms being leaving the Autobots alone on earth while the Decepticons return to rule over Cybertron, and this was changed as Optimus wouldn't look too smart making a truce with Megatron, who literally just helped to kill the last person he made a truce with.
  • For Transformers: Age of Extinction there were originally two more characters; a female Decepticon named Widow Maker who was either replaced by Stinger or would have been Lockdown's partner, killed by the Autobots during their escape and her death is why Lockdown is trying to flatout murder Optimus in the climax instead of capturing him. The other was a fifth Dinobot, a Velociraptor named Slash would would have broken up from Robot-mode into an entire pack of raptors. There was also supposed to be a scene explaining how Attinger gets to the final battle; shooting an innocent civilian in the head and taking his car as well as a bonding scene in the church the heroes hide out in, briefly seen in the TV trailers with Hound dancing to a song while Drift bobs his head as well.
• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol would've had a cameo by Peter Graves, the original actor to play Jim Phelps, the hero of the TV series, possibly out of goodwill that it would undo the damage the first film did to his reputation, but his untimely death on March 2010 put an end to those plans.
• The first movie version of Watchmen, which was never made, looks like it would have been a much more typical humorous action heavy campy superhero flick. The fact that the project got stuck in Development Hell and was eventually dropped is probably proof of God's mercy.
  • In one script, the reason masked heroes are outlawed is when they fail to save the Statue of Liberty from being blown up by terrorists, and Ozymandias' plot was to open a time portal and kill Dr. Manhattan before he transformed, and it all would have ended with history being rewritten and the Watchmen ending up in a dumpster in OUR world.
  • Watchmen had a boatload of "What Could Have Been"s. Among them:
    • Terry Gilliam was at one point attached to be director. At this point, Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered for the part of Doctor Manhattan.
    • In 2004, Simon Pegg was in negotiations for the part of Rorschach and Joaquin Phoenix was considered for the part of Doctor Manhattan (who was designed to have visible intestines).
    • Jessica Alba, Milla Jovovich, and Jennifer Connelly were considered for the part of Silk Spectre II. One version of the script had the character being given "slingshot powers" from Doctor Manhattan.
    • Keanu Reeves tried for some time to get the part of Doctor Manhattan.
    • Jude Law, Lee Pace, and Tom Cruise all were considered for the part of Ozymandias.
    • Ron Perlman had discussed playing The Comedian.
• Green Lantern (2011):
  • Early drafts of the film featured Legion as the Big Bad, rather than Parallax.
  • The movie was heavily altered in editing, with a number of elements removed or switched around. Flashbacks showing Hal Jordan's childhood with Carol Ferris and Hector Hammond were cut, as was another flashback that would have provided set-up for Hal's race track construct later in the film.
  • Parallax was originally going to be a surprise third act reveal, but the studio altered the story so that he was established as the main threat from the very beginning. This change incited Creator Backlash from director Martin Campbell.
  • Justin Timberlake, Bradley Cooper, and Jared Leto were all in the running to play Hal Jordan.
  • A cameo featuring Nick Jones as John Stewart (the Green Lantern audiences knew from Justice League) was filmed, but ultimately cut.
  • Earlier drafts featured Alan Scott, the Golden Age Green Lantern, as a Retired Badass who would have served as the narrator and something of a mentor to Hal.
  • Guy Gardner was going to appear in a cameo.
  • The Green Lantern ring was going to search for other potential Green Lanterns first, stopping at the Daily Planet and landing on the desk of Clark Kent, before flying off again. The cameo was cut due to budgetary concerns.
  • One ending would have Hal kissing a dying Carol and reigniting the Green Lantern ring.
  • The film ends with an obvious Sequel Hook for a second installment with Sinestro as the Big Bad.
  • The movie was initially going to be the start of a DC cinematic universe, with Angela Bassett's Amanda Waller playing a Nick Fury-like role throughout the various films. This idea was scrapped due to the film's poor reception and box office bombing, and DC eventually started their shared universe with Man of Steel.
  • Robert Smigel wrote a script for a comedic Green Lantern film that would have starred Jack Black as a Canon Foreigner GL named Jud Plato. According to Smigel, the Corps would've been portrayed in a serious, respectful manner, which he felt would serve to make Plato seem funnier by comparison. Highlights included Jud proving his fearlessness by eating a coyote on live TV, and catching criminals with a giant energy condom. But seeing as this news came out around the time of the "creative liberties" of Catwoman (2004)... Meanwhile, back in The '80s there was a similar attempt at a comedic Green Lantern which would have starred Eddie Murphy.
• George Miller came close to making a Justice League of America film in 2007, with a cast consisting of Armie Hammer (who would later play The Lone Ranger) as Batman, D.J. Cotrona as Superman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, rapper Common as Green Lantern (John Stewart), and Adam Brody as The Flash (Barry Allen), with Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, and a teenage Wally West appearing as well. The story had Maxwell Lord (played by Jay Baruchel), Talia al Ghul, and the OMACs as the villains, with a plot loosely inspired by Mark Waid's Tower of Babel, and Greg Rucka's The O.M.A.C. Project and Countdown to Infinite Crisis. The movie would have ended with Barry pulling a Heroic Sacrifice to defeat Lord, setting up Wally to become the new Flash in future installments. It got far enough along in production that sets were created and filming was ready to start. However, the project was put on hold before filming could commence following the 2007 writer's strike, the death of the costume designer, and an unfavorable change in Australia's tax code. Even after the strike ended and a new costumer designer was hired, most of the cast had moved on and Warner Bros. lost interest in the project following the success of The Dark Knight, leading to the film's cancellation.
• An early script for Wild Wild West, written by none other than Shane Black, has been posted on the Internet, and it is far more faithful to the details of the original series than the version which finally made it to the screen. About the only thing that didn't get changed was the giant mechanical spider. What is it with producer Jon Peters and Giant Spiders, anyway?
  • A big-screen reboot of Wild Wild West had been mooted since 1992, with the abovementioned Shane Black screenplay providing the story, Mel Gibson set to play Jim West and Richard Donner attached to direct. It's likely no coincidence that Gibson and Donner ended up doing an adaptation of another Western TV show: Maverick.
• The original script of The Truman Show had Truman living in a fake New York City, continued the story after Truman got out of his studio, and was a lot more disturbing. Peter Weir had the story rewritten to make it believable that people would want to watch The Truman Show, and hence made Truman's life more idyllic and escapist.
• Thomas and the Magic Railroad was to have featured a human villain named "P.T. Boomer". Originally, it was he who had taken Lady out for a spin and crashed her (not Diesel 10) which caused Burnett to feel guilt. Boomer's motivation against Burnett was because he had taken his love interest Tasha from under his nose, and the reason for his return to Shining Time was to seek out Lady and destroy her. He was removed from the plot as test audiences apparently found him "too scary", leaving the filmakers to plaster over whatever they could. So late was his removal that he was still seen in the trailer yelling "I'll get you, you blue puffball!" and the only scene of him in the proper movie is a motorcyclist asking directions (and his line redubbed by another actor).
• Rowan Atkinson's character in Love Actually was originally meant to be an angel, thereby explaining his eerie familiarity with characters who had never met him before. In his final scene he was meant to disappear while walking away from Liam Neeson in the airport. The whole idea was eventually scrapped and left us with a funny, if somewhat random, performance from Atkinson.
• Gus van Sant was at one point in negotiations to direct The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)
  • He was also attached to Speed Racer. With Johnny Depp starring.
  • Speaking of The Time Traveler's Wife (2009), the film was originally going to star Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt, who bought the filming rights to Niffenegger's novel before it was released to the public. However, the Real Life dissolution of their marriage (and subsequent legal settlement) scrapped the plan.
• There are a surprising number of roles that were initially intended to be played by Anne Hathaway, namely Christine in The Phantom of the Opera (2004), Katherine Heigl's character in Knocked Up, and Johanna in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
  • Speaking of Sweeney Todd, there's the matter of all the material from the stage musical that was cut from the film. Most notably, "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" was to be sung by a chorus of ghosts, which included Christopher Lee. This also explains the two-second cameo by Anthony Head following the shaving contest.
  • And speaking of The Phantom of the Opera (2004), Hugh Jackman was apparently on the short list for the title role, but had other commitments at the time of filming. (While this wouldn't have solved all the film's problems, "Music of the Night" at least would have been awesome.) A much earlier Phantom film (late '90s) might have toplined Antonio Banderas, perhaps with Kate Winslet as Christine. And even earlier, if Andrew Lloyd Webber and Sarah Brightman (the original stage Christine) hadn't divorced when they had, she would have played the role in the film, alongside original Phantom Michael Crawford.
• George A. Romero penned a screenplay for a Resident Evil film that can still be found on the Internet. In general, aside from a few head-scratch-inducing changes, (making Chris Redfield into both a Magical Native American and Jill's lover instead of being a S.T.A.R.S. member, the robotic Hunters, Jill being the team captain rather than Wesker, Barry becoming a Scary Black Man who gets killed off, etc.), the movie hangs together a fair bit better than the game it's based on, and is much, much more faithful to the source material than the films that did get made.
• Manos: The Hands of Fate was supposed to have a sequel, which is why Torgo escapes from the house toward the end. However, its incredibly poor quality prevented that from happening.
  • And Torgo's actor committing suicide...
• Michael Jackson really wanted to get into acting after he became a megastar, but those ambitions never amounted to much. Among the could-have-beens:
  • Playing Peter Pan. Jackson was considered as Peter for Steven Spielberg's Hook, but didn't care for the film's premise of an older Peter Pan rediscovering his childhood.
  • When Paramount briefly considered producing The Crow (1994), they intended it to be a Jackson vehicle and a musical. Upon being contacted about such an adaptation creator, writer, and illustrator of the comics, James O'Barr apparently laughed his ass off at the idea, thinking they were joking, only to be stunned when told they were serious.
  • According to the book Michael Jackson Unauthorized, he had a conversation with Spielberg about playing the title character in the movie adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera (at the time, Spielberg's name was being thrown around as a potential director for it). Lloyd Webber has confirmed that Jackson wanted that role badly and kept bringing it up with him, but he was never seriously considered for it.
  • In 1993, according to Entertainment Weekly, the first round of child molestation allegations killed a Jack and the Beanstalk adaptation and an original superhero movie, MidKnight.
  • There was also talk earlier in '93 of mounting a remake of 7 Faces of Dr. Lao with him as the title character. In the book Michael Jackson Inc. colleague/producer Rusty Lemorande discusses an unnamed film that made it to the pre-production/conceptual art stage and sounds suspiciously like this one — the model sets included a circus train and an inner-city block (suggesting a Setting Update), and there were character designs for a variety of creatures Jackson would have played.
  • Michael Jackson Inc. also briefly discusses Jackson's attempts to buy the struggling Marvel Comics in the mid-1990s, with the intent of adapting its flagship titles into movies he could star in. Had this panned out, he might have played such roles as Tony Stark/Iron Man and Charles Xavier.
  • Plans were announced for at least two film projects that never came to fruition at the Turn of the Millennium: The Nightmare of Edgar Allan Poe and Wolfed, a werewolf movie based on Alexandre Dumas' The Wolf King. He would have played the lead roles in both. As the Edgar Allan Poe film was going to be written by a Smallville writer and directed by the guy who made Fear Dot Com, Cracked.com declared it the "worst movie Hollywood never made".
  • The Way of the Unicorn, the Endangered One was an animated feature that would have featured his voice. Faulty reporting on this one may have led to the "Michael Jackson was involved in the long-rumored live-action The Last Unicorn adaptation" rumor.
  • According to the book The Man Behind the Mask, Jackson was willing to appear in Men in Black II for free... if Will Smith was dropped from the film so he could play the protagonist. He wound up in a cameo instead. The scene in question is a little awkward.
  • According to brother Jermaine's book You Are Not Alone, Jackson was all set to campaign for the role of Willy Wonka in the second Charlie and the Chocolate Factory adaptation...then he was accused of child molestation for a second time, and that became impossible. Colleague/producer Marc Schaffel (in the biography Untouchable) goes further with this, claiming that Michael wrote a whole soundtrack for the movie and submitted it to Warner Bros. in 2000, figuring that they would give him the lead on the basis of it. But though executives loved it, they were not comfortable casting him as Willy Wonka, and offered to find another role in the film for him in exchange for the soundtrack. Michael was too dead set on the lead role to allow this, so it fell through.
  • Untouchable also mentions that he was working on a King Tut project for years.
  • He was planning to co-direct, with Bryan Michael Stoller, a film adaptation of Jennings Michael Burch's They Cage the Animals at Night, a memoir of child abandonment and abuse in the orphanage/foster care system.
  • Jermaine has also claimed that Michael was supposed to be one of the founders of DreamWorks SKG, alongside Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen, and points to the resemblance of the DreamWorks logo to that of Michael's Neverland Valley Ranch — which was established as such in the late 1980s — as proof. (Both feature a boy sitting on a crescent moon.) For unknown reasons, Michael was left out when the plans were finalized. No one else has made similar claims about this, though, so take this with a grain of salt...
  • He wanted to be The Riddler in Batman Forever.
  • He even lobbied to play a Klingon(!) in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
• In Dan Aykroyd's original treatment for Ghostbusters (1984), the film took place in the future, ghostbusting was commonplace, and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man would have appeared in the first twenty minutes. Ivan Reitman on the commentary for the film said that it would have cost 300 million dollars to make. To put this in perspective, Ghostbusters was made for about 30 million. In 1984 dollars.
  • Also, Dan was to have been joined by John Belushi (who died during writing, and later inspired Slimer) and Chevy Chase.
  • And Eddie Murphy would have played Winston. Winston's backstory was also more written out in the original script, with him being a former Marine and a Ph.D. with multiple degrees. His role was heavily rewritten to give a bigger part to Bill Murray, which resulted in Winston's role getting significantly trimmed down and his introduction being moved to the middle of the film. Ernie Hudson has said he still wishes he had gotten to play the original Winston instead of the role he ended up with.
  • Additionally, John Candy was the original choice for Louis Tully, who was conceived as an uptight businessman. According to the DVD Commentary, however, Candy had horrible ideas for the character. He wanted to play him as an over-the-top German stereotype with dogs. Ivan Reitman thought that the movie already had enough dogs, and everyone involved agreed that Candy just didn't get the character. They also agree that their subsequent choice of Rick Moranis and his choice to play Tully as a meek accountant (which he felt more comfortable playing) is much funnier than any of Candy's ideas were.
  • In addition, the ghostbusters would travel through time with SWAT gear and wands in order to battle ghosts.
  • Aykroyd's idea for a third movie was a script called Ghostbusters 3: Hellbent, in which the beloved quartet end up in an alternate hell dimension version of New York, called "Manhellton," where Central Park is filled with green demons and surrounded by thousand-foot-high apartment buildings. The Ghostbusters' nemesis was to be named "Lou Siffler," as in Lucifer — a "Donald Trump-like mogul" who was literally the devil. Plus, Aykroyd decided it would have to be computer-animated, because it would be "cheaper to produce".
• Give My Regards to Broad Street: Originally, the segment of the film after "Eleanor Rigby" proper and set in Victorian times (more or less) was to be set to normal classical music or be about six minutes shorter or both. Paul McCartney insisted on too many ideas for it to be short, and it's just as well: that segment does have a plot, and it contains a nice mixture of foreshadowing and Red Herrings which does add some badly-needed suspense and depth to what comes later. And Paul also figured that he could write his own classical. (The piece is titled "Eleanor's Dream," part from context and part from it leaning heavily on variations of the "Eleanor Rigby" theme.)
• Transmetropolitan starring Patrick Stewart as Spider Jerusalem.
• Darkness Falls, in which the vengeful ghost of a murdered lady acts as a tooth fairy who kills you if you look at her, started production as a more psychological thriller simply called "The Tooth Fairy," without the murdered lady, and the actual Tooth Fairy (who has a side job as the Angel of Death) being the monster. The shift in focus came so late that an action figure based on the original Tooth Fairy design was released (and can be seen here, in all its lost glory.
• They was originally conceived as being about evil cybernetic creatures that stole people's organs to replace their own, that could make everyone forget their victims had ever existed. The actual script wound up replacing the cyborgs with supernatural night-terrors whose victims would be dismissed as crazy if they sought help.
• Paul Rudnick wrote the original draft of the screenplay of Sister Act with Bette Midler in mind for the lead. When she turned it down, Rudnick left the project, and it was re-tooled for Whoopi.
• A short story about films that could have been.
• Judy Garland:
  • She was supposed to star in three MGM musicals that were made without her: The Barkleys of Broadway (which was supposed to follow up on the success of Garland and Fred Astaire in Easter Parade but instead reunited Astaire with his old partner Ginger Rogers), Annie Get Your Gun (which Garland was partially filmed in before being replaced by Betty Hutton) and Show Boat (where Ava Gardner played the part written for Garland).
  • Judy was also, much later, slated to play Helen Lawson in the extremely notorious film version of Jacqueline Susann's novel Valley of the Dolls, but proved so unreliable by that point she never got past the screen test stage (Some of the crew however considered her firing to be staged by the film's director, who supposedly kept her waiting till very late in the day deliberately, knowing she'd be in no shape to perform).
• And then there's Project 880, the early "scriptment" for a little movie called Avatar. Generally speaking, it hits the same basic plot points, but is also much longer and much more detailed, explaining many things that ended up being plot holes in the final film and lacking the Mighty Whitey aspect altogether. There are also many interesting lost subplots. Perhaps they could be sequel fodder...
• The three henchmen at the beginning of Once Upon a Time in the West were originally to be played by Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach. But since Eastwood was unavailable, Sergio Leone scrapped this.
• Peter Sellers' sudden death in 1980 affected or scuppered several projects:
  • He was to topline a remake of Preston Sturges' Unfaithfully Yours and the original comedy Valium! Both projects were eventually filmed as Dudley Moore vehicles, with the latter retitled Lovesick.
  • Grossing Out was a satire about arms dealers to be scripted by Terry Southern (who wrote the source novel for The Magic Christian and co-wrote the Dr. Strangelove screenplay) and directed by Hal Ashby (who had directed Sellers in Being There).
  • Most famously, Romance of the Pink Panther was a Grand Finale for the franchise that Sellers was co-writing prior to his death and for which Blake Edwards was well paid not to be involved in (directors that were attached: Sidney Poitier, then Clive Donner). The plot would have had Clouseau fall in love with a beautiful woman (Pamela Stephenson) without realizing that she's "The Frog", the jewel thief he's trying to capture. United Artists tried to revive this project as a Dudley Moore vehicle (again!), but Moore would not play Clouseau unless Edwards was involved. Edwards didn't want to shoot that script, Moore moved on, and we got the Clip Show of Trail of... and Replacement Scrappy of Curse of... instead.
  • In a related issue, for a while Edwards was working on The Ferret, set in the same universe as the Pink Panther series but focused on an original character: The son of a famous spy, forced to take his father's place. Sellers was still around when it was first being developed, but it ended up more associated as a could-have-been for Moore before it was demoted to a standalone TV movie in 1984 starring Steve Guttenberg. (That the role was attached to Moore can be seen in the character being a jazz musician, as Moore himself was.)
• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes would have had Peter O'Toole as Holmes and Peter Sellers as Dr. Watson if the director's original wishes had been met. And it would have been a three-hour film with an intermission intended for roadshow engagements.
• Laurence Olivier was approached for the supporting role of Benjamin Rand in Being There — which would have given the world the spectacle of him sharing scenes with fellow Brit superstar Peter Sellers — but turned it down when he found out what Shirley MacLaine would be doing in the "I like to watch" scene. When you consider all the roles he did take late in life, the fact that he passed on the role that won Melvyn Douglas his second Oscar does not speak well for his judgment.
• Before Phil Hartman's death, there were plans for him to appear as his The Simpsons character Troy McClure in a live action film. According to Matt Groening the idea never "got further than enthusiasm", but "would have been really fun".
  • The plans for The Simpsons Movie are numerous: one script focused on Bart and Lisa and co-starred Simon Pegg, another had the Simpsons being filmed as part of a reality TV show, with Will Ferrell as the show's producer, and two Simpsons episodes were originally thought up as feature-length scripts for the movie: "Kamp Krusty",^note season four episode where Bart and Lisa go to Kamp Krusty, and end up overthrowing it after the camp turns out to be a prison and "Bonfire of the Manatees"^note season 17 episode where Marge leaves Homer after finding out that he's using the house to let the Mafia film a porno in it, and Marge falls for a marine biologist voiced by Alec Baldwin.
• River Phoenix was on the cusp of being a breakout star when he died, resulting in him being replaced for roles he had been slated for:
  • Daniel Malloy, the interviewer in Interview with the Vampire. The role went to Christian Slater, who donated his salary to charities Phoenix supported.
  • Izzy Singer, in Safe Passage. He was played by Sean Astin.
  • Cleve Jones, in Gus Van Sant's Milk. The movie was in development hell for more than a decade, until Van Sant finally produced Milk, with Emile Hirsch playing Jones.
  • Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries. Leonardo DiCaprio portrayed him.
  • The lead role in a Neil Jordan/John Boorman movie Broken Dreams. The movie remains on hold.
  • When River died, he was starring in Dark Blood. The film was left unfinished for almost twenty years, before the film was recut and due for release in 2012.
• Ever wondered why Flash Gordon and Ming The Merciless are included in the closing credits of A Christmas Story? It's because the script originally had a scene where Ralphie fantasizes about helping out Flash Gordon with a BB gun. It was filmed but got cut at the last minute.
• The Magnificent Ambersons, directed by Orson Welles. Perhaps the most tragic example of this trope in cinema history, the film was re-edited by the studio while he was out of the country. They then dumped the footage they removed into the ocean, as they did with many other things things they considered disposable.
  • Rumor exists that an original cut was flown to Welles in Brazil and could still survive...
  • While we're talking about Welles, he also planned, but never made, a version of Heart of Darkness
  • Parodied in the long-running "rumor" of a partly completed film by Orson Welles called... Batman.
• John Carpenter intended the Halloween series to be an anthology franchise, each telling a completely unrelated horror story. Unfortunately, Executive Meddling forced the second film to be a direct sequel to the first, and so when he tried to re-implement the idea with the third film, which turned out poorly thanks to the film's negative reception due to critics and audiences finding the story nonsensical, full of plot holes, and too strange, not helped by a massive fan rebellion over how it had nothing to do with the previous two films. This meant the later sequels also focused on Myers leaving film three as an absurd aberration dropped in the middle of the story.
  • Carpenter and producer Debra Hill have stated several times that Christopher Lee was their first choice for the role of Dr. Loomis. He turned down the role. He now calls it the biggest mistake of his career.
    • Apparently, the part of Loomis was also offered to Lee's best friend and frequent co-star, Peter Cushing. His agent evidently hated the idea. It is unknown if Cushing ever actually read the script.
  • The sixth installment in the franchise would have seen Michael Myers as a homeless guy sleeping at a local men's shelter, a reporter named Dana (who turns out to be Michael's long-lost sister), and a scene where Michael murders a Jason Vorhees-lookalike with a beer bong.
• Friday the 13th was conceived as an anthology series, much like the original path of Halloween, but this concept never saw the light of day.
  • The reboot was originally going to have a Found Footage sequel, but the producers vetoed the idea.
• Hellraiser vs Halloween: Cliver Barker and John Carpenter had both discussed a Halloween/Hellraiser crossover, but the project seems to have been cancelled.
• Jeff Bridges was considered for the part of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver. In fact, according to the IMDB pages, Paul Schrader said he wrote the part with him in mind.
• Kate Bosworth was the first choice for the dominatrix character of Gail in Sin City
• Michael Madsen was originally slated to play Bud White in L.A. Confidential.
• Ben Stiller originally wrote Tropic Thunder intending to play Tugg Speedman's agent Rick Peck himself, with Keanu Reeves as Speedman. Then, Owen Wilson was going to play Peck, but after his attempted suicide he was replaced by Matthew McConaughey. Also, Mos Def turned down the role of Alpa Chino.
• Monica Bellucci was originally slated to play Mina Harker in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but scheduling conflicts scuppered what could have been mind-fryingly awesome.
• Hitman was screwed up in the last moment by Executive Meddling. The near-final script, floating in the Internet, has no mention of where did Number 47 come from, no mention of the infamous train swordfight scene, more backstory for Nika and the Big Bad, 47 is chased by Spetsnaz instead of the Agency, a shootout between 47 and Spetsnaz commandos on a moving train (and they're rappelling from helicopters, no less!), Agent Markov being The Man Behind the Man and Mike Whittier foiling his plan by giving the recording from the bug he planted on him to a Russian general.
• Guillermo del Toro has a load of unrealized projects.
• In 1998, House of the Dead was reported as being produced by DreamWorks SKG with Bob Dylan's son as director... Instead, we get Uwe Boll.
• Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire was originally going to end with Cassiel also becoming human...and joining Damiel and Marion for a big pie fight. This is for the better, since a wacky pie fight would be a strange way to end a film that isn't at all a comedy. Speaking of films that originally ended with a pie fight...
• 200 Motels, Frank Zappa's intended fantasy about the things that can make a band go crazy during a tour, had a series of troubles during the production, finishing with only a third of the script filmed. A new plot was made in the editing room with the material gathered, and was released in 1971.
  • Also by Zappa, was 1969 project Uncle Meat, which was aborted in an even earlier stage of production. A direct-to-video release in 1987 gathered the little that was filmed, including behind the scenes and footage of live concerts with spoken and musical material that were to be worked upon in the film. Although the movie project remained in obscurity, the soundtrack was released in 1969 and is regarded by fans as a high point in Zappa's career.
• Vileness Fats, an abandoned project of avant-garde multimedia band The Residents, had only two-thirds of an unfinished script filmed. Two condensed versions were released, in 1984 and 2001. The story dealt with the war between the village of Vileness Fats and the Atomic Shopping Carts.
• Extensive changes were made from the early scripts of Hellraiser: Bloodline. A notable one being that Angelique was supposed to be served by a troupe of demon clowns, leading to a sort of Order Versus Chaos dynamic between her and the Cenobites. The movie kept one scene from this, in which Cenobite Angelique admires her human form in a mirror. Other changes include the fates of characters, and an added backstory for the Twin Cenobite, who's origin was left unknown in the original script. By and large, the script was far more well received by the fans then the movie itself.
• For Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Ang Lee originally wanted Jet Li for Chow Yun-Fat's role and Shu Qi for Zhang Ziyi's. Jet Li turned it down due to his wife's pregnancy, Shu Qi was pulled out of the film by her manager - to do a Coca Cola commercial, no less.
• Smokey and the Bandit Part 3 was shot as Smokey IS the Bandit, with Jackie Gleason's Sheriff Buford T. Justice taking up the Enos' latest bet and thus being the character on the run from the law. This proved so confusing for test audiences that the film was reshot, adding Jerry Reed's character to the cast as a conventional substitute for the Bandit (who only appeared in a cameo), and from there retitled. A long-standing misconception is that Gleason played two separate characters in the original cut, but the director has debunked this (as discussed by film critic Drew McWeeny in the 80s All Over podcast episode covering August 1983).
• Inglourious Basterds: Who wants to try imagining Adam Sandler as the Bear Jew, Simon Pegg or Tim Roth as Lt. Archie Hicox, and/or Leonardo DiCaprio as Col. Hans Landa? Hard, isn't it?
• The Sandman, as directed and written by Roger Avary with aid from the guys who went on to write Pirates of the Caribbean. The original script blended Preludes and Nocturnes and A Doll's House with the meeting of the Endless that opens Season of Mists, so you have Morpheus trying to reclaim the symbols of his office while trying to stop The Corinthian from using Rose Walker to take over the Dreaming. Then Jon Peters (yup, that guy again) got his hands on the script, and tried to insert, among other things: Morpheus in tights; Morpheus talking even more pretentiously than he already does; Morpheus engaging The Corinthian in hand-to-hand combat; and that damned mechanical spider. Gaiman took one look at the script after Peters was done with it, declared it a work on unparalleled crap, and the film has rested in Development Hell ever since.
• The feature film version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?? was projected to star James Mason as George and Bette Davis as Martha, which would have made the famous "What a dump!" scene that much more deliciously ironic^*Bette Davis spoke the line herself in the 1949 movie Beyond the Forest. The then-very-hot couple of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor professed interest in the project and the original casting was scrapped.
• I Am Legend initially began development as a project for Ridley Scott to direct and would have starred Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Connelly. Due to budget reasons, this version never happened and instead we got the Will Smith version.
  • Also, in 1957, Richard Matheson himself wrote an adaptation of the novel under the title The Night Creatures for Hammer Films. The project died when both the BBFC and the MPAA told Hammer that a film based on Matheson's script would never be passed. The script was sold, and eventually became the Vincent Price film The Last Man on Earth. The title was later applied to the U.S, release of Captain Clegg.
  • There were plans for a sequel, where Will Smith was to return as the clone of his character.
• Gremlins was initially envisioned as a much darker and more violent film, with the Gremlins actually EATING people alive, and no good mogwai like Gizmo. The first draft (which Joe Dante never even read) had the main characters as prepubescent children, Steven Spielberg had that changed because he found that to be too similar to E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. You can read the second draft Here.
  • Stan Winston got offered the opportunity to do the visual effects for ET, but declined. He would regret doing so.
• This article explains what Paramount Pictures had in mind for Twilight the movie, since they originally picked up the rights to it. Their script versions changed Bella from a clumsy damsel to an Action Girl track star who became a vampire in the first movie rather than the final movie. In some versions, her dad also died. The studio also wanted to focus more on action elements to pull in a male audience. (In their words, the book was just becoming popular at the time, and they didn't think it had the fan base to sell the love story alone). So they added a Korean FBI agent who hunted vampires and SWAT officers and vampires fighting each other in the woods. Stephanie Meyer was understandably not pleased. Paramount lost interest and Summit Entertainment picked it up and made a more faithful-to-the-book adaptation. One can't help but wonder why Paramount didn't just make their own vampire movie instead of bothering to get the rights to Twilight with the intention of changing everything
  • Chris Columbus almost directed the first Twilight film. This would have resulted in the Harry Potter and Twilight movie franchises both being started by the same man.
  • Jennifer Lawrence auditioned for the role of Bella but lost to Kristen Stewart. Four years later she would star in another Young Adult film of the book, The Hunger Games, which were not only bigger box office hits, but lack the negative stigmas of Twilight that continue to hound Kristen Stewart.
• Samuel L. Jackson auditioned for the role of Mr. Orange's contact in Reservoir Dogs. There was also a point during the preproduction for Pulp Fiction when he was nearly replaced in the part of Jules by Phil Calderon (who went on to play Paul the bartender). Jackson got wind of the possibility, went back and re-auditioned, cementing himself as Jules.
• Originally, Jaws 3-D was supposed to be a parody, done by National Lampoon, called Jaws 3: People 0, with a shark killing off all people linked to Jaws, starting with Peter Benchley in a swimming pool. Steven Spielberg himself squashed the production by threatening to never work with Universal again if they went through with production.
• When Grease became a huge hit, there were plans for at least three sequels and a TV series. However, when Grease 2 bombed, these plans were scrapped.
  • Years before the existing Grease film came to be, Ralph Bakshi and Steve Krantz had acquired the rights and had wanted to do an animated version of the musical. After their partnership fell through, the film rights were passed to Allan Carr.
  • Porn star Harry Reems (of Deep Throat fame) secured the role of Coach Calhoun (a role he'd played in the stage version). The producers, worried Reems' infamy would hurt the box office, replaced him with Sid Caesar.
  • The script for Grease 3 ended up seeing life over 20 years later... as High School Musical.
• In the DVD special features for Freddy vs. Jason, it's mentioned that the writers had, not too seriously, considered ending the film with a scene of both of its superstar killers in Hell, charging at each other in a rage ... only to be ensnared in chains, and confronted by Pinhead from the Hellraiser films, saying: "Gentlemen, is there a problem?" This one never even got past the level of a production-crew joke, as New Line never had the rights to Hellraiser or its characters, but still rates a mention as a What Could Have Been.
  • One of the sequel ideas involved the two teaming up to fight Michael Myers. The other involved Ash joining the fray (this would later be done in comic book format).
  • Special effects artist Rob Bottin was going to direct the film in 1997 in what would have been his directorial debut, and had tested his version of Freddy Krueger's makeup on Robert Englund.
• This website has a huge amount of unmade Kaiju films on it. some are interesting like King Kong Vs. Frankenstein and Ray Harryhausen's unmade film Force of the Trojans makes one nostalgic for the greatness that never was.
• The Lawnmower Man: The association with Stephen King's short story was added to a script titled Cyber God. Had it remained its own movie, it may have had a different response than being known as a bad adaptation of a short story.
• Stanley Kubrick had several unrealized projects, most notably Napoleon. Said to be the greatest film never made, there was a whole coffee table book about it.
• Francis Ford Coppola could-have-beens: Megalopolis, about an architect who tries to bring about Utopia in New York, supposedly after some great disaster, was one. Another would have been a Pinocchio adaptation.
• David Lynch has had a few projects that turned out like this, including his followup to Eraserhead, Ronnie Rocket, and the film One Saliva Bubble.
• Anybody curious about what would have happened if Ayn Rand's unmade film Red Pawn about a woman trying to free a prisoner from Soviet Russia were ever made?
• Giorgio Moroder won rights to produce his '80s pop-music version of Metropolis, outbidding David Bowie.
• The original protagonist in the screenplay for Gregg Bishop's Dance of the Dead was not Jimmy, but a troubled girl named Lucy who was going to move into town at the beginning of the film, and the zombie epidemic was going to be one more example of trouble that followed her. On the first day of shooting, the girl meant to play Lucy walked onto the set and told the filmmakers she didn't want to do it anymore, forcing them to completely write her out of the story completely. As explained on the DVD commentary, they didn't know it at the time, but this was a blessing in disguise, because once they started shooting the film as we currently have it, they realized the character of Lucy completely sucked.
• Old School was originally written to be a comedic parody of Fight Club. However, the studio decided that film wasn't well known enough (at the time the script was written, the film was only known as a box office flop) and instead became more of a film in the vein of Animal House and the director's previous film Road Trip. However, some pieces of the original script remain in the final film (such as Luke Wilson's character never having to pay for anything at the local diner).
• There are several horror movies that never were on this list, some of which have been mentioned here, but amongst those that haven't:
  • A sequel to the bizarre horror film Society, supposedly giving greater detail on the society of old-money, blue-blood shape-shifting monsters
  • Kalidescope, an Alfred Hitchcock film about a serial killer that was supposed to be made with all new filmmaking techniques
  • Two sequels to Peter Jackson's Bad Taste!
  • House of Reanimator, a sequel to the Re-Animator series that has a plot involving Herbert West re-animating the effing Vice President of the USA!
  • The Steven Spielberg film Night Skies, a film about alien scientists tormenting a farmer's family and mutilating their livestock, which evolved into E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when Spielberg wanted to do something less dark (the dark elements gelled into Poltergeist), and latched onto a subplot about a friendly one of the aliens befriending the family's child to build a movie around. Supposedly Rick Baker made a really cool special effects model for one of the aliens, but there appears to be no pictures of it around.
    • Columbia Pictures was supposed to distribute Night Skies given their work with Spielberg on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (they wanted Spielberg to do a sequel on that film, which Spielberg declined, yet at the same time Spielberg fretted about Columbia doing a sequel without him), but lost faith when Spielberg decided to change course and put the film in turnaround. MCA head Sid Sheinberg, through Universal, then bought the project from Columbia and worked out a deal where Columbia got 5% of E.T.'s box office profits. Columbia's then-president would go on to say that they had made more money on that film than any of their releases that year.
• Howard Stern was going to originally make a Fartman movie, which supposedly had a pretty good script, but the deal fell apart over the fact that Stern didn't want to relinquish the merchandising rights.
• This topic has an excellent overview of some great SF films never made. Notable ones include:
  • Several unmade sequels to The Abominable Dr. Phibes
  • Several unmade Ed Wood movies, including Ghouls On The Moon, The Day The Mummies Danced, Beach Blanket Bloodbath, Dr. Ackula, The Ghoul Goes West, and two pilots for his TV show.
  • George Romero's The Stand
  • Hammer Horror's Vampirella
  • Screaming Room Only, a film about a psychic, tormented teenager who psychically manifests various monsters against his tormentors.
  • A cracked-out horror film called Bloody Twilight starring John Carradine and Lon Chaney Jr. as themselves (Although in this film Carradine is literally a real vampire, and Chaney a real werewolf), hypnotizing hippies to kill directors they felt had wronged them.
  • A Macekre of Godzilla's Counterattack called The Volcano Monsters with all new footage for the human actors and the story partially set in Chinatown to explain all the Asian architecture. Godzilla and Angirus would have been turned into an ordinary T-Rex and Anklyosaur.
  • Charlie Chaplin's The Freak, a dramatic comedy about a young South American girl who unexpectedly sprouts a pair of wings. She is kidnapped and taken to London, where her captors cash in by passing her off as an angel. Later she escapes, only to be arrested because of her appearance. She is further dehumanized by standing trial to determine if she is human at all. It would have starred his daughter Victoria.
  • Choice Cuts, a film about a guy cut up to provide parts for Vietnam Veterans who's head was preserved by a mad scientist. Due to a tumor he can control these parts from a distance and inducing their holders to kill. At some point in the movie the guys' girlfriend would have found his head and taken it to recover all his parts.
    • A similar film titled Body Parts based on the same source material (the Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac novel Et mon tout est un homme) was released in 1991.
• Apparently the short that this trailer is for, about a man with an ice cream cone for a head on the run from the mob, apparently was going to be made into a movie, called Swirlee. It was supposed to be fairly serious, described as "Dick Tracy and Edward Scissorhands meets Mean Streets". But, unfortunately, the execs didn't get it and wanted to make it a kids movie. And thus it stayed unmade.
• Charles Band has a huge amount of these. Most notably, there was proposed an epic three-part Puppet Master trilogy where the puppets would fight the Mummy, Dracula, and Frankenstein's monster.
• Christopher Nolan initially thought of Inception as a horror film, before deciding to turn it into a heist movie. The shade haunting Cobb throughout the film was originally going to be his business parter, but Nolan changed it to his wife since he felt that created a stronger emotional connection between the two. He also saw it as a small, low budget affair but we all know how well that turned out.
  • Nolan's initial casting choices were also interesting. James Franco for Arthur, Evan Rachel Wood, Emily Blunt, Rachel McAdams, Emma Roberts, Jessy Schram, Taylor Swift and Carey Mulligan for Ariadne, Brad Pitt and Will Smith for Cobb, Kate Winslet for Mal.
• Street Fighter:
  • Writer and director Steven E. de Souza originally planned to have a smaller, more manageable cast that would've only used seven characters from the game. The representatives from Capcom initially agreed to this, but later changed their minds and forced him to include eight other fighters from the game.
  • Capcom wanted Japanese actor Kenya Sawada to play Ryu, but the director wanted someone with comedic chops and a better grasp of the English language. The character of Captain Sawada was written into the movie specifically for Kenya as a compromise.
  • Many of the fight scenes had to be edited to remove blood and gore after the MPAA complained. This included a death scene for Vega, who was supposed to die after being impaled on his own claws.
• The 1984 comedy Best Defense with Dudley Moore and Eddie Murphy originally only starred Moore. When it tested poorly, they filmed extra scenes featuring Murphy (he doesn't interact with any of the other characters — his scenes are set two years later) and inserted them in, hoping it would attract people to the film. Unfortunately, the movie was blasted by critics and was a flop with audiences.
  • They did shoot a scene where Dudley's and Eddie's characters meet (as shown in these publicity◊ stills◊), but it was deleted from the final cut.
• Amongst the most famous is Peter Jackson's aborted HALO film. Neill Blomkamp was to direct it, and when it fell through, Jackson gave Blomkamp $30 million to go make a feature version of his short film "Alive in Joburg". The result was District 9, making it a case where What Could Have Been still resulted in something awesome.
• Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie had a number of things planned out both before and during filming (see here for an early draft):
  • Before the usage of CGI and the armored suits, it was planned to be done in the style of the main series, something that would be done in Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie.
  • The helmets were originally molded without the visors and faceplates, allowing them to show off emotions. This quickly got scuttled when they realized they were not supposed to do that sort of thing, and that footage shot without the visors looked awful.
  • The Oozemen were originally just rats, but the costumes were so horrible, they got scuttled as well. The rat costumes turned up in the TV series, as part of a small number of episodes filmed in Australia (the movie's filming location) when filming on the movie overran and started eating into the series' shooting schedule.
  • Originally, when Ivan Ooze zapped the Tengu Warriors, they were supposed to turn into the Tengu Queen, who'd return to Phaedos and attack the Rangers again. This didn't happen, but the character of the Tengu Queen was used for the Game Boy game.
  • Cathrine Sutherland, who'd go on to play Kathrine "Kat" Hillard in the series proper, auditioned for the part of Dulcea.
  • There was a scene filmed where the Rangers, after getting their Ninjetti powers, train to get used to them before going off to get the Great Power. This scene was dropped after the shuffling around of who was playing Dulcea.
  • When the Rangers get to the temple of the Great Power and enter it, they were supposed to use the crests on their ninja uniforms to reflect back the light and activate the powers, with a brief moment of Kimberly using her crest to check herself over. This was replaced with the battle against the stone gatekeepers.
  • Zordon's revival was supposed to be before the final fight with Ivan, but was swapped around in the final version. The Sega Genesis game version keeps the original order.
  • After leaving Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers midway through season two, Austin St. John, Walter Jones and Thuy Trang had planned to appear in several films in the mid-1990s, including Cyberstrike, Act of Courage, and Children of Merlin, the latter of which was to be developed by Landmark Entertainment Group. None of the three films were ultimately made. Additionally, Trang was expected to appear in a film called The Adventures of Tracie Z, which also never came to fruition.
• This 1996 trailer for Blue Planet (Not to be confused with the BBC documentary series THE Blue Planet), a planned animated movie by then Rainbow Studios (now THQ), with a console game tie-in. The studio was unable to put together the funding; and the existing animation sequences were incorporated into the game, which was released as Deadly Tide. For a while after the film project was dropped, a number of fans created a (now defunct) website called savetheblueplanet.com to try and drum up enough support to get the film made. The trailer developed a large fanbase, mainly for its opening sequence Take That! at Disney/Pixar films Toy Story and A Bug's Life, and use of Rob Zombie's "More Human Than Human" as the soundtrack.
• Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marilyn Manson were planning to team up on a sequel to El Topo called Abelcain, which was supposed to be ready for a 2005 release. However, budget problems and a lawsuit with El Topo's American distributor Allan Klein over royalties and sequel rights caused the project to get delayed and later canceled. The lawsuit was eventually settled and El Topo got a DVD release in 2007.
• In Men in Black, the Arquillians subplot was originally going to involve the Baltians, a rival alien race that was going to return a galaxy to the Arquillians as a sign of peace. Scenes from this version of the film can be seen in the "Metamorphosis of MiB" featurette on the DVD.
• Originally, Robin Hood (2010) was supposed to have been a film called Nottingham, which have had the Sheriff of Nottingham as the main protagonist instead of Robin Hood. The plot would have essentially been the Sheriff investigating a series of murders in Nottingham, with Robin Hood as the main culprit. Robin Hood himself would be a Jerkass, but ultimately innocent and being framed, and the film's climax would have been the city being sieged by the armies of both Prince John and King Richard as the Sheriff desperately tried to find the identity of the killer. And the Sheriff would have done this using actual 12th century crime investigation techniques. However, when Ridley Scott was signed on as director he played with making Robin and the Sheriff the same person, then changed the story completely into a origin story involving a French invasion and the Magna Carta.
• At one point, Alan Rickman was being considered for the lead role in Four Weddings and a Funeral. The writer, Richard Curtis, fought for him, but in the end it was decided he was too old for the part.
  • Jeanne Tripplehorn was originally cast as Carrie, but had to back out for personal reasons. Melanie Griffith and Brooke Shields were both offered the part, but turned it down.
  • Rowan Atkinson's part was nearly done by Michael Sheen, since the producers were worried about it being The Cameo.
• Advise and Consent almost had Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. cast as a senator from Georgia.
• Peter Jackson was asked to write a script for what would have been the sixth A Nightmare on Elm Street film: Playing off the franchise's perceived Sequelitis, his idea would have started out with a weakened Freddy Krueger who no one takes seriously anymore, to the point where teens made a game of deliberately going to the dream world to beat him up. Once Freddy does start gaining power again, the main plot is kicked off by a boy having to enter the dream world to rescue his father. This script was never used and we got Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare instead... But the general concept of Freddy needing to regain strength because no one believed in him anymore was a plot point in Freddy vs. Jason.
  • Wes Craven had proposed the concept of Freddy invading the real world and coming after people who were working on a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel back when they were starting to develop the third movie: Much later he used the same basic idea for Wes Craven's New Nightmare.
    • Speaking about Wes Craven's New Nightmare, Wes Craven wanted Johnny Depp to make a cameo but didn't ask him since he was working on Ed Wood at the time. After the film was released, Craven bumped into Depp and told him about it. Depp said he would have done it if Craven had asked.
  • In 2008, French filmmakers Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo pitched their vision for a reboot. According to the team, their idea "was to really use the fact that Krueger is a child molester," and to have the new gang getting terrorized by Freddy be a group of actual children straight out of an '80s Spielberg movie, like a "twisted version" of The Goonies.
  • John Saxon (Nancy Thompson's dad) pitched a prequel to the franchise set in 1969, when Nancy is five years old and Freddy is still alive. The new story focused on Betsy, Nancy's previously unmentioned stepsister, becoming "caught up in the hippie movement" and getting murdered along with some of the other neighborhood teens. Freddy would have been captured and subjected to a vilgilante execution, only for it to be revealed that the true murderer was none other than Charles Manson.
• Robert Altman had a few movies that never got made due to other circumstances. The first was Wild Card, which was a baseball comedy with Bill Murray as a pitcher trying to lead his team into the then-new Wild Card spot in the MLB Playoffs. The project got scrapped days before filming was to start due to a president change at MGM and the new president feeling the film was too expensive. The second was a film called Paint, which was a comedy about an art heist and the suspects in the robbery. This was set to start filming in early 2004 but Altman contracted cancer (which he eventually passed away from in 2006) and the film had to be canceled.
• In the early 1990's, two adaptations of The Three Musketeers were in the works. The first one (by Disney) was completed and released in 1993. The second one (by Tristar Pictures) was canceled in pre-production due to the other film. Who was attached to play D'Artagnan in this version? None other than Johnny Depp.
• Harrison Ford:
  • He was Stephen King's personal choice to play Jack Torrance in The Shining. Before casting Jack Nicholson, Stanley Kubrick had also considered Robert De Niro and Robin Williams.
  • Ford was also almost cast as the lead in Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
• Saw. There were originally supposed to be eight films. Thankfully, because of Saw VI's lackluster box office draw and Executive Meddling, what would have been films VII and VIII were combined into Saw 3D.
• Early attempts to adapt V for Vendetta to film were a lot more... surreal than what was eventually produced, and included such things as the various government agencies (the Eye, the Finger, etc) being based out of buildings shaped like the organs they were named after, Britain reduced to 1880s-level technology, and the fingermen being mutated, satyr-like creatures.
• In the late '90s, Max Fleischer's son Richard "Dick" Fleischer worked on a full-length Betty Boop movie. A prequel following Betty's rise to fame in the Golden Age of Hollywood, it would have had legendary Broadway star Bernadette Peters voicing Betty, and it would have introduced Betty's estranged father Benny Boop into official canon. It was eventually cancelled due to a change in management at MGM, but some of the music and storyboards can be seen here.
• According to some accounts, following the success of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Frank Capra planned a sequel, in which Mr. Deeds would find himself involved in politics. However, Gary Cooper wasn't available to reprise the role, so Mr. Deeds became Mr. Smith.
• After their great success in Mary Poppins, Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke were to be reunited in a film version of the wonderful Broadway musical She Loves Me. Alas, a series of big-budget musical flops (not least among them Andrews' Star!) resulted in the project being cancelled.
• American Beauty had a strange dream sequence where Lester imagines he is flying cut late into production. A much more significant change completely altered the film's point of view: the film originally would have begun and ended with Ricky and Jane on trial for Lester's murder.
• Nosebleed was a film that had its production started in 2001 where a World Trade Center window washer, played by Jackie Chan, foils a terrorist plot. The film got scrapped for obvious reasons.
• In 2006, Icon Productions said that it would adapt the book A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray into a movie. However, for whatever reason Icon relinquished the rights to the film and it will not be made in the foreseeable future.
• The musical Dream Sequence in Carefree was supposed to be filmed in Technicolor. This explains the song title, "I Used To Be Colorblind."
• Apocalypse Now was the communal property of American Zoetrope; it was heavily developed by George Lucas, who wanted to direct it. However Francis Ford Coppola overruled him and took it for himself. One cannot help but wonder how different George Lucas's career would've been if he'd spent those months of hell in the Philippines instead of Coppola.
  • Of course, the idea was much older, originally having been shot during the 60s, on location in Vietnam in 16mm using real soldiers (and a real war), but this was scrapped, partly for safety reasons. Lucas had also made the film differently with Milius, with the ending being a scene where Willard and Kurtz defend themselves from an attack using a machine gun which Kurtz manned.
  • In addition, at the start of shooting, the role of Willard was played by Harvey Keitel. He was sacked after a week of shooting and replaced by Martin Sheen. This one event basically stopped Keitel's career in its tracks, and it wasn't until Reservoir Dogs that he finally started to get the attention of audiences and film makers.
• There were once plans for a sequel to Gladiator, written by none other than Nick Cave. And what wonderfully batshit plans they would have been, with Maximus finding himself before the Roman gods (who are slowly dying), getting resurrected, and fighting to protect the persecuted Christians. Also, he'd be immortal, and the film would show him fighting throughout history, ending with him in the halls of the Pentagon.
  • There was originally going to be a scene where Commodus has the entire Roman Senate and his own sister executed via Brazen Bull.
• There were plans in The '70s to adapt Promises, Promises, the Broadway musical version of The Apartment, into a movie. The plans got as far as Burt Bacharach and Hal David writing additional songs for it; one of them, "Seconds", would be recorded by Dionne Warwick.
• Sammy Davis Jr. wanted to play Bill the candy store owner in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, but the filmmakers dismissed the idea as "kitschy", so the part went to Aubrey Woods instead. Davis then covered "The Candy Man", and thus the song he would have sung in the film ended up being strongly associated with him anyway.
• The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer film was closer in tone to the television series. But Joss Whedon was just a scriptwriter then, and after the script was sold, the film was changed so much that even the creator said "They Changed It, Now It Sucks!". There's been talk for a few years now of a remake of the film, but Whedon wouldn't be involved much and no TV series characters would appear. This is because of a legal mish-mash made by the selling of the film script-the film is owned by the people who originally bought the script, but the series is still owned by Whedon and 20th Century Fox. Neither the actors or the fanbase were happy at all about it. Fortunately, it appears to have been shelved for now.
• Highlander: The Source went through many script rewrites and a director change during its production. In its earliest stage, director of the original film Russell Mulcahy was supposed to do the film, and it was to be a Prequel.
• The original 1986 Highlander was massively different between the original vision and the final film:
  • The original story was quite a bit Darker and Edgier than the final film in some respects. Connor was born in 1408 instead of 1518, and lived with his mother and father. He was promised to a young girl named Mara who he loved with all his heart but she rejected him when she found out he was immortal (aspects of this character remain in the film with his his crazy redheaded girlfriend who wanted him burned); he never met Heather and got Happily Married with her, as her character didn't exist at all in the original script. His alias in his immortal life was Richard Tupin and his used a variety of swords rather than just the katana he took after Ramirez's death in the film. Ramirez really was Spanish rather than a millennia-old Egyptian styling himself as a Spaniard. And Immortals actually could have children; in the draft, Connor was stated to have 37 with a number of different women over the centuries.
  • The Kurgan was a man known as the Knight (going by the alias Carl Smith) and rather than an Ax-Crazy Russian barbarian dressed as a biker who used his immortal life as an excuse to Rape, Pillage, and Burn over centuries, he was envisioned as very much the opposite - a steely killer in a suit and bowler hat who was massively depressed and only fought in The Game because it was the only reason he had to keep living after thousands of years.
  • Sunda Kastigir had a much bigger role in the original script, and was envisioned as a Mongolian or Chinese Immortal who used a pair of swords to fight. This character was de-composited into Kastigir and Kim, a Korean Immortal who never appeared in the final film as the footage with his scene was sadly destroyed in a fire.
  • The film's final showdown between Connor and the Kurgan was originally planned to take place in (perhaps fittingly) a history museum. Other ideas included an amusement park and atop the head of the Statue of Liberty.
  • Kurt Russell was originally cast to play Connor, but he turned down the role on the advice of his girlfriend Goldie Hawn. Sean Connery was also considered for Connor but he expressed more interest in the character of Ramirez, and was given that role. Bizarrely, Hulk Hogan was offered the role of Connor as well (he refused, citing a focus on his wrestling career).
  • Michael Caine, Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McDowell, Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman and Lee Van Cleef were all considered for the role of Ramirez.
  • Virginia Madsen auditioned unsuccessfully for the role of Heather Macleod (the role was given to young English actress Beatie Edney). Madsen came back to play Connor's love interest in the sequel.
• The original version of Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie would have been an origin movie showing how Joel Robinson got captured and tossed up on the Satellite of Love, but fights with an executive working with the movie led creator Joel Hodgson to leave MST3K halfway through season 5.
  • There was a fifth host segment that was lopped out for some unknown reason. The host segment would've had an asteroid hit the Satellite of Love, damaging the air supply. Not a big deal, but Mike Nelson isn't Batman. So, the bots end up springing in to save the day and restore the air to the Satellite.
  • As well, there was an alternate ending to the movie. It would've had Tom distracting Dr. Forrester while Mike, Crow and Gypsy transformed and teleported an ant into Deep 13 as a MutAnt, who strangles Forrestor and knocks him out. At the end, Crow runs off and attempts to finish his dig to Earth using the chainsaw he found in Tom's room, completing a Brick Joke.
  • Two other ideas for the movie that were rejected by the studio were one where a being of pure logic and a being of pure energy meet on the Satellite of Love...and get into a wrestling match, and a cameo appearance by Kim Cattrall...in lederhosen.
• The prawns in District 9 were originally supposed to wear human clothes and other pieces of trash to protect their sensitive skin from the sun. And five different endings were shot, including one where Wikus made it onto the mothership, as did Koobus.
• The One was originally written with Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson in mind for the role of the inter-dimensional killer and his good double. However, Johnson chose to do The Scorpion King instead. When Jet Li signed on to do the film, they rewrote the script and removed a good number of his lines to leave more room for good old-fashioned "Jet Li asskicking". According to Word of God, the Rock doesn't need to speak a lot; Jet Li needs to speak even less. The Jet Li vs. Jet Li fight at the end of the film (with even Jason Statham not being able to do much in the face of such awesomeness) is likely the only reason to see the movie. Now imagine the Rock vs. the Rock with each giving the other the "eyebrow".
• In the early 1970's, Jerry Lewis (of all people) wanted to adapt The Catcher in the Rye and star as Holden. As with many other attempts at doing the story, he was unable to get the rights. Lewis documents the ordeal in his book The Total Film-Maker.
• Before Steven Soderbergh was signed on to direct Magic Mike, Channing Tatum wanted Nicolas Winding Refn to direct the film. Refn turned it down due to a busy schedule but you would have more than likely seen a totally different film than Soderbergh's serious semi-biopic on the film's star.
• Chris Farley was offered to star in a biography of 1920s comedian Fatty Arbuckle.
  • He and David Spade also planned a film version of his Saturday Night Live character Matt Foley.
  • At the time of his death, Farley had been in talks to costar with Vince Vaughn in The Gelfin.
  • He also planned a biopic of Hermann Goering.
• After Larry Fine suffered a career-ending stroke, Moe Howard asked longtime friend and colleague Emil Sitka to be his replacement. A movie was planned, but fell through after Moe and Emil expressed concern about the film's financing and distribution. A few years later, the Stooges were offered a part in a comedy called The Jet Set. The day after Sitka agreed, Moe died, taking The Three Stooges with him. The movie was retooled as a softcore comedy with the surviving Ritz Brothers, and retitled Blazing Stewardesses.
• When Dragonheart first began production, it was during the time when CGI wasn't that great. This meant that the production team needed other means to make the dragon, so they hired the Jim Henson company to build a dragon puppet. The puppet, or at least parts of it, was actually built, and a version of the campfire scene was actually filmed with it. However, when Jurassic Park was released, the team decided to go with the then-cutting edge CGI used for the dinosaurs.
  • Liam Neeson was the first choice for the role of Bowen but Universal didn't think he would be a believable action hero, due solely on his performance in Darkman. So the studio looked at Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, and Patrick Swayze as possible alternatives before Dennis Quaid was ultimately cast. Elizabeth Hurley and Kenneth Branagh were originally going to play the roles of Kara and Einon, the latter even considered directing the film as well as starring in it after original intended director Patrick Read Johnson was let go.
  • Charles Edward Pogue's script went through a number of revisions during production as a part of Universal's goal to make Dragonheart a more family-friendly film as opposed to the original vision for it to be a serious and transcendent film. See the film's novelization page for more info.
  • Its sequel Dragonheart: A New Beginning was a lackluster direct-to-home video ordeal that used a noticeably less advanced rendering system, despite coming out 4 years later when CGI had both improved significantly and dropped in cost. One has to wonder - if they'd cared a bit more, or tried to make a theatrical sequel, how much better would the visuals have been compared to the first?
• In Buffalo Soldiers, the protagonist invites out the daughter of the new boss purely to make her father angry. The father chases them to the club but doesn't make it. This was originally going to be a big car chase, but having run out of budget the father ended up not getting into the club because he's wearing the wrong kind of shoes.
• In 1993, Arnold Schwarzenegger told Oprah Winfrey that he rejected out of hand a script that would have had him play a Tooth Fairy. Tooth Fairy from 2010, starring Dwayne Johnson, is likely the end result of the project after 17 years of on and off Development Hell.
• When Joaquin Phoenix decided to make a return to acting, he was weighing two choices on which film to do. The one he made was The Master. The one that he turned down? Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Therefore, we very nearly had two famed method actors play Abraham Lincoln in the same year.
• Originally, Sam Rockwell was going to reprise his role as Batman in the sequel to Robin's Big Date that appears as one of the segments in Movie 43. For some strange reason, he pulled out and Jason Sudeikis took over. Also, the trademarks were supposed to appear but instead Batman got a shield that simply says "43".
• According to the trailer for the 2000 version of Shaft, there was going to be a fistfight at an airport runway between Shaft and Wade. It was going to happen in the film, but Executive Meddling gave Jeffrey Wright's character Peoples Hernandez the more antagonistic role and the fight didn't make the final cut.
• There were several different actors intended to be in the cast of Django Unchained:
  • Kevin Costner, Kurt Russell, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Sacha Baron Cohen were originally cast before pulling out. Russell even shot some scenes but left due to creative differences (Tarantino was reworking the script during filming and cut much of Russell's character out).
  • Tarantino had originally wanted Will Smith to play Django. The two of them discussed it a lot, but according to Tarantino the script "wasn't 100 percent right" at the time and after agreeing to wait, he started testing other actors and decided that Jamie Foxx was perfect. In addition, it's been rumored that Smith feared that playing a slave out for revenge against his masters in a hard-R Western would tarnish his clean-cut "good guy" image.
  • Michael K. Williams was almost cast as Django, as was Idris Elba. Chris Tucker was also in the running.
  • Jonah Hill was also intended to have a bigger role, but ended up playing a One-Scene Wonder.
• The Tony Clifton Story was intended as Andy Kaufman's first starring vehicle. Focusing on his Alter-Ego Acting persona of Tony Clifton, the plot follows Clifton's ascent to stardom when he accosts Kaufman — portrayed as a Nice Character, Mean Actor — at a restaurant. Kaufman convinces the Lounge Lizard Clifton that he's talented, but promotes him as the So Bad, It's Good act he actually is. When Clifton realizes he's a public laughingstock, he runs away...at which point the film cuts to an out-of-character Kaufman explaining to the audience that Clifton died before the third act of the film was shot, so Kaufman will play Clifton (intentionally poorly) for the remainder. In the climactic scene, as faux!Clifton returns from being stranded in the jungle and assumed dead to confront Kaufman at his own funeral, the "actual" Clifton returns to assume control of the film and give everyone a happy ending. This was all a bit much for Universal Pictures at the turn of The '80s, and rewrites tried to simplify matters (i.e., the villain became an evil agent who caused trouble for both Kaufman and Clifton). Ultimately, the far more conventional Heartbeeps was Kaufman's first lead role in a film; when it bombed, The Tony Clifton Story was dead in the water.
• Hasbro initially tapped Sony to release and co-finance the Live-Action Adaptation of Jem and the Holograms. Sony turned down the offer in favor of My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) ^note Which Sony too pulled out of. See that for more, after which Hasbro reluctantly went to Universal.
• There were plans for a fourth The Naked Gun movie titled Naked Gun 4 Score: And 3 Sequels Ago (or possibly Naked Gun 5, just to screw with people more). However, this was shelved when Leslie Nielsen passed away.
• When casting The Italian Job (2003), Jason Statham was not the producers' first choice for Handsome Rob. Originally they wanted to go with a younger actor with classic movie-star good looks, being "Handsome Rob" and all. Eventually they decided instead to make his attractiveness into more of a state of mind than a purely physical thing, making him not conventionally handsome but still cocky and swaggering enough to make the ladies weak.
• The Cannonball Run:
  • It was originally planned as an action movie starring Steve McQueen (actor). Unfortunately, he had to turn it down due to being terminally ill with cancer. Burt Reynolds was cast in the lead, and the film was rewritten as a comedy.
  • Reynolds himself only turned to acting after injuries derailed a promising football career at Florida State University.
• There were so many proposed actresses to play Cosette and Eponine in Les Misérables (2012) including Emma Watson, Jessica Biel, Evan Rachel Wood (who actually got the part) for Eponine, and possibly Taylor Swift and Lea Michele.
• Acclaimed Austrian actor Klaus Maria Brandauer was originally cast as Captain Marko Ramius in The Hunt for Red October. He had been fitted for costumes and had attended several rehearsals when he was in an accident and broke both of his legs. Unable to proceed with filming, it was he who suggested that Sean Connery replace him. There is no doubt whatsoever that had Brandauer been able to continue, the movie would have had a very different feel.
• Before the legendarily bad Roger Corman-produced The Fantastic Four, there were plans on making a film starting the Human Torch. This is the main reason why the Torch didn't show up in The Fantastic Four (1978) cartoon.
• Tower Heist originally started as a 2005 movie concept from Eddie Murphy in which he would lead an ensemble black comedian cast as a group of disgruntled employees who would rob Donald Trump and the Trump Tower, affectionately titled Trump Heist. Aside from Murphy himself, the cast included Chris Tucker, Dave Chappelle, Kevin Hart, Tracy Morgan, and Martin Lawrence; and at a later point swapped out the latter three with Chris Rock.
• Wonder Woman:
  • At one point, there were plans in 2001 for a film by Joel Silver, with the then-current script drafted by Todd Alcott. It was set to feature both Diana Prince and Donna Troy in the role of Wonder Woman. Donna would have been an ordinary woman that suddenly gained super powers similar to Diana's, and would spend the movie trying to locate her would-be mentor so both could fight off the wicked Dr. Psycho. But the script was also said to ditch Wonder Woman's classic costume in favor of giving her a black catsuit, although her classic uniform would be referenced at some point.
  • Joss Whedon became attached to the Wonder Woman project in 2005, but left two years later, citing Creative Differences with Warner Bros. over the direction of the film. This version would have covered Diana's meeting with Steve Trevor and her journey to the outside world. Cobie Smulders would have played Wonder Woman. Concept art for the film later surfaced, which showed that Wonder Woman would've worn a Matrix-style black duster and leggings over her traditional costume. Whedon's draft of the film is said to be one long Break the Haughty for Diana. Steve Trevor tells her she can never be a hero because she's never known real suffering (calling her "a fucking tourist"), she is forced to dance sexily for Dionysus, and is ultimately Buried Alive in a mass grave.
• Masters of the Universe:
  • There were plans to make a second film, this one involving cyborgs in the plot. However, interest in the He-Man franchise began to wane at the time, and also the film becoming a flop at box office, and the film was scrapped, what was already done fusing with the aborted Spider-Man film to become Cyborg (1989).
  • The DC Comics adaptation placed in a scene that was cut from the original movie - the revelation that Eternia was future Earth.
• In 1989 Debbie Gibson was set to make her starring film debut in Skirts for Columbia Pictures, with choreographer Jeffrey Hornaday making his big-screen debut as a director - but then-studio head Jon Peters put his foot down thusly:
  Jon Peters: No choreographer will ever direct a picture here!
  Executive: But what about Bob Fosse?
  Jon Peters: I don't want him, either.^note Bob Fosse directed All That Jazz for Columbia - and was, by this time, the late Bob Fosse (he passed away in 1987). But Peters may have called it correctly with Hornaday, who made his directorial debut two years later for Universal with Shout... and didn't direct another movie for two decades, until Geek Charming.
• Henry Cavill was called by one magazine, "the unluckiest man in Hollywood". There is a rumor that fans wrote in to have him play Cedric in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but he lost out to Robert Pattinson. Stephenie Meyer herself wanted him to play Edward Cullen in Twilight, but by the time production started, he was too old and again lost out to Pattinson. He also lost out to Daniel Craig for the role of James Bond in Casino Royale (2006). Ironically, he also was nearly cast as Superman in Superman Returns, 8 years before he played Superman in Man of Steel.
• The View Askewniverse:
  • The ending to Dogma would have been a little different: originally, Silent Bob was to confront the Golgothan and one of the demon kids that were killed previously in the hospital after God is rescued which would have God turn the Golgothan into a bunch of flowers, but was cut.
  • There's also the original ending to Clerks which would have had Dante killed by a robber out of nowhere. Kevin Smith is on record as saying that the rest of the franchise likely would not have happened if this original ending had been kept.
• Scooby-Doo:
  • Tim Curry was originally going to play Mondavarious, but he backed out when he found out that the character was a disguise for Scrappy-Doo. The role would be taken up by Rowan Atkinson.
  • Speaking of Scrappy, he wasn't supposed to appear in the movie at all (not even being ditched by Scooby and the gang as part of the backstory), though James Gunn's original draft does have the U.S. Coast Guard threaten to put Scooby to sleep, with Shaggy adding, "Like what happened to Scrappy." The main villain was instead supposed to be Old Man Smithers, the Luna Ghost from the beginning of the movie, living up to his vow of revenge, this is why the Luna Ghost's shadow is so prominent on the posters, home releases, and promo materials.
  • The original script was more faithful to the series and acted as a prequel story, explaining how the gang came together; with the gang being in a college that had a newly instated 'No Dogs Allowed' rule that brought in a sadistic dogcatcher, forcing Shaggy to hide Scooby. Daphne would have been an aspiring reporter for the school's newspaper who was danger prone as she was in the series and is invited to attend and write about a part at the old Kingston Mansion (from the classic series episode "What The Hex Going On?") on campus grounds but her roommate Velma comes with her due to a power outage and would meet Shaggy and Scooby, who were delivering pizzas, at the party. The party would have been broken up by the ghost that was rumored to haunt the place, but a series of events leads Scooby to knocking the ghost down and Velma unmasks him to be none other than Fred, who was doing it as a House Initiation Dare. The now five members of the gang would have been left in the mansion where the plot would take off and be attacked by the Ghost of Elias Kingston and they'd stumble into the film's mystery. There was also going to be a more serious romance arc between Daphne and Fred, who initially dislike each other but come to care deeply for one another, especially when Daphne discovered Fred is homeless and lives in what becomes the Mystery Machine. Other characters from the show such as Mr. Wickles ("What a Night for a Knight") and Old Hank ("Mine Your Own Business") would have appeared along with other Hanna-Barbera properties making cameos, such as Josie and the Pussycats appearing as a band at the party, an inanimate Speedbuggy in a parking lot, The Jetsons playing on TV, and William Hanna and Joseph Barbera themselves were also intended to make cameos at the end as the presidents of the university, praising Mystery Inc for saving the school. The original script and the final film don't have much in common, other than a darker and higher stakes story than the series with an end of the world scenario, a character arc with a love interest unintentionally coming between Shaggy and Scooby (though the original script had her as more of a goth/grunge girl who shared Shaggy's passion for food as opposed to the Mary Jane character in the final movie), and risque humor with jokes about the old rumors that Shaggy was a pothead, hinting Mr. Wickles was a transvestite, and Scooby would have called the dogcatcher an 'rasshole'.
• The various Brothers Gibb were at times destined to have a much more illustrious film career....
  • In the late Sixties, a version of Hair was pitched, starring Barry as Berger and Maurice as Woof. Barry turned down the part as he refused to appear nude.
  • Andy Gibb was considered for the male lead in Xanadu, but turned down as his drug addiction was at an all-time high at this point.
  • Likewise, Andy was considered for the male lead in Grease 2, which ended up going to Maxwell Caulfield.
  • This has never been proven, but it seems logistical that Andy, whose career was at its peak at the time, would've been considered for the male lead in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band alongside his brothers.
  • Maurice Gibb recorded a score for low-budget B-movie The Supernaturals - coincidentally starring Maxwell Caulfield - which was replaced in most editions of the film. Ironically, reviewers bashed the replacement score (which Maurice had nothing to do with), claiming it to be annoying and unnecessary.
• The 1986 version of Little Shop of Horrors was intended to be MUCH darker, not only including the infamous "Audrey and Seymour die and plants take over" ending, but featuring gorier shots such as Seymour feeding Orin's dismembered head to the plant and more of Seymour squeezing blood out of his finger, as well as a surreal dream sequence in the middle of "The Meek Shall Inherit" featuring a bleeding portrait of Mr. Mushnik. Only the "Don't Feed The Plants" ending has made it to an official release, though the other scrapped footage can be seen online thanks to the fairly recent discovery of an existing workprint.
• The Predators 1996 script by Robert Rodriguez included the return of "Dutch" Schaefer, and featured several captured alien creatures being fought in an arena, soldiers colluding with the Predators, the appearance of over fifty Predators, and a Predator King.
• Rob Liefeld:
  • Dooms IV, an "ecological superhero film" based on Rob Liefeld and Kurt Hathaway's short lived Image comic. The movie was supposed to take place after the comic, and was planned to be produced by Amblin Entertainment and directed by Steven Spielberg.
  • Movies based on Youngblood (Image Comics), to be directed by Brett Ratner, Bloodstrike, and Godyssey, based on an Avengelyne story, were announced, but updates became sparse after 2013.
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show could have been considerably different in a number of ways:
  • Mick Jagger was originally slated to play Frank-N-Furter, before Tim Curry returned to the role.
  • Steve Martin originally auditioned for Brad Majors, while VINCENT FRIGGIN' PRICE auditioned for the Criminologist.
  • The creators asked Susan Sarandon to appear nude during "Touch-A Touch-A Touch Me," and she refused. (Ironically, as she would appear nude in many films later on.)
  • As is well known, the singing lips replaced a rather dull sequence of sci-fi film clips meant to accompany "Science Fiction Double Feature."
• The entire "Rocky Horror" franchise may have worked out differently, had Richard O'Brien's 1979 sequel "Rocky Horror Shows His Heels" been accepted by Fox and not mutilated into "The Brad and Janet Show" (which in turn became Shock Treatment). Oddly enough, the unmade 1994 sequel "Revenge of the Old Queen" was a direct sequel to this script rather than acknowledging any of Shock Treatment, which has led to quite a bit of confusion from fans who have read it.
  • Fan club founder Sal Piro once joked that if the terrible "Heels" script had seen production, the Rocky fan-base might not exist today. The relatively few fans who are aware of the contents of the script (which is kept under wraps for legal reasons) tend to agree with this sentiment.
  • No-budget Rocky fan film "Bedroom Scenes," which consists only of three individuals (Magenta, Columbia and an interviewer) conversing, was originally written as a much more involved film in which a character wakes up in Magenta and Columbia's bedroom, unaware of how he got there. He would then witness the events of RHPS unfold from 'behind the scenes,' culminating in his failure to prevent Columbia's murder.
    • Prior to becoming its own script, the character waking up in Magenta and Columbia's bedroom was originally a brief dream sequence in the script for an unmade indie flick titled "Hopelessly Devoted," which got as far as seeking music rights and location scouting before one of the lead actors passed away suddenly.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra: Rapper Common was offered the role of Heavy Duty's cousin Roadblock, but film screenwriter, Stuart Beattie, chose Heavy Duty instead.
• G.I. Joe: Retaliation was originally slated for release in 2012, but was held back a year to do some reshoots with Channing Tatum, expanding Duke's role in the film. Carrie Vaughn suggests this expansion must have come at the cost of other scenes (such as a possible reaction shot from the British Prime Minister when London was destroyed or any characterization for Flint at all) which had to be cut to stay at a 110-minute running time.
• There were scenes in the script for The Dreamers depicting much more blatant sexual relations between the characters of Matthew and Theo, but they were not filmed. Bernardo Bertolucci said, "The gay sex was in the first script, but I had a feeling that it was just too much stuff. It became redundant." Michael Pitt said in interview, "It was in the script and it's what I'd signed to do. But they said we weren't going to do that."
• Universal had a One Step Beyond movie in the works in 1983, but according to Paul Bartel Steven Spielberg indicated he wasn't too keen on another movie based on an anthology TV show coming out in competition with the one he was doing at Warner Bros... and as Starburst wrote, "at Universal, whatever Steven wants, Steven gets."
• In the mid-1990s, Ted Turner was planning to get a Gilligan's Island movie produced with Adam Sandler as Gilligan and Chris Farley as The Skipper. Though the idea never got passed the development stage, you can't help but imagine what the end result would have been with Sandler and Farley's on-screen chemistry.
• The entire career of George Lucas might not have happened. In high school, he had aspirations of being a race car driver and did amateur races. Just before graduation, he was involved in a serious crash that destroyed his car. (Ironically, he survived because he was thrown from the wreck due to his seat belt failing.) After the crash, he decided to make movies instead. Interesting because there are two other possible outcomes: he might have become a race car driver or he could have died. Lucas had also planned to become a pilot and filled out an application to join the Air Force. When he took his physical, he found out that he was diabetic and was turned down.
• In the 1950's, Warner Bros. intended to film a number of titles in 3-D but didn't due to the trend dying. Titles that could have been in 3-D included East of Eden, the 1954 version of A Star Is Born (1954), The High and the Mighty and Mister Roberts.
• World War Z:
  • An early treatment for the film (which was leaked in 2009) was much closer to the book, and had Brad Pitt's character (Gerry Lane) interviewing survivors after the outbreak.
  • Ed Harris and Bryan Cranston were originally intended to star in the film, but scheduling issues kept them from participating.
  • The last forty minutes of the movie were reshot when it became clear that there were much deeper plot issues than the filmmakers originally thought. Everything from the point where Gerry boards the plane leUnsortedFilmaving Israel is completely different. In the original version, the plane not only doesn't crash, but lands safely in Moscow. The passengers are rounded up by the military and are conscripted to fight the infected, and Gerry's phone is taken away. There's a Time Skip showing that he's formed an anti-infected unit that is utilizing the cold weather to take out as many of them as possible, and he later saves Segan from a Russian soldier who tries to rape her. He then gets his phone back and calls his wife, only to discover that she's selling her body to keep their kids safe in a refugee camp. The end of the movie had Gerry, Segan and a British soldier named Simon boarding a boat and traveling to the U.S. to rescue Gerry's family.
  • Matthew Fox (who appears in one scene of the film as the paratrooper who saves Gerry during the rooftop escape) originally had a much larger role as the man Kirin is prostituting herself to in the refugee camp in exchange for safety. He would have appeared in the original ending (and was likely planned for a sequel), but most of his scenes were cut.
  • The film originally had a more breakneck pace, with very little time focusing on character relationships. Several scenes (including Gerry and his family having breakfast, and a phone call Gerry makes to Kirin) were added to the film during the reshoots.
• Originally, Elysium was about escaping genetic experiments getting out into the real world from a factory, the eponymous Elysium (which sounds a lot like Neil Blomkamp's commercial for Adidas).
  • Blomkamp originally wanted Eminem for the lead but the latter dropped out after they couldn't film in Detroit.
  • Kruger was originally going to be an android, then he was changed to a human who would be turned into a cyborg after getting horribly injured, until they finally settled for having him be a regular human with a powered exoskeleton.
  • The original process for attaching the exoskeleton would have been far more graphic, requiring removing the subject's internal organs and replacing them with mechanical parts, and cutting off the top of the subject's skull in order to plug the control systems directly into the brain. This was likely dropped because it would pretty much eliminate Max's entire reason to want to go to Elysium.
• At the 2009 D23 Expo, Robin Williams announced that he would star in a Disney comedy called Wedding Banned, which would have been about a divorced couple who kidnap their daughter from her own wedding so she wouldn't make the same mistakes they did. It ended up being cancelled after the failure of Old Dogs.
• Quentin Tarantino was at one point interested in making a movie about Vic Vega aka Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs and Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction whom he revealed were brothers, it was to be titled "The Brothers V", the project was cancelled after Michael Madsen and John Travolta had aged to the point where they no longer looked like they did in their respective films.
• The Lone Ranger (2013) was originally supposed to have a plot focusing more on supernatural elements and Native American mysticism, in keeping with the idea of Tonto being the big player. This mainly would've taken the form of werewolves, which would've explained the whole "silver bullet" thing. However, this draft was supposedly part of the initial $250 million proposal that Disney quickly shit-canned after John Carter underperformed; when the project was revamped to meet Disney's approval, it came more in line with the current script.
• Scottish director Lynne Ramsay was originally set to direct the film version of The Lovely Bones, and had written a script in which all the scenes of Susie in heaven are clearly shown as being in her grieving father's imagination, and where he has befriended Mr. Harvey, never suspecting him of Susie's murder.
• Bean would have ended with Mr. Bean returning to the National Gallery, only to find it abandoned, so he ends up mailing himself back to the Leary family (In truth, the staff of the Gallery staged the whole thing to drive Bean away).
• Dr. Strangelove:
  • A deleted scene gave the film a Framing Device of being made by aliens, based on records found in an Earth bomb shelter After the End.
  • In the nineties, Kubrick and Southern began to collaborate on a script for a sequel set decades later in the mineshaft, which they planned to pitch to Terry Gilliam.
• There was buzz of a movie version of the novel Gates of Fire, about the 300 Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae, with George Clooney and Bruce Willis and directed by Michael Mann. It dined in Development Hell long enough to be shelved because of 300.
• The rights to the remake of the 1976 movie Sparkle were bought by Whitney Houston's production company in the 1990s, and Aaliyah was intended to play the title character, however, she passed away in 2001 before the movie started production. In 2005 Raven-Symoné was also in talks to star in the movie, which was finally released in 2012 with Jordin Sparks as the lead.
• Chris Pratt initially turned down the role of Peter Quill in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) because he felt like he was too fat for the lead role. He eventually ended up losing over 60 pounds to take the role. Pratt also auditioned for the role of Jake Sully in Avatar (the role which went to Sam Worthington) and Kirk in Star Trek (2009) (the role that went to Chris Pine). This may be somewhat of a subversion since Chris Pratt didn't think he would get either of those roles anyway, also mentioning a G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra audition that he labeled as "embarrassing".
• Otto Preminger liked to have several film projects going at once, and he never got around to filming many of them:
  • In 1954, Preminger traveled to India, and then began work on The Wheel, a Hindu drama in which Mahatma Gandhi was to "play a symbolic role."
  • Preminger acquired the film rights to Alexander Fedoroff's novel The Side of the Angels, and had Elmer Bernstein compose a Title Theme Tune that could have been used to promote it. Nothing more came of this project.
• Bruce Almighty: The original script contains a lot more scenes that didn't make it into the final movie. These include: Bruce answering lots of prayers individually (including God showing him the consequences), Grace's breasts growing twice more (and going back to normal after a prayer), Bruce "pleasuring" Susan right before they go on air, a lot more stories covered during the "A Little Less Conversation" montage, people confessing their sins to Bruce, and an entire new character called "Bobby", who works at Channel 7, and is damned by Bruce, causing him to become possessed by a demon.
• Director Russell Mulcahy, planning on a transition from music videos to films, fully intended to helm a film adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novel The Wild Boys with Duran Duran doing the musical score for the film. Unfortunately (or fortunately if you're not a fan of Mulchay or DD) the project never got off the ground, leaving only one song, which happened to be one of the best-selling singles of Duran's career ("Wild Boys"). Later on Mulcahy got to collaborate with another band on a film project that actually succeeded, Highlander, with the music provided by Queen.
• The Slumber Party Massacre from 1982 was written by a feminist activist and it was supposed to be a spoof of the slasher genre. Instead, it was shot as a serious film. The end result is a mixed bag with more Fanservice than any other slasher film of its day.
• There was an alternate ending to Titanic where, when Rose goes to drop the Heart back into the ocean, her daughter and the scientists race out to stop her, thinking she's going to jump again. She reveals that she had the Heart the entire time and that she had thought of selling it for years, only to think about Cal and that she didn't need money to be happy. It also reveals the main reason she joined them was so that she could finally send the Heart back to the Titanic. The lead scientist convinces her to let him hold it for awhile, though she warns him that he's looking for treasure in all of the wrong places. When he finally allows her to take it back, then she throws it into the ocean, which highly pisses off one of the other scientists. The lead scientist, though, finally understands and starts laughing before asking Rose's daughter if she wanted to dance.
• Minority Report started out in the hands of Carolco Pictures who intended it to be a direct sequel to Total Recall (1990). Apparently the movie would have been set on a terraformed Mars, where mutants with psychic powers were abducted and used to power the Pre-Crime system. They even intended to bring Arnold Schwarzenegger back to play Quaid as the main character. They apparently even had a script written, but then Carlco went out of business and the rights went to 20th Century Fox. It stayed in Development Hell with them for years until Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise came on board. Spielberg rewrote the script from scratch, turning it into a standalone movie.
• The original script for Red State had the horns sounding during the climax be the signal for the literal Apocalypse, with the Five Pointers and the ATF agents (save John Goodman) all being killed by angels as the Four Horsemen appear on the horizon. They didn't have the budget to pull that off, so the ending was changed to the surviving Five Pointers arrested and Goodman's ATF agent being debriefed. The horns were handwaved as a prank by the compound's neighbors.
• In Dracula Untold, the Master Vampire was never revealed as the Roman Emperor Caligula as originally intended, nor was Charlie Cox who was cast as a young Caligula even in the final cut. Samantha Barks was cast as the Baba Yaga, but also doesn't appear.
• Michael Chabon pitched short movie treatments for the Fantastic Four and the X-Men. The Fantastic Four was to be set in an Alternate History which, tonally, "was forever November 21st, 1963" and, plot-wise, was to involve Doctor Doom travelling back in time to assassinate a key world figure in order to remake the world into a grim dystopia that was pretty much the real world. Soviet agents were also going to be involved somehow.
• Vampire Academy:
  • The film title was originally Vampire Academy: Blood Sisters, the Blood Sisters part was later dropped.
  • In the original draft, Christian was Blond and Jesse was Latin, Needless to say author Richelle Mead was not impressed.
• Wes Craven had written a script for a film adaptation of Flowers in the Attic back in the '80s, but it was rejected. While mostly faithful to the book, there were a few changes:
  • The Dollangangers were renamed to the 'Chapmans' for unknown reasons.
  • It was much more violent (And occasionally less serious) than the novel, including Chris being attacked by a wolfhound belonging to the Grandmother's watchman Doberman, and Cathy being tied up and left in a bath tub full of scolding hot water.
  • The script had a bigger focus on Chris than in the book, sharing the role of main character with Cathy.
  • Unlike the eventual film adaptation, the Brother–Sister Incest between Cathy and Chris was kept. In addition, Chris did not end up raping Cathy.
  • The climax was also changed. Like the 1987 adaptation, it takes place during Corine's wedding. The remaining children had to deal with Doberman while getting out of Foxworth Hall, and then revealing themselves as Corine's children right in front of the wedding guests and Corine's fiance. At the end, Doberman would have fallen from the roof and fell on top of the Grandmother, killing her.
• Colin Firth was originally cast as the voice of the titular bear in Paddington (2014). However both he and the producers came to the mutual conclusion that his voice wasn't the right fit for the character, and he ended up being replaced by Ben Whishaw instead. This was somewhat awkward as there had already been posters printed out and distributed with Colin's name on them, but there were no trailers featuring Colin's voice. However most critics agree that Ben's softer voice was more suited for Paddington than Colin's more regal voice.
  • A similar incident occurred with Al Pacino with Despicable Me 2, who was going to voice the Big Bad. Pacino had creative differences with the filmmakers and eventually dropped out, but the movie was so far into post-production that it was too late to replace Pacino's name that was prominently shown in all the trailers. Benjamin Bratt came in and did the role just a mere month before release, so close that his role wasn't advertised at all.
• During the earliest stages of development for Annie (2014), Willow Smith was in talks to play Annie, with her father in the Warbucks/Stacks role. But it was later decided that Willow was too old for the role. Quvenzhané Wallis (fresh from her Oscar-nominated role in Beasts of the Southern Wild) stepped in to play Annie, and Jamie Foxx auditioned for Stacks, a role which he eventually got when Will Smith decided not to act in the film (he's still credited as a producer - after all, the film is associated with Overbrook Entertainment).
• Phase IV was to have had an impressionistic epilogue, storyboards for which were captioned "Man Controlled (Paradise Lost)," "Transformation," "Rebirth" and "Man at One with Nature (Paradise Regained)." This sequence had to be abandoned due to lack of funding.
• According to emails leaked in the Sony hack, a scene in Pixels where video game characters destroy the Great Wall of China was cut from the final product because the executives felt it would lead to Chinese backlash.
• The Rocketeer: Johnny Depp was Disney's preferred choice to star as Cliff Secord before Bill Campbell was cast. His getting passed over was part of why he was eventually cast as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean. Kurt Russell, Kevin Costner, and Bill Paxton were also considered.
• Jupiter Ascending:
  • After Natalie Portman dropped out, Rooney Mara was considered for Jupiter but ultimately Mila Kunis got cast.
  • Joseph Gordon-Levitt was considered for a role but it's unknown which role exactly. Most likely Caine or one of the Abrasax siblings.
• In the mid-1990s there was a semi-seriously pitched idea for a live-action Peanuts movie. The idea was to take cues from the theatrical adaptation You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown, which features adults playing all the roles, including Snoopy (who does not wear a dog suit). Rumors swirled that Charlie Brown, Lucy and Linus would be portrayed by... Dustin Hoffman, Brooke Shields and Jack Nicholson, respectively. The casting "choices" were widely ridiculed, and nothing was heard about the project after that. In 2015, The Peanuts Movie was released — but it was a traditional (albeit souped-up) animated feature like the ones from 1968 to 1980, with Kristin Chenoweth as the only big (voice) star (and in a relatively minor role, too).
• David Lean:
  • His next film after The Bridge on the River Kwai was a biopic of Mahatma Gandhi, produced by Sam Spiegel and starring Alec Guinness.
  • He spent most of the '70s trying to get his two-part Mutiny on the Bounty remake off the ground. He scouted locations in Tahiti, built a replica ship and commissioned Robert Bolt to write the screenplay. The main problem? Money. At various points Dino De Laurentiis, Joseph E. Levine and even Lean's old sparring mate Sam Spiegel were tapped to produce. But Lean's refusal to rein in the budget or scale back the script scared all of them away from the project. Robert Bolt's stroke in 1979 finally convinced Lean to abandon the project. Eventually the project morphed into The Bounty (1984), directed by Roger Donaldson and starring Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins. Though based off Bolt's screenplay, this film was much smaller in both scope and budget than what Lean originally envisioned.
  • He was to film an adaptation of Nostromo, with Steven Spielberg producing it for Warner Bros., but Lean died a few weeks before the principal photography was to begin. Marlon Brando, Paul Scofield, Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole, Isabella Rossellini, Christopher Lambert, Dennis Quaid and with Georges Corraface as the title role, had all been set to star. Lean also wanted Alec Guinness to play Dr. Monygham, but the aged actor turned him down in a letter from 1989: "I believe I would be disastrous casting. The only thing in the part I might have done well is the crippled crab-like walk."
• The studio originally wanted a white actor to play the titular character in Blade, but screenwriter David Goyer argued against this. Other candidates Mike DeLuca suggested for the lead role included Denzel Washington and Laurence Fishburne.
• Blade: Trinity:
  • German director Oliver Hirschbiegel was considered to direct after the film's original director left by order of Wesley Snipes. By that time, he had signed a contract with Constantin Film to direct Downfall, which stated he could not move on to other ventures during production of the film. Hirschbiegel decided not to bail from Downfall after legal action was threatened against him. This ultimately paid off for Hirschbiegel in the end. Downfall was universally-acclaimed and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, while Blade: Trinity was critically panned, flopped at the box office and was the indirect Franchise Killer for the Blade Trilogy.
  • Rachel van Helsing from the comics was originally going to be one of the three leads, but she was replaced with an Expy named Abigail Whistler in order to avoid inviting comparisons with the Van Helsing movie.
  • The plot for the movie was originally going to be an After the End story featuring Blade protecting the last remnants of humanity after vampires have taken over the world. The studio vetoed the idea because they thought it would be too bleak and expensive.
• Paper Towns:
  • There was a brief idea to have Ansel Elgort play Gus Margo's security guard friend as a nod to his role in The Fault in Our Stars, but was thought it would be too confusing. Instead he plays Mason the gas station clerk.
  • John Green revealed the existence of a very different early draft (which he described as "terrible") where Q's love interest was Lacey instead of Margo.
• The Shawshank Redemption:
  • Tom Hanks turned down the role of Andy Dufresne.
  • Clint Eastwood, Harrison Ford, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford were all considered to star as Red before Morgan Freeman was selected.
• The title role in Daredevil was initially won by Matt Damon. However, Damon ended up having Creative Differences with the director Mark Steven Johnson and left. Colin Farrell, Edward Norton, Guy Pearce and Vin Diesel were also candidates for the role up until Ben Affleck stepped in.
• Fifty Shades of Grey:
  • Charlie Hunnam was originally cast as Christian Grey, but left due to creative differences.
  • Robert Pattinson was said to be E.L. James' personal choice for Christian Grey, and Ryan Gosling was the studio's first choice.
  • Joe Wright, Steven Soderbergh, and Gus Van Sant were all considered to direct.
  • At the end of the film, the director came up with what could have been quite a Moment of Awesome as Ana stops Christian from following her into the elevator just by saying their safeword "Red." Sadly, E.L. James refused to let them do it.
• Adrian Cronauer says Good Morning, Vietnam was originally pitched as a TV series, an Armed Forces version of WKRP in Cincinnati, but couldn't generate any interest. He retooled the series idea into a made for TV movie and couldn't sell that, either. Even though one of the top shows at the time was M*A*S*H, Cronauer was repeatedly told that war isn't funny. Then a copy of the movie screenplay got the attention of Robin Williams.
• Promotional images for a court scene in The Children's Hour exist however the scene was deleted for the final product.
• Divergent:
  • Miles Teller auditioned for the role of Four, but producers thought he was a better fit for Eric. He turned it down, feeling he couldn't be intimidating against Theo James. Shailene Woodley personally persuaded him to take the role of Peter instead.
  • A love scene was filmed between Tris and Four, but cut to preserve the PG-13 rating.
  • Similarly Edward being stabbed in the eye was also filmed, but cut to avoid an R rating. The director says that it interrupted the flow of the scene anyway.
  • Kate Winslet wanted to return for The Divergent Series: Allegiant and let the filmmakers know she was available to cameo. They ultimately decided against it.
  • Neil Burger was to direct all the movies. But, overwhelmed by post production commitments to Divergent, he backed out of The Divergent Series: Insurgent (which was greenlit hurriedly after high advance ticket sales).
• The Maze Runner:
  • Catherine Hardwicke was originally set to direct until Wes Ball came on board. Ball had been looking to direct a feature-length version of a short film he had made called Ruin. As the tone was so similar to The Maze Runner, he was asked to direct the film adaptation.
  • Dylan O'Brien almost didn't get the role of Thomas. Wes Ball rejected him after seeing photos from Teen Wolf, dismissing him as a Pretty Boy. However he saw a photo of Dylan with his head shaved from another film and was persuaded to meet with him. The two frequently joke about Dylan's "MTV hair" preventing him from getting the part.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay:
  • Jodie Foster was strongly considered for Alma Coin before Julianne Moore was cast.
  • The ending to the Part 1 was meant to be the opening of Part 2. The original ending was to be when Boggs knocks Peeta out and the movie fades to black. It was felt that was too big of a cliff hanger.
  • Part 1 was going to open with a scene where Peeta would tell President Snow that he doesn't support the rebellion or Katniss' role in it (not knowing about the atrocities committed by Snow yet).
• Mind Ripper started life as a sequel to The Hills Have Eyes (1977), with the plot being that Pluto (a recurring cannibal from two previous installments) was being exploited by the army in the desert base which the film takes place in. Despite the end product abandoning the connection, the film is still called The Hills Have Eyes 3 in some areas.
• Felicity Jones was strongly considered for the role of Ava in Ex Machina.
• The Fault in Our Stars:
  • The scenes in Amsterdam were intended to be shot on location. However, filmmakers were intimidated by the poor October weather - and also denied permission to film inside the Anne Frank House. As a result, a replica was built, and Pennsylvania doubled for Amsterdam.
  • Mae Whitman was John Green's preferred actress to play Hazel. Nonetheless, he was blown away by Shailene Woodley's audition and gave her the Approval of God.
  • A scene was filmed featuring an argument between Gus and his mother right before the trip to Amsterdam, that also features in the book. It would have acted as Foreshadowing that Gus's cancer has come back.
• Bruce Lee was originally going to star in a live-action movie update of Charlie Chan titled "Number One Son", playing the role of Chan's first-born son, who would have been portrayed as a Chinese James Bond. The idea was scrapped when the Batman TV show became popular and The Green Hornet TV show was created (in which Lee played the role of Kato).
• George Clooney was considered for the role of Nick Fury right around the time Fury (MAX) dealing with its version of the character—and said mini killed the deal as Clooney was disgusted by some of the stuff in it, including a scene of Fury strangling the main villain with his own intestines, and bowed out of the project.
• The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones:
  • Alex Pettyfer turned down the part of Jace Wayland. Among others who auditioned were Alexander Ludwig, Xavier Samuel, Douglas Booth and Lucas Till before Jamie Campbell Bower won the role.
  • Matthew Daddario, who would later play Alec Lightwood in the tv adaptation of the books, auditioned for a part in the film.
• The part that Kurt Russell played in the 1988 crime thriller Tequila Sunrise was originally written for and offered to Los Angeles Lakers head coach Pat Riley. Seriously. Riley had no regrets about turning down the part, saying about Russell, "He plays me better than I can play me."
• The movie Dredd was meant to have Judge Death in it, but Fox turned it down, wanting to have something simple instead of dealing with a creature like him.
• Boogie Nights: The role of Dirk Diggler was first offered to Leonardo DiCaprio. When he turned it down in favor of Titanic (1997), he suggested Mark Wahlberg for the role.
• There was originally to be a duet in the first High School Musical that was basically a song fight between Ms. Drabus and Coach Bolton. Ms. Darbus was played by Alyson Reed, a former Broadway actress, and this cut meant that she didn't get to sing a note in any of the three movies.
• An early draft of Get Out (2017) had a Sudden Downer Ending where the hero Chris Washington is arrested for murdering the villains and sent to jail, unable to prove his innocence. Out of respect for Police Brutality victims, Jordan Peele decided on a more uplifting one where he is rescued by his best friend Rodney.
• In the original ending for Se7en, John Doe holds Mills hostage before shooting and killing him, then Somerset tortures doe by shooting him in the arms and legs before burning him alive.
• In Natural Born Killers, Mickey and Mallory were originally going to be killed by the same serial killer that helped them escape the prison.
• Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights was originally going to be a stirring and gritty war drama about the Cuban Revolution, focusing on a fifteen year old American girl in Cuba and the difficulties of the revolution being led by the youth (virtually all the revolutionaries being under 30).
• Ready Player One (2018):
  • Christopher Nolan, Robert Zemeckis, Matthew Vaughn, Peter Jackson and Edgar Wright were all considered to direct the film.
  • Before his untimely death Gene Wilder was offered the role of James Halliday, but he politely declined. Michael Keaton was also considered.
  • Nick Robinson, Nat Wolff and Dalton Vaughn were considered for the role of Wade Watts.
  • Elle Fanning and Lola Kirke were considered for the role of Art3mis.
  • The film's score was originally going to be composed by John Williams but due to scheduling conflicts, he left and was replaced with Alan Silvestri.
• Kong: Skull Island:
  • The original opening scene was supposed be set during WWII with an army battling on the beaches of Skull Island before stumbling upon a big ape who looked very much like the original King Kong and shooting him, before the King Kong from this movie would show up, alive and bigger than the original giant ape. While the film kept the WWII setting for the opening scene, it was changed to Marlow and Gunpei fighting only to be interrupted by Kong.
  • J. K. Simmons and Michael Keaton were initially attached to the project but left before filming started. As such, they were replaced by Samuel L. Jackson and John C. Reilly respectively.
  • There was originally going to be a scene where the main characters stumble upon a "boat village", populated by people who have gotten washed up or shipwrecked on the island.
• Tina Fey's original script for Mean Girls was intended as an R-rated film, due to Fey wanting to write a truthful high school experience. Several lines were rewritten or cut altogether in the final film:
  • The boy who comes up to Cady and asks "Is your muffin buttered?" originally asked "Is your cherry popped?". According to Fey, the MPAA was more comfortable with the former since it was made-up.
  • The part in the Burn Book about Amber D'Alessio making out with a hot dog was originally that she masturbated with a hot dog. If one looks closely during the "Made out with a hot dog? Oh my god, that was one time!" line, you can see the line was dubbed and that the actress' lips still read "masturbated."
  • A subplot about a student who takes ecstasy named Barry was cut entirely.
• Cloud Atlas: Quite a few things, both book and movie, according to this piece by Slashfilm.
  • The book was supposed to have 9 stories, starting all the way back in the 12 century.
  • Dr. Ovid was supposed to be played by Tom Hanks.
  • Ben Whishaw was supposed to appear as a business man in Sonmi's story.
  • James D'Arcy had a bigger role in Cavendish's tale before it got cut down.
  • Natalie Portman, James McAvoy and Ian McKellen were once involved in the project at one point.
• Flash Gordon (1980):
  • Sam J. Jones was at least third choice to play Flash. Kurt Russell was offered the role, but chose to do Escape from New York instead. Arnold Schwarzenegger was considered, but rejected, due to his thick Austrian accent.
  • Dino De Laurentiis wanted Pink Floyd to do the movie's score. He didn't even know who Queen was.
  • Sergio Leone was De Laurentiis' first choice as director. Leone declined because he felt the script wasn't faithful enough to the comic.
• In a case of "What could have been?" tag, Helena Bonham Carter was originally considered for the role of Bess McNeil in Breaking the Waves, but dropped out suddenly and was replaced with the then-unknown Emily Watson. Watson was initially considered for the role of Elizabeth I in Elizabeth, but was replaced by the then-largely unknown Cate Blanchett. Watson was also considered for the role of Amélie, (originally named Emily) but dropped out and was replaced by the then-unknown Audrey Tautou.
• Moulin Rouge!:
  • In early drafts, Satine was a Single Mom Stripper with a three-year-old son, whom Christian adopted after her death. Instead of the final Framing Device of Christian writing the story, the framing scenes would have shown an older Christian telling the story to the now-grown son.
  • Originally there was a scene between Christian and his father in England before Christian's departure for Paris, which would have featured Cat Stevens' "Father and Son." It was cut because Stevens refused to license the song, but the scene is included in the complete script on the Special Edition DVD.
• In Elf, the store Buddy worked in New York was actually Macy's. Macy's actually signed off on this under one condition - Santa couldn't be revealed as fake. The director wasn't keen on changing the script to accommodate this and pulled out.
• Journey into Space:
  • After the success of The Quatermass Xperiment, the film remake of the 1953 BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment, Hammer expressed interest in producing a Journey into Space film. However, the studio did not think that the existing scripts were suitable for adaptation and instead requested that Charles Chilton write a new one. He was unable to do so due to his volume of work at the BBC.
  • Also in 1955, London Films and Ealing Studios separately considered producing a Journey into Space film.
• Hellboy (2019):
  • The movie originally began production as the second sequel to 2008's Hellboy II: The Golden Army, but Creative Differences led to Guillermo del Toro and Ron Perlman both leaving, thus causing a long hiatus until it was decided to reboot following the rise of R-rated superhero movies.
  • Ed Skrein was originally cast to play Ben Daimio, but dropped out when he learned that his character is of Asian descent in the comics and didn't want to whitewash his role. Daniel Dae Kim took his place.
  • Doug Jones was offered a cameo but was unable to participate due to commitments to Star Trek: Discovery.
• Following Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948) and Richard III, Laurence Olivier planned a film adaptation of Macbeth with himself in the title role and Vivien Leigh as Lady Macbeth. Sadly, the box office disappointment of Richard III and the death of one of the financiers put an end to it.
  • Sean Connery agreed to return as James Bond for Diamonds Are Forever in exchange for United Artists greenlighting two projects of his choosing. One got made - the gritty crime thriller The Offense. The unmade film - an adaptation of Macbeth with an all-Scottish cast. Alas, it was abandoned following Roman Polański's adaptation.
  • In the early seventies, Richard Burton told Olivier of his plan to adapt Macbeth to the big screen with Elizabeth Taylor as his Lady.
• Michael Winner planned a Bio Pic of William The Conqueror with Oliver Reed in the lead role. It was scrapped when they couldn't get funding.
• There were plans for a remake of The Seven Year Itch in The '80s starring Al Pacino.
• In the early 1970s, Paramount had plans to remake Double Indemnity with Robert Redford in the Walter Neff role. The project never got off the ground.
• In the mid-'80s a remake of My Darling Clementine was announced starring Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck, but it never materialized.
• In the late 1980s, Charlton Heston considered starring in a remake of Ride the High Country with Clint Eastwood.
• John Boorman planned an adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1968 with Irvin Winkler producing for MGM, who bought the rights for $200,000. It would have starred Michael Caine and Terence Stamp in the lead roles, Laurence Olivier as the Player King, Albert Finney as Claudius and Maggie Smith as Gertrude. Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould also wanted to star but MGM never greenlit the movie.
• Behold, the unmade projects of John Hughes:
  • National Lampoon's Jaws 3/People 0 (1979). A documentary spoof of the making of Jaws. Due to a lawsuit from Steven Spielberg looming if it was made, Universal Studios scrapped it.
  • National Lampoon's The Joy of Sex (1981). A comedy anthology film about the life of a young man obsessed with sex, even when he enters adulthood. It was originally to star John Belushi and be directed by Penny Marshall, but when a reluctant Belushi decided to go ahead with the film, he died from a drug overdose the next morning and Paramount did not produce the movie. The script was eventually re-written as a teenage sex comedy under the title Joy Of Sex in 1984. Matty Simmons was involved with the movie, but ordered to have his name and the National Lampoon moniker taken off the film after he saw the final cut.
  • The History of Ohio from the Beginning of Time to the End of the Universe (early 80s). A dramatic adaptation of Lampoon’s Sunday Newspaper Parody, an Onion-like sendup of a small-town paper.
  • Lovecats (1984) A movie that would've starred Molly Ringwald, named after The Cure song of the same name. The plot is unknown, but a mixtape of what the soundtrack would've been was made by Hughes to give Ringwald an idea of what the film would be like.
  • The Last Good Year (1984). A movie with Anthony Michael Hall set in 1962, the titular last good year before The British Invasion. The movie would follow America's cultural shift following the Invasion. Just like Lovecats, a mixtape of the supposed soundtrack was made by Hughes.
  • The New Kid (1986). A movie meant to star Anthony Michael Hall as the new kid in college. Passed over by Howard Deutch in favor of Pretty in Pink.
  • Oil and Vinegar (1987). A comedy-drama road movie meant to star Matthew Broderick and Molly Ringwald. Broderick would play a groom driving out of town to a wedding with Ringwald as a hitchhiker that he picks up. They both then talk about their personal problems in the car for the remainder of the trip.
  • Bartholomew Vs. Neff (1991). A comedy meant to star John Candy and Sylvester Stallone as feuding neighbors. Likely passed over after Curly Sue received negative reception from critics.
  • Black Cat Bone: The Return of Huckleberry Finn (1991). A modern retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  • Peanuts (1992). A supposed live-action adaptation of the titular comic strip. Likely canceled in favor of Dennis the Menace.
  • The Bee (1994). A Disney movie about a man, played by Daniel Stern, and his daylong battle with a simple bee.
  • Tickets (1996). A group of teenagers pull an all-nighter in sub-zero temperatures waiting for tickets to a legendary rock concert. Never made due to a similar film, Detroit Rock City, entering production first.
  • Grisbys Go Broke (2002). A middle-class family lose all their money and are forced to spend the holidays frugally. It was rumored that Paramount was going to make this movie upon the passing of Hughes, but no news has been heard since.
• Behold the unmade films of Walter Hill:
  • Lloyd Williams and His Brother aka The Drifters - a Western written circa 1971. Hill says Sam Peckinpah was considering making it after The Getaway but decided to do Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid instead so Hill used material from the script in Hard Times.
  • The Last Gun - a Western written with Roger Spottiswoode (circa 1977).
  • Lone Star from the play by James M. McClure to star Powers Boothe and Sigourney Weaver (1981).
  • The Last Good Kiss based on a novel by James Crumley (early 1980s).
  • An adaptation of Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (early 1980s).
  • An adaptation of Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 (1980s).
  • A remake of The Magnificent Seven (1960) (1984).
  • A remake of The Killer (1989), with Richard Gere as the assassin and with Denzel Washington as the cop. Left the project due to Creative Differences.
  • American Iron (1989/1990) - a film set in the world of bikers written with Marc Brunet, Daniel Pyne, and John Mankiewicz.
  • Red, White, Black and Blue (1997) - rewrite by Hill of an Andrew Kevin Walker script.
  • Vengeance of Mine - a contemporary thriller set in Las Vegas.
  • A proposed remake of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?.
• Michael Cimino claimed to have written fifty scripts in his time. Amongst his unmade films:
  • His dream project was an adaptation of The Fountainhead. Taking its cue from more than the novel, it was largely modeled on architect Jørn Utzon's troubled building of the Sydney Opera House, as well as the construction of the Empire State Plaza in Albany, New York. He wrote the script in between Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and The Deer Hunter, and hoped to have Clint Eastwood play Howard Roark.
  • He spent two and a half years working with James Toback on The Life and Dreams of Frank Costello, a biopic on the life of mafia boss Costello, for 20th Century Fox. "We got a good screenplay together," said Cimino, "but again, the studio, 20th Century Fox in this case, was going through management changes and the script was put aside." Cimino added, "Costello took a long time because Costello himself had a long, interesting life. The selection of things to film was quite hard.
  • While working on the Costello biopic, he wrote a biography on Janis Joplin called Pearl, also for 20th Century Fox. "It's almost a musical," replied Cimino, "I was working with Bo Goldman on that one and we were doing a series of rewrites."
  • In 1987, he attempted to make an epic saga about the 1920s Irish rebel Michael Collins, but the film had to be abandoned due to budget, weather and script problems. The film was to have been funded by Nelson Entertainment.
  • He started pre-production work on Santa Ana Wind, a contemporary romantic drama set in L.A. The start date for shooting was to have been early December 1987. The screenplay was written by Floyd Mutrux and the film was to be bankrolled by Nelson Entertainment, which also backed Collins. Cimino's representative added that the film was "about the San Fernando Valley and the friendship between two guys" and "more intimate" than Cimino's previous big-budget work like Heaven's Gate and the yet-to-be-released The Sicilian. However, Nelson Holdings International Ltd. cancelled the project after disclosing that its banks, including Security Pacific National Bank, had reduced the company's borrowing power after Nelson failed to meet certain financial requirements in its loan agreements. A spokesman for Nelson said the cancellation occurred "in the normal course of business," but declined to elaborate.
  • He was in talks to direct The Yellow Jersey, a bicycle racing drama with a script by Carl Foreman and starring Dustin Hoffman. The project was ultimately abandoned as it proved logistically difficult to shoot during the actual Tour de France.
  • One of his final projects was writing a three-hour-long adaptation of Andre Malraux's 1933 novel Man's Fate, about the early days of the Chinese Revolution. The story was to have focused on several Europeans living in Shanghai during the tragic turmoil that characterized the onset of China's Communist regime. "The screenplay, I think, is the best one I've ever done," Cimino once said, adding that he had "half the money; [we're] trying to raise the other half." The roughly $25 million project was to be filmed wholly on location in Shanghai and would have benefited from the support of China's government, which said it would provide some $2 million worth of local labor costs. Cimino had been scouting locations in China since 2001.
• The following projects were announced for Errol Flynn but were not made:
  • Danton (1936) based on Dantons Death and to be produced by Max Reinhardt and directed by William Diertele.
  • The White Rajah (late 1930s) – based on the life of Sir James Brooke based on Flynn's own story.
  • The Romantic Adventure (1938) – a romantic comedy with Joan Blondell based on an original story by Jerry Wald and Maurice Leo.
  • The Outpost (1939) based on Caesar's Wife by Somerset Maugham starring Flynn and Geraldine Fitzgerald directed by Michael Curtiz.
  • Shanghai (1940) from a story by Somerset Maugham.
  • Jupiter Laughs (1940) from the play by A.J. Cronin.
  • The Life of Simón Bolívar (1939–40) – possibly with Bette Davis.
  • The Sea Devil (1942) – a remake of The Sea Beast which was adaptation of Moby-Dick.
  • Ghosts Don't Leave Footprints (1941) – sequel to Footsteps in the Dark.
  • To the Last Man (early 1940s) – comedy with Alexis Smith.
  • The Devil, George and Rosie (1943) – from a story by John Collier to star Flynn, Ann Sheridan and Humphrey Bogart.
  • The Frontiersman (circa 1945) – an original western by Alan Le May about the beginning of a riverboat operation in the Mississippi to be produced by Flynn and Mark Hellinger with Raoul Walsh directing.
  • Stallion Road (1945), based on a novel, with Ida Lupino.
  • Target Japan (1945) with producer Jerry Wald and director Raoul Walsh about a B-29 bombing crew.
  • The Man Without Friends (1945) based on story by Margaret Eckhard about a man accused of the murder of his wife to be produced by Henry Blanke and adapted by Catherine Turney.
  • untitled adventure film "in the Frank Buck tradition" shot off the coast of Mexico produced by Flynn.
  • Thunder Valley (1946) - a Western written by James Webb and produced by Owen Crump.
  • General Crack (circa 1947) – remake of a 1929 film originally starring John Barrymore.
  • Half Way House (circa 1947) – an "alpine thriller" by Frances Potter and Spencer Rice.
  • The Turquoise (circa 1948) with Claude Rains and Dorothy Malone based on the adventure novel by Anya Seton - set in the American southwest in the 1890s, written by Edmund North produced by William Jacobs.
  • The Candy Kid (1948) with producer Bill Jacobs - story of a gambler in the days of Diamond Jim Brady from a script by Borden Chase based on a magazine story by Michael MacDougall.
  • The Last of the Buccaneers (circa 1949) – a pirate movie based on a script by Flynn himself to be produced by Flynn, shot in technicolor with the star as a Robin Hood type pirate (not to be confused with the 1951 Paul Henreid film) story of the female pirate Mary Burns with Greer Garson (circa 1949) (he and Garson also discussed doing a Broadway play together).
  • The Man Who Cried (1950) – production with William Marshall described as a psychological thriller about the perfect crime which took place over four hours.
  • The Man from Sparta (1951) – movie to be shot in Italy about Spartacus.
  • The Bengal Tiger (1952).
  • Fire Over Africa (1952).
  • The Green Moss (1952) from a magazine serial by John Molloy to co-star Gordon Macrae directed by Roy del Ruth.
  • The Talisman from the novel by Sir Walter Scott (1953).
  • Abdulla the King (1953) in the title role with Dawn Addams directed by Gregory Ratoff.
  • Dragonfly (1953) – proposed adventure film from producer John Champion set in the Far East with Flynn as an air force officer whose command is threatened with desertion.
  • The Story of William Tell (1953) - an epic he was to produce and star in, shot in location in Italy. This was to be the directorial debut of acclaimed English cinematographer Jack Cardiff. The film was abandoned due to financial difficulty. Had the film been completed on time it would have been the first independent movie filmed in Cinema Scope. A little more than a minute of footage was shown on Turner Classic Movies in the early 1990s as part of a feature on Flynn, but that short clip itself is now lost as well. Flynn's estate have chosen to remain silent about it. A £10,000 model town set was built near Mont Blanc. The model ski resort was turned into a real ski resort that uses the film's production to lure tourists in every year, and is still active today.
  • The White Witch of Rose Hall (1954) – to be made with Herbert Wilcox based on a Jamaican legend about a female plantation owner who was a witch and killed her husbands – to be produced by Barry Mahon – Flynn was still working on it in 1957 saying he wanted Bob Evans to star and Charles Marquis Warren to direct.
  • Lord Vanity (late 1950s) – with Robert Wagner
  • Ten Days to Talara (1956) with the same director of The Big Boodle'' about an adventurer whose son is kidnapped.
  • untitled Debbie Reynolds project as her teetotal father (circa 1958).
• Who Killed Bambi: Formerly titled Anarchy in the U.K., the film would have been the Punk Rock equivalent of A Hard Day's Night starring The Sex Pistols. With a script by Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert. Only a brief scene was filmed featuring Sting (in his film debut) before it was abandoned. Ebert posted the whole script on his blog.
• Kevin Spacey's Gore Vidal biopic was at least partially completed, but thanks to his scandals, will most likely never see the light of day.
• When Harold Ramis guest-hosted At The Movies, he revealed that John Belushi's big ambition was to star in a biopic of Ludwig van Beethoven.
• For a period of time in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Arnold Schwarzenegger was attached to star in Sgt. Rock film, despite the seeming incongruity of an Austrian actor playing an American G.I. in World War II. In fact, the reason Hawkins is reading the comics in Predator is because Arnie had them onset for research. Screenplays were written by David Webb Peoples (1987), Steven E. De Souza (1988), John Milius (1993), and Brian Helgeland (1996), depicting Rock as having a German-American father and being able to speak German (a skill he uses to ambush the enemy). Joel Silver was going to produce.
• John Milius planned to make a biopic of Senator Joseph McCarthy entitled The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy, but it was never made. Warner Bros. wanted him to update Dirty Harry and he wanted them to fund a version of The Iliad.
  • He was going to direct a film about Alexander the Great starring Jean-Claude Van Damme but that was put on hold when a mini series on the same topic was made by Italian TV.
  • He wrote Harlot's Ghost, for Francis Ford Coppola based on a novel by Norman Mailer; Milius described it as "a cross between The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. It's about families and duplicity and danger, but this time provoked by the government.".
• Baz Luhrmann planned an Alexander the Great biopic starring Leonardo DiCaprio which was abandoned following Alexander.
• Bob Fosse's next film after Star 80 would have been a film about gossip columnist Walter Winchell starring Robert De Niro from a script by Michael Herr. He died before filming started.
  • He also planned a film adaptation of Chicago starring Goldie Hawn as Roxie Hart, Liza Minnelli as Velma Kelly and Frank Sinatra as Billy Flynn.
• Behold the unmade films of Alfred Hitchcock.
• There were attempts to adapt Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in The '70s starring Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi or Jack Nicholson and either Marlon Brando or Dennis Hopper.
• Orson Welles planned a film version of Out of Africa in The '50s starring Greta Garbo. Nicholas Roeg planned an adaptation in The '70s starring Julie Christie and Ryan O'Neal.
• There were talks of Ron Howard directing a Bill Hicks biopic starring Russell Crowe.
• Laurel and Hardy had several unmade films:
  • In 1938, Stan and the L&H staff writers began working on a story which had the team in a swashbuckling adventure on Devil's Island. Stan's then wife Illiana would have played the feminine lead. The idea was nixed after the writers had too much difficulty in completing the story.
  • During the 1940s, Laurel and Hardy wanted to star in a film adaptation of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
  • In 1942, Boson Blackie writer Paul Yawitz was hired by 20th Century Fox to submit a story for a Laurel and Hardy film. Me and My Shadow would have found the duo running around an amusement park, trying to save a baby from a couple of Nazi spies.
  • Around the same time Me and My Shadow was written, Chuck Roberts and Eugene Ling proposed another story for a Laurel and Hardy Fox film. It too would have found the team against Nazis, this time in a sanitarium in Switzerland.
  • Yet another L&H story proposed to Fox was a film adaptation of stage play By Jupiter. The film would have taken place in ancient Greece, where the population is entirely dominated by Hippolyta (a role intended for Martha Raye) and her female warriors. Stan and Ollie would have played the easily bullied Theseus and Hercules, who unsuccessfully attempt to steal Hippolyta's power.
  • Congratulations, another proposed L&H-Martha Raye vehicle would have found Stan running for governor.
  • Two proposed radio series: The Laurel and Hardy Show (which did result in a pilot episode being recorded) and Laurel & Hardy Go to the Moon.
  • An autobiography on the team, partially written by Laurel and partially written by Hardy.
  • Following the death of comedian Edgar Kennedy, RKO Pictures considered starring Oliver Hardy in The Average Man series of short comedies.
  • While on a trip in England, there was talk of starring the duo in a film adaptation of Robin Hood.
  • RKO Pictures wanted the duo to appear as the comic relief in the 1951 Technicolor musical Two Tickets to Broadway. However, the team was stuck in Paris filming Atoll K, which ultimately continued production months over schedule. RKO hired vaudevillians Joe Smith and Charley Dale as replacements.
  • In 1956, the team was in negotiations with Hal Roach to star in a series of technicolor television specials collectively titled Laurel and Hardy's Fabulous Fables. Each episode would have featured the duo in a retelling of a popular fairy tale, the first of which was to be Babes in the Woods. Stan Laurel suffered a stroke shortly before production was to begin, putting the series on hold. Oliver Hardy's death a year later prevented the series from being made.
  • Billy Wilder planned on making a film with the duo that saw them sleeping in the two Os in the Hollywood sign. This was scrapped when Oliver Hardy died.
• Billy Wilder's A Night at the United Nations starring the Marx Brothers as crooks who cause chaos at the U.N. This was abandoned following Chico's death and Harpo undergoing heart surgery.
• Orson Welles and Michael Caine discussed a film adaptation of Ronald Harwood's play The Dresser.
• Peter O'Toole was scheduled to star with Toshiro Mifune in Will Adams, to be directed by John Huston, with screenplay by Dalton Trumbo and produced by Eugene Frenke and Jules Buck. This would have been a biopic of the first English sailor to reach Japan.
• Mortal Kombat: The Movie:
  • Cameron Diaz was set to play Sonya Blade when she broke her arm in pre-production.
  • The producers' first choice to play Raiden was Sean Connery, but he declined and his Highlander co-star Christopher Lambert was cast instead,. Given how much mockery Lambert's American-accented Raiden received, one wonders what audiences would've made of a Japanese thunder god speaking with Connery's unique accent.
  • Michael Jai White was offered the role of Jax for the original and Annihilation. He turned them down both times (the second in favor of Spawn).
  • Jean-Claude Van Damme was offered the role of Johnny Cage. He turned it down in favor of Street Fighter.
• Steven Seagal's dream project was a biopic of Genghis Khan that he would direct and star in. No, really. He got as far as scouting locations in Asia and casting actors to play his relatives before it was cancelled due to legal issues involving the mafia.
• There were talks of a remake of Kind Hearts and Coronets starring Will Smith and Robin Williams that never got off the ground.
• LL Cool J was once attached to star in a remake of Dolemite.
• In The '70s, Harlan Ellison worked with Isaac Asimov on a film adaptation of I, Robot that was actually close to the original novel. Asimov is quoted as saying that this screenplay would lead to "the first really adult, complex, worthwhile science fiction movie ever made."
  • Ellison's script builds a framework around Asimov's short stories that involves a reporter named Robert Bratenahl tracking down information about Susan Calvin's alleged former lover Stephen Byerly. Asimov's stories are presented as flashbacks that differ from the originals in their stronger emphasis on Calvin's character. Ellison placed Calvin into stories in which she did not originally appear and fleshed out her character's role in ones where she did. In constructing the script as a series of flashbacks that focused on character development rather than action, Ellison used Citizen Kane as a model.
  • Ultimately, the film was scrapped due to budgetary concerns. In a meeting with the Head of Production at Warners, Robert Shapiro, Ellison concluded that Shapiro was commenting on the script without having read it and accused him of having the "intellectual and cranial capacity of an artichoke". Shortly afterwards, Ellison was dropped from the project. Without Ellison, the film came to a dead end, because subsequent scripts were unsatisfactory to potential directors. After a change in studio heads, Warner allowed Ellison's script to be serialized in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine and published in book form.
• Sequels of Space Jam were planned, with different types of sports stars, but the ideas were replaced with Looney Tunes: Back in Action.
  • Also, the movie had a few deleted scenes:
    • The movie would start with a Batman parody that makes Elmer cry, instead of the cartoon that Daffy suggests.
    • And the characters would stay in the jungle temple for the final battle, instead of going to space.
• In 2009, there were plans for a remake of Drop Dead Fred starring Russell Brand, but it was scrapped following the failure of the Arthur (2011) remake.
• In the late sixties, Richard Harris tried to set up a film adaptation of Hamlet, to be directed by to be directed by Frank Silvera, with Faye Dunaway as Ophelia, and music by Jimmy Webb, but it fell through Tony Richardson started shooting his version. In 1971, it almost got green-lit again, this time with Harris directing. Ophelia would now be played by Mia Farrow, with Peter Ustinov as Polonious, and George C. Scott as Claudius, but Paramount Pictures got cold feet, and the project failed to materialize.
• Josef von Sternberg's adaptation of I, Claudius starring Charles Laughton, based on the novels I, Claudius and Claudius the God that was abandoned when Merle Oberon (who was cast as Messalina) was injured in a car crash. The surviving footage appears in The BBC documentary The Epic That Never Was.
• Ray Harryhausen's unrealised projects:
  • The Jupiter Project (1937): A Flash Gordon–like adventure in which a spaceship lands on Jupiter and encounters a multi-armed creature.
  • Evolution of the World (also known as Evolution) (1940)
  • War of the Worlds (1949)
  • Food of the Gods (1949): Based on a story by H. G. Wells.
  • The Valley of the Mist (1950): An unrealized Willis O'Brien project about the discovery of an Allosaurus in a lost valley. The concept later became the basis for Harryhausen's 1969 film The Valley of Gwangi.
  • Baron Munchausen (1950)
  • The Elementals (1952): Harryhausen wrote the original outline story about bat creatures that nest in the Eiffel Tower and terrorize Paris, France; he sold the idea for development to Jack Dietz in 1953, but the project, after several scripts—including one by Ray Bradbury—languished. A test sequence was nonetheless filmed showing Harryhausen battling one of the bat creatures on a hill.
  • The Tortoise and the Hare (1953): Only partially filmed, the shelved project was resumed a half-century later and completed in 2002 by Harryhausen, in collaboration with animators Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero (who had offered Harryhausen, long-retired since 1981, their services to help him finish the film).
  • Tarzan and the Ant Men (1960): Dropped due to difficulties in obtaining rights to the Tarzan franchise.
  • Food of the Gods (1961)
  • Skin and Bones (1963): Based on the novel by Thorne Smith about a photographer who invents a compound that makes him invisible.
  • Sinbad and the 7 Wonders of the World (1981)
  • Sinbad Goes to Mars (also known as Sinbad on Mars; Sinbad's Voyage to Mars) (1981)
  • Sinbad in the Age of Muses (1960): Title given to the Harryhausen's earliest work which then evolved into Jason and the Argonauts.
  • Sinbad and the Valley of Dinosaurs (1966): Harryhausen considered making a Sinbad film involving dinosaurs however it met little interest. He instead co-produced The Valley of Gwangi.
  • People of the Mist (1983): Based on an H. Rider Haggard story; planned for Michael Winner; dropped by Harryhausen due to Winner's insistence on radically changing the story.
  • Force of the Trojans (1984): A version, with mythological creatures, of Aeneas and his journey after the fall of Troy; a sequel to Clash of the Titans (1981).
  • The Story of Odysseus (1996–1998): Harryhausen was consultant on story development and character design for Carrington & Cosgrove Hall Productions.
• Terry Gilliam planned a film adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities starring Mel Gibson. When he left to make Braveheart, it was then going to star Liam Neeson before being abandoned.
  • He also planned a film adaptation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
• During Terrence Malick's hiatus from filmmaking, he developed a few projects during his twenty-year hiatus. Q, which explored the origins of life on Earth; The English Speaker, about Josef Breuer's analysis of Anna O.; adaptations of Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer and Larry Mc Murtry's The Desert Rose; and a script about Jerry Lee Lewis.
• Some of Ken Russell's unmade projects:
  • A biopic of ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinski, which was abandoned after the failure of Billion Dollar Brain.
  • Little Sparrow, a film about Edith Piaf.
  • A biopic of King Ludwig of Bavaria.
  • He announced a biopic of Sarah Bernhardt with Barbra Streisand.
  • A Dracula adaptation in the late seventies. He originally considered Laurence Olivier as Dracula. His later cast was either Peter O'Toole or Mick Fleetwood in the lead, with Peter Ustinov as Van Helsing. He also wanted Oliver Reed as Renfield, with Sarah Miles and Mia Farrow as Lucy and Mina, respectively. Michael York and James Coburn were also on Russell's wishlist (most likely for Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris respectively).
  • Beethoven's Secret was about to start shooting when financing fell apart at the last minute.
  • He was attached to do the film of Evita for over a year, but ultimately left the project when he refused to cast Elaine Paige in the lead.
  • He planned a biopic of Maria Callas with Sophia Loren that also failed to get financing.
  • He had a legal fight with Bob Guccione over an aborted attempt to film Moll Flanders which was dramatised in a movie, Your Honour, I Object!
  • Towards the end of his life, Russell was planning a remake of the 1976 erotic musical comedy Alice in Wonderland. He offered Kathleen Turner the role of the Queen of Hearts (everyone in her court would have been naked except her), but he died before anything could come of it.
• Martin Scorsese planned a Dean Martin biopic called Dino. It would have starred Tom Hanks as Martin, Jim Carrey as Jerry Lewis, John Travolta as Frank Sinatra, Hugh Grant as Peter Lawford and Adam Sandler as Joey Bishop.
• William Goldman's unmade projects:
  • Flowers for Algernon: Good Old Charley Gordon (1964) – an adaptation of Flowers for Algernon done for actor Cliff Robertson – Robertson was unhappy with the version and hired Stirling Silliphant to write what became Charly.
  • The Chill (1967) – adaptation of the 1964 Lew Archer novel by Ross Macdonald.
  • In the Spring the War Ended (1968) – from the novel by Stephen Linakis about American deserters in Europe at the end of World War Two. Lawrence Turman was producer and Martin Ritt attached as director but the studio, 20th Century Fox, decided not to make it because they wanted Pentagon co-operation for Patton.
  • The Thing of It Is... aka That's Life (1968) – adapted from his novel.
  • Piano Man – adaptation of his novel Father's Day
  • Papillon - an adaptation script that wasn't used.
  • A musical remake of Grand Hotel with Norman Jewison to direct.
  • The Sea Kings (late 1970s) – a pirate movie about the relationship between Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard, the first of a three-picture deal with Joseph E. Levine. Goldman said he wrote the part of Blackbeard for Sean Connery and at one stage Richard Lester was attached as director. Goldman says Connery and Roger Moore were considered stars, then later Roger and Dudley Moore. However the film was too expensive to make.
  • The Ski Bum aka Hot Shot (1981) – based on the article "The Ski Bum as an Endangered Species" by Jean Vallely, it was about a man who appeared to live the glamorous life of ski instructor at a resort, only he lives in a trailer with his wife and child. Goldman said this was never made due to tension between the producer and the studio.
  • The Right Stuff – adaptation of the Tom Wolfe book that was not used.
  • Rescue! (1980–81) – story of the rescue of employees of Ross Perot by Arthur D. Simons during the Iranian revolution. Goldman said this foundered when Clint Eastwood, the only suitable star to play Bull Simons, elected to make Firefox.
  • Flora Quick, Dead or Alive.
  • The National Pastime.
  • Singing Out Loud – unproduced musical worked on with Rob Reiner and Stephen Sondheim.
  • Low Fives (1992) – comedy about an African who plays for a basketball team in a small college, commissioned by Danny DeVito and intended to star John Cleese and DeVito.
  • Shazam! (c 2003) – a film adaptation of DC's Captain Marvel.
  • The Shooter – an adaptation of the Stephen Hunter novel Point of Impact that was to have been directed by Lee Tamahori.
  • Mission: Impossible II – script that was not used. He also declined opportunities to write The Godfather and Superman.
• In 1990 there was serious talk at 20th Century Fox of remaking The Ghost and Mrs. Muir with Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer in the leads, but the poor box-office for The Russia House killed it.
• David Cronenberg could-have-beens:
  • He was offered several projects by Paramount Pictures before and after The Dead Zone, all of which were too "mainstream" for his liking.
    • Witness, which he specifically declined because he saw Amish society as too repressed for him to respectfully depict.
    • Flashdance
    • Beverly Hills Cop (the Sylvester Stallone vehicle version)
    • Top Gun
  • He had a two-script deal with Universal Pictures in the early 1980s that only produced one film, Videodrome. The other script he wrote for the deal was Six Legs, a comedy "about entomologists discovering an insect on a Caribbean island that is addictive when you eat it." The initial draft he wrote didn't appeal to the executives, however (by his own admission he rushed the writing), and they passed.
  • He was attached to Total Recall (1990) back when the rights were with The Dead Zone's producer Dino de Laurentiis, but ultimately left due to severe Creative Differences. (This famously freed him up to do The Fly (1986).)
  • Early in The New '10s he wrote a Spiritual Successor to The Fly (1986) for 20th Century Fox, but it remains unproduced.
• For a man who made many films over five decades, you can imagine that there were a considerable John Ford projects that never came to ground:
  • In The '30s, Ford lobbied Darryl F. Zanuck to produce an English language remake of The Grand Illusion (by Jean Renoir), which he greatly admired. Zanuck, in a surprising aversion of typical Hollywood behaviour, stated that Renoir's film was a masterpiece and it would be a pity to remake it.^note Zanuck was personally a Francophile and quite partial to French culture, though ironically he and Renoir did not get along too well
  • In The '50s, Ford heavily involved himself with Lord Kilkenny to develop a slew of movies in Ireland in the hope of developing an Irish Cinema. He shot The Quiet Man in Ireland for this reason and The Rising of the Moon, an anthology film adaptation of Irish short fiction, was an Irish production. One of the segments for the latter film was to be an adaptation of James Joyce's The Dead with Katharine Hepburn as Greta Conroy. It didn't pan out but years later, John Huston would adapt the short story in a separate production.
  • Ford also expressed interest in making a movie about Ulysses S. Grant, seeking to restore the reputation of America's greatest general after decades of Pro-Confederate smears. The closest he ever came was "The Civil War" in How the West Was Won.
  • Towards the end of his life, Ford expressed interest in adapting Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company (one of his favorite books) and lobbied extensively but his declining health and non-Western and non-commercial subject matter hindered any production.
• The earliest version of what would become Escape from L.A., written by screenwriter Coleman Luck in 1987, was a completely disconnected concept that would have been a prequel to the original film, and would have followed Snake as he is parachuted into Los Angeles for 48 hours in a "Most Dangerous Game" scenario. A combination of bad timing and John Carpenter claiming the script was too "campy" put the kibosh on the project until the mid '90s, when the project was revived. While some of the concepts eventually made its way into the final product, the script as a whole was very different to the final film.
  • The script begins with narration explaining that L.A. become a walled-off island due to two cataclysmic events: a plague caused by hazardous suntan lotion that turned the population of the city insane, and a 9.1 earthquake that hit the city at rush hour. In the final film, this was changed to be focused on just the earthquake, with the city being walled off at the direction of The Fundamentalist President, who uses the opportunity (and a previous prediction he made about the earthquake) to make himself President for Life.
  • Snake is introduced in Las Vegas, where he interacts with a variety of characters (including hookers, a fortune teller and a claw machine that makes people bet their own body parts to win cash) before he is sedated and captured when he goes to get a touch-up on his famous snake tattoo. He is woken up by Bob Hauk (referred to as "Houk"), who explains Snake's service history in a scene very similar to New York, then informs him that he's going to be dumped in L.A. and forced to survive for his amusement — if he can get to a place called "Rodent Park" (essentially, Walt Disney World) in 48 hours and survive against a "secret weapon", Hauk will give him anything he wants within reason. At least one part of the intro sequence (Snake interacting with a hooker who has a polypropylene condom in her mouth) was shot verbatim and intended to be used in the final product (albeit much later, when Snake gets to L.A.), was removed before release.
  • Snake is given a submachine gun for protection and is airdropped into the city (in a sequence that was later repurposed with Hauk Expy Commander Malloy telling Snake the same thing when he tries to use the Coreburner). Snake paraglides past a number of incredulous residents before he lands, but he is immediately captured and knocked out. When he awakes, he's been strapped to a float (across from self-professed "beauty queen" Blandish Vox") particpating in "Float Wars", a battlesport overseen by the crazed Surgeon General of Los Angeles. Some of the sequences outlined were either planned or filmed — the residents waving at Snake were intended to be placed during the hang-glider scene towards the end of the film, where the sequence with the Surgeon General was rewritten to take place in a plastic surgery clinic.
  • The parade is interrupted when Snake's war buddy from the Battle of Leningrad, Drummond, appears and begins firing on the floats. Snake uses the opportunity to cut his bonds, free Blandish and escape with her, while they're pursued by Drummond. After a cat-and-mouse chase, Snake shoots him several times in the chest, then tells Blandish that he thought Drummond was dead, as he buried him in Leningrad.
  • Snake and Blandish stop at a bar, where he learns that he has a big reputation as a "video star" (a Running Gag similar to the original movie, where people comment that they thought Snake was dead). Traveling further, the pair are forced to flee from a group of crazed surfers, only to be caught again by "The Sewer Man", a sympathetic dweller who gives Snake some information on the area and gives him directions on how to get to Rodent Park. The pair eventually make it to the Hollywood Freeway, when the script's villain, "Oral Turnwheel" (a rich, emaciated warlord who only wears a loincloth) is revealed. Turnwheel orders the "Cultural Police" to attack the duo, and in the ensuing altercation, Blandish is shot and killed. This sequence was partially replicated in the final film, with Taslima being shot and killed by a roving gang on the Hollywood Freeway.
  • Snake is rescued by another former war buddy, Johnny Lorder, who drugs him and leads him to a club/factory where he is assaulted and taken advantage of by six female dancers. Lorder then steals one of his shoes and his weapon. Snake pursues him to a nearby gym, where he fights and overpowers his former colleague, throwing him into an overpowered tanning bed and killing him before retrieving his gear. The only remnant of this scene to make it to the finished product was the character of Map-to-the-Stars Eddie, who uses the same trick (a tranquilizer gun placed in his dashboard) to knock out Snake.
  • Still being pursued, Snake ducks into a religious ceremony being overseen by "Sister Cher Blessing", who leads a group of cowled religious cultists. Snake steals one of the member's cowls and attempts to hide when the police show up, but eventually gives up the ruse and shoots the cops down before the cultists overpower him. He and other refugees are sent to the "Queen Mary", a beached ship near the coast of the island. Once there, Snake discovers that some of the dead refugees have been reanimated, including Blandish, who has been brought there and gives Snake directions on where to go. Snake also encounters another former war buddy, Dargan, who died and reanimated and is holding a key to escape. Snake defeats him and exits the ship, but is captured by Turnwheel, who reveals that he is the one who orchestrated Snake's capture and pursuit throughout the last 24 hours. He explains that Snake is the "perfect soldier" before bringing him to Rodent Park, which has reopened to the public for "Snake Plissken Day".
  • Turnwheel then reveals that the reason for the island's occupants telling Snake he is a "video star" is because they took a DNA sample he gave the army four years earlier and used it to create four clones of Snake. He forces Snake to participate in a Duel to the Death with his former clone, under the pretense of wanting Snake's DNA and body to create an army of clones. The overpowered clone Plissken defeats Snake, with the latter (being mortally wounded) pushing himself into a vat that kills him and dissolves his body. The clone, having found remorse over his own actions (and being fed up with Turnbull's actions) guns down all of the security forces in the area before picking up Turnbull and tossing him into the same tank. The script would have ended with Hauk arriving as the "new" Snake proclaims that he wants L.A. for himself, before a title card stating Snake would go on his mission to New York two years later.
• The third remake of A Star Is Born, which was released in 2018 with Lady Gaga as Ally and Bradley Cooper as Jackson Maine, went through many iterations before finally being produced, with planned remakes stretching as far back as the early 1990s.
  • Clint Eastwood was originally going to direct the film when it was in development during 2011. Cooper himself ended up directing it.
  • Over the years, Christian Bale, Russell Crowe, Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., Eminem, Jon Hamm, Sean Penn, Will Smith, Denzel Washington, Jamie Foxx and Jack White were considered for Jackson Maine.
  • Beyoncé, Esperanza Spalding, Selena Gomez, Whitney Houston, Kesha, Jennifer Lopez, Demi Lovato, Rihanna, Aaliyah and Shakira were all considered to play the role of Ally.
  • Ray Liotta was considered for the role of Bobby.
  • Robert De Niro, John Turturro and John Travolta were considered for the role of Lorenzo.
  • Originally, Bradley Cooper considered a different film ending where Jackson and Ally perform "Shallow" as the final song.
• Heaven Can Wait (1978) was planned to be an acting vehicle for Muhammad Ali, but scheduling conflicts prevented it, resulting in Warren Beatty being cast in the Joe Pendleton role and the role being rewritten to showcase Beatty's talent at football, as he couldn't box. Paramount would eventually remake the film with a black Joe Pendleton, but as a comedian.
• The "Time Out" segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie was supposed to end with the central character having a Heel Realization, rescuing two Vietnamese children, and returning to his own time as a changed man. An on-set accident during the filming of the rescue sequence killed Vic Morrow and the two child actors. Rather than re-shoot the sequence with a new actor or cut it altogether, a decision was made to alter the storyline to use only the footage that Morrow had shot prior to his death, cutting out the redemption arc altogether.
• Columbia short subject comedies:
  • In the late 1940's, Columbia short subjects boss Jules White wanted a make a series of shorts featuring a young, up-and-coming comedian named Danny Thomas. However, Thomas' agent said he had his own plans to launch Thomas' career, and that short-subject comedies were not under consideration.
  • White also wanted to include Henry Armetta (an Italian-American comic actor who frequently played barbers) on his roster of stars (which at that time included The Three Stooges, Andy Clyde, Harry Langdon, and Charley Chase). However, Armetta insisted on complete control of his shorts, saying he wanted to choose his own cast, crew, scripts, and budget. White replied, "Choose your way out."
• Garfield:
  • Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler were all considered for the part of Jon Arbuckle, but were all too expensive, so Breckin Meyer got the part in the end.
  • Jennifer Garner was considered for the role of Liz Wilson rather than Jennifer Love Hewitt.
  • Instead of Stephen Tobolowsky, the first choice for the role of the film's villain Happy Chapman was Thomas Lennon, who couldn't play the part because of scheduling conflcits with Reno 911!.
  • Before Bill Murray got the part, Jack Nicholson was considered for the part of voicing Garfield.
  • The sequel A Tale of Two Kitties was originally planned to be a crossover with Jim Davis' other comic strip U.S. Acres, but had to be changed to a different story because of the failing health of Howard Morris, who was Wade Duck's voice actor in the U.S. Acres segments of Garfield and Friends.
• In the 2000's, studios planned to revive the Candyman and Leprechaun franchises. A crossover between the two was planned to further both franchises, but was scrapped when Tony Todd refused to appear.
• New Line Cinema read the script of Solace, and initially wanted to rewrite it as a sequel to Se7en entitled "Ei8ht", with Morgan Freeman's character learning that he's actually a psychic detective.
• The Breakfast Club almost had a sequel where the characters were in college and detained once more, as well as having the exact opposite personalities that they had in the first film.
  • There was originally going to be a scene where Mr. Vernon was spying on a female gym teacher who was swimming naked in the school pool.
• There was to be a sequel to An American Were Wolf In London, involving Debbie Klein (the woman mentioned at the start of the first film) trying to track down David and having nightmares about Nazi mutants. Eventually, she would have found David's nurse Alex, who is also a werewolf and dating David (who's soul is trapped on Earth for some reason).
• Simon West floated an idea for a sequel to Con Air set in space where, in his own words, "they're all robots or the convicts are reanimated as super-convicts, or where the good guys are bad guys and the good guys are bad guys. Something shocking."
• In the first draft of The World's End, Gary King lip-synched "Batdance" from start to finish.
• Scream:
  • The original script for Scream 2 had three killers — Mrs. Loomis as the Big Bad motivated by revenge against the Final Girl Sidney for killing her son at the end of the first film, and Sidney's boyfriend Derek and roommate Hallie as her accomplices, a fame-whoring Outlaw Couple inspired by Natural Born Killers. After an extra leaked the script online, the film was heavily rewritten, with Mickey as Mrs. Loomis' lone accomplice with a similar motive to Derek and Hallie. To prevent further leaks, screenwriter Kevin Williamson wrote three "dummy" scripts to foil anybody who might leak the film, one of which had the police officer Dewey as the killer.
  • Scream 3 saw far greater rewrites thanks to the Columbine High School massacre leaving the studio uneasy about making a teen-focused horror movie. The original plot had Stu, one of the killers from the first film, surviving and leading a "fan club" of killers from prison to carry out a new killing spree in his name, eventually targeting Sidney. The resulting film was instead a Horrible Hollywood satire about the making of a film based on the Woodsboro killings. Years later, Williamson would dig his old idea back up, file off the Scream name, and turn it into the TV series The Following.
• The Last Days of American Crime:
  • Sam Worthington was originally attached to star in the film.
  • F. Gary Gray and Anthony Mandler were both considered to direct.
• God Told Me To originally starred Robert Forster, but he left after a few days due to a falling out with director Larry Cohen and was replaced by Tony Lo Bianco.
• Blazing Saddles: Gig Young, fresh from his Supporting Actor Oscar win for They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, was the original choice to play The Waco Kid. But Mel Brooks soon discovered Young was also an alcoholic, who passed out on the first day of filming, due to alcohol withdrawl. Not willing to wait for Young to recover more fully, Brooks fired him and called on Gene Wilder, who played Leo in The Producers. The rest is history.
• Shredder Orpheus:
  • Robert McGinley considered "real actors" to play Orpheus before being convinced to do the role himself, as he'd done in a short film that acted as a precursor to the finished movie.
  • Originally the dream sequence with Orpheus and Persephone was done naked, but it attracted a sizable crowd that threatened the shoot. The addition of clothing saved the scene and allowed filming to continue.
  • The third draft script contained many differences from the finished film. Razoreus was narrator of the film, not Axel, while Scratch was written as male, and the Grey Zoners didn't get their own introductions. The EBN scene happened before Orpheus's concert, and Orpheus himself was Razoreus's cousin, whose band was named Aorta Sandwich, and he had an additional relative named Aunt Elaine. Eurydice's wedding was mostly indoors and her death by snake was retained from the myth, while Hades' house band was originally named the Zombie Gospel Choir and everyone involved was zipped up in body bags after the song. Orpheus also had a dog after the time skip, and the dance audition and his conversation with the oracle before entering her parlor were both scripted, as were additional scenes where he gets a jaywalking ticket and Razoreus scores the pizza. The draft ended with the explosion of the EBN broadcast tower, and Eurydice and Persephone had less to do than in the finished film.
• Moving Violations: Michael J. Fox was tabbed to play lead character Dana, before producers decided he was too young to plausibly pull off playing an incurable smart-ass like Dana. He was replaced with Bill Murray's younger brother John. A blessing in disguise, as this left Fox free to replace Eric Stoltz in Back to the Future.

Cool World: The original concept for the film was for it to be an erotic horror flick about a cartoonist who had sex with a sexy cartoon woman he created named Debbie Dallas, from which he becomes father of a half-real, half-cartoon girl who considers herself a freak and goes on a rampage against the man who spawned her. Due to executive meddling (party due to the producer being tired of the horror genre having produced many popular 80's horror films) and pressure from Star Kim Basinger (who wanted a film she could show to children), the movie's script was rewritten to be more family friendly. Had Bakshi been able to stick to his original horror script, might the film have been a success and not killed off all adult animation that wasn't based off popular animated TV shows for over two decades?

• White Christmas, like the previous Irving Berlin movie musicals Holiday Inn and Blue Skies, was originally to have had a dancing star as a foil for Bing Crosby, in this case Donald O'Connor rather than Fred Astaire. When O'Connor was replaced by Danny Kaye, Berlin rewrote the Argument Song "A Singer—A Dancer" as "A Crooner—A Comic" to better fit Kaye's personality, though the number was ultimately cut.
• The Exorcist: Two actresses were considered before Ellen Burstyn for the role of Chris McNeil: Shirley MacLaine (rejected by casting because of her role in an earlier, similar movie, The Possession Of Joel Delaney) and Carol Burnett, whom the producers liked because she brought a different kind of star power to the role (the studio turned her down).
• Knights of the Zodiac:
  • Early script versions stuck closer to the source material, with Seiya training in Sanctuary as a child, and the other Bronze Knights (who are otherwise Adapted Out of the final film) being part of the cast. These elements were dropped for the sake of simplifying the story for a general audience, while the Bronze Saints were "tragically" cut due to the lack of time and budget needed for each of them to be properly depicted.
  • Nero was originally intended to be the primary villain, but after the filmmakers felt they wouldn't have enough time to properly explore his depth and motivation, Guraad was created as a simpler, less-mystical threat. One version of the script even cut Nero out entirely, before he was added back in for the sake of the story.
  • Guraad was originally conceived as a man (and a business partner of Alman Kiddo), but following the character's poor reception in Saint Seiya: Knights of the Zodiac (which was based on the film but came out first) and the addition of Famke Janssen to the cast, the character was changed to female.
• During the last months of John Belushi's life, he attempted to create a vehicle for himself after the back-to-back failures of Neighbors and Continental Divide. The film, Noble Rot, was about the troublemaking son of a Northern Californian winemaker family. When his elder, more responsible brother falls ill, he's sent to New York in his place for a big wine competition, only to get involved in a diamond forgery scheme by an attractive wealthy woman. The film was meant to be a throwback to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s with Belushi still being comedic but now the straight man, a complete 180 from his iconic role as "Bluto" Blutarsky of Animal House. However, Michael Eisner, then-CEO of Paramount Pictures, refused the script and tried to persuade him to take the lead role of The Joy Of Sex. Despite Belushi's attempts otherwise, he failed in trying to pitch Noble Rot and accepted the other role before dying days later.

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