Extremely Lengthy Creation

A work's size, of course, rarely hints at the lengths an author went to to write, compile, and pass the trial-by-fire that is publication.

As a general rule, this trope covers anything that took more than ten years to write or make, or that involved some truly labyrinthine process, or simply because of Development Hell. While a publicized work is trapped in an Extremely Lengthy Creation, it is often comes to be considered Vaporware. Occasionally, this can be a very good thing, as having a long time to think about your creation can result in a worthy masterpiece. However, spending too long on something can result in a work that is completely overwrought and filled with flaws that you don't notice because you have spent so long looking at whatever it is that you become blind to your own mistakes and used to your Purple Prose and alliterative grammar.

This trope is divided into three categories:

• In-Universe Examples: These examples occur within a work; if the book is about Sue's decade-long fight to finish her Magnum Opus, it goes here.

• Normal Examples: This category is for examples of works that took a long time to complete relative to the medium used. For example, if it is a book, up to five years is relatively average for a first novel and one-two years for anything after that. As a general rule, anything over six years for a novel and ten years for a Doorstopper should be listed. If the book was planned in advance to, say, document a long period of time, it doesn't count unless it over-runs significantly.

• Delayed Creation: This is for works where the creator had their initial idea years before, but didn't start working on it properly for a long time. This can be because they lacked the technology, the money, the time or the motivation, or they needed some sort of epiphany to get the creation started. Note: Beware of adding examples that are really vaporware.

A series that is just incredibly long-running is a Long Runner. See also Sequel Gap, which may involve either this or the creator just taking a long time to be inspired to do a sequel. Contrast with Absurdly Short Production Time, where a work takes a relatively short time to be completed.

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In-Universe Examples

Films — Live-Action

• The eponymous Mr. Holland's Opus. Mr. Holland takes a temp job teaching music appreciation in a high school to support himself while working on his opus — and it still isn't done 30 years later when his position is terminated, but that doesn't stop his former students from coming together to perform it at his retirement party.

Literature

• In Middlemarch by George Eliot, Rev. Casaubon's life's work, an unfinished book The Key to All Mythologies, is intended as a monument to the tradition of Christian syncretism. It turns out that this life's work is useless as he is behind on current studies (he doesn't read German, so his scholarship is incomplete). We also learn he is aware of this but has put too much time into his research to admit it to anyone else.
• "Leaf by Niggle" by J. R. R. Tolkien: The title character Niggle starts to paint a forest, and after many years, dies and leaves a painting of a leaf. (One wonders if it expressed JRRT's experience of writing The Silmarillion.)

Live-Action TV

• Midsomer Murders: In "Fit for Death", Miranda Bedford has been writing a novel for decades: to the point that many people don't believe it actually exists. Towards the end of the episode, another character attempts to destroy the manuscript (thinking it may contain incriminating information) only to discover all he has destroyed is her handwritten copy. The novel has been sold to a publisher, and her transcriber has been delivering each chapter as it is finished.

Normal Examples

Anime and Manga

• Hunter × Hunter As of 2024, Yoshihiro Togashi has been drawing it for 26 years and is still not finished. It is not a particularly lengthy series compared to its Shonen Jump brethren, but rather, Togashi took so many long breaks, one of which was three years and eleven-month hiatus, that it has taken this long to make it.
• Berserk, similar case with Hunter × Hunter as the manga artist Kentaro Miura used to take long breaks in between. This led to Miura dying in May 2021 long before he had drawn up an ending.
• REDLINE was in production for a total of 7 years. This is mainly because studio Madhouse went all in on the animation and artsyle, even doing most of it handdrawn. In the final product it's clear that their efforts paid off, though unfortunately it didn't fair well at the box office.

Comics

• Ultimate Wolverine vs The Incredible Hulk. First issue dated February 2006, second issue April 2006. Third issue... May 2009. Three years. Apparently, after the initial delays, they decided they might as well hold onto it until the remaining issues were complete.
• Planetary: A 27-issue, supposedly bi-monthly comic that somehow took over a decade to complete, the longest gap being between the final two issues (dated December 2006 and December 2009).
• Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons. The series was first announced back in March 2018 with the launch of the Black Label imprint but wouldn't get an official release date until October 2021 but not before being pushed back to November 16th and then the 30th due to global supply chain shortages caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic. Issues #2 and #3 being solicited for Spring and Fall of 2022.

Fan Works

• The Doctor Who Fan Film "Devious" has been in production since before 1996. (They got Jon Pertwee to reprise his role as the 3rd Doctor, in what was possibly his last filmed performance.)
• Paradoxus (Winx Club, World of Warcraft): This fanfic has been in the works for nearly a decade—it was created in 2012 and has been on Wattpad since 2014. It has also been the subject of a few Retoolings, a couple of Drawing Board Hiatuses, and a Mid-Development Genre Shift. Not counting all of the "what-could-have-beens" it has accumulated over time.

Films — Animation

• The Overcoat is a film by animators Yuri Norstein and Francheska Yarbusova. It has been in active production since 1980, and will likely never be complete. It currently holds the record for longest production of any animated feature ever.
• Princess Mononoke: Hayao Miyazaki took 16 years to fully develop the characters and plot of the film.
• Bambi was meant to be the second Disney feature after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, with development starting in 1936, but production went slower than expected as animators struggled to get the realism Walt wanted for the film. By the time it was released in 1942, three other features had premiered in the meantime.
• Sleeping Beauty took six years to produce, as Disney wanted it to be a "moving illustration", rich in detail.
• George Lucas worked on Strange Magic for 15 years before production began.

Films — Live-Action

• Richard Linklater filmed Boyhood over a period of 12 years (although the total shooting time was only 45 days) in order to follow its young protagonist as he aged naturally, rather than have different actors play the same character at different ages.
• Linklater is also making a film adaptation of Merrily We Roll Along, and just like with Boyhood, he's planning on covering the musical's twenty-year timespan in real time. It began production in 2019 and, if all goes according to plan, will be until at least 2039.
• Quentin Tarantino:
  • It took six years to write the entire script for Kill Bill before being split into two parts. The original draft was about two hundred twenty pages long.
  • He spent just over a decade writing the script for Inglourious Basterds because, as he told Charlie Rose in an interview, he became "too precious about the page", meaning the story kept growing and expanding.
  • He worked on the script for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood for five years.
• John Milius wrote the original script for Apocalypse Now in 1969 and he and George Lucas spent four years developing it, with principal photography expected to start in 1971 before it was shelved. Francis Ford Coppola came across the property in 1974 and started filming in 1976. What was supposed to be a four week shoot balloned into fourteen months before it was finally completed. In fact, it took so long to complete that it was dubbed Apocalypse When? and Apocalypse Never.
• Michael Cimino submitted the script for Heaven's Gate in 1971, but the project was shelved when it failed to attract big-name talent. Production started in 1979, but wasn't completed for another two years.
• A New Hope: George Lucas had the idea for a space-fantasy film in 1971. However, he has said that he had the idea long before then. He began writing in 1973 and production started in 1976.
• The documentary Andy Kaufman: I'm from Hollywood, chronicling Andy Kaufman's wrestling career in general and his feud with Jerry Lawler in particular, started production in 1983 only for his cancer diagnosis and subsequent death in 1984 to throw a wrench in things (in particular, he was supposed to appear in new footage as a deranged has-been "ruined" by his wrestling obsession, the film not breaking Kayfabe), especially as co-director/editor Lynne Marguiles was also Kaufman's lover. She completed the film in 1989, but then couldn't find a buyer for it for three years.
• Stanley Kubrick had been developing the film that became Eyes Wide Shut since 1968, with preproduction starting in earnest in 1994. The shoot itself was 400 days, recognized by Guinness World Record as the longest continuous film shoot, due mainly to Kubrick's perfectionist tendencies .
• Shoah took 11 years to make, owed to the sheer volume of interview footage that had to be shot and edited. The process of making the nine-and-a-half-hour film was so lengthy and laborious that the Israeli government, who commissioned the documentary, backed out as soon as it became clear that they wouldn't be getting a two-hour movie within a year and a half.

Literature

• The Bible took centuries — though it is, in actual fact, far more than one book.
• Dictionaries; they are always a work in progress. Examples get updated, new ones are added, old ones are removed, and it can go on for centuries. In fact, the only thing that really stops the process is when a publisher decides not to release any new editions or goes out of business.
• J. R. R. Tolkien:
  • Wrote The Lord of the Rings between 1937 and 1949. Didn't finish the appendices and final edits until 1955.
  • Started work on what would become The Silmarillion in 1914. After his death in 1973 it still wasn't finished, so his son Christopher Tolkien continued working on it and it was finally published in 1977.
• Charles Darwin left his book On the Origin of Species in a drawer for almost 20 years before finally publishing it out of concern for how it would be received (which, as history has proven, was very much justified). Indeed he intended for it to be published posthumously until Alfred Wallace had a similar theory and Darwin had to publish it or lose credit for his life's work.
• The Shelters of Stone, book 5 of the Earth's Children series took 12 years. Jane Auel really likes to do the research.
• Orson Scott Card, in general, starts up a book series, and then gets sidetracked and starts writing side stories, new series, or something else entirely.
  • Children of the Mind came out in 1996, and despite fans wanting to know what happens next, Card wrote a ton of prequels.
  • It took seven years to make the fifth book of the Ender's Shadow prequel series.
  • He co-wrote Lovelock with Kathryn H. Kidd in 1994. It's supposed to be part one of The Mayflower Trilogy, and the second book still isn't out.
  • The Crystal City, sixth book of the Alvin Maker series, came out in 2003. Book seven, Master Alvin, is still in the works.
• 3001: The Final Odyssey took Arthur C. Clarke ten years to write.
• Robert A. Heinlein started working on a novel in the style of his juveniles and set his notes aside. Years after his death, those notes were passed on to Spider Robinson, who turned them into the book, Variable Star.
• James Joyce spent 17 years writing Finnegans Wake.
• Harry Potter took seven years of planning and organizing before JK Rowling published the first book. The seven books were published over the course of ten years.
• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell took a decade to write. Author Susanna Clarke has spoken about ideas for a sequel, but it's been in Development Hell since then.
• George R. R. Martin began A Song of Ice and Fire in 1991 and is still writing it. The first three installments came out rapidly beginning in 1996, but once he hit plot snares while writing the fourth installment, the gaps between subsequent books get progressively longer. He seems to have hit Writer's Block after A Dance with Dragons, as the story has yet to advance beyond that point (prequels spin-offs and supplementary materials are still regularly published).
• The Empirium Trilogy: From inception to publication, Furyborn took fourteen years to create. Part of that was due to Legrand being in college for some of that time and/or working on other books while editing the trilogy. It would take another two years before its conclusion, Lightbringer, would see the light of day.
• Stephen King started writing "The Gunslinger", the first short story in The Dark Tower, in 1970, but only managed to finish it in 1978. This was followed by four more short stories between 1980 and 1981, which were collected as The Gunslinger in 1982. This was followed by The Drawing of the Three in 1987, The Wastelands in 1991, and Wizard and Glass in 1997. Then, in 1999 King got hit by a car, realized he might actually die one day, and released Wolves of the Calla, The Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower within a year, 2003 - 2004.
• Robert Caro's multi-volume biography about President Lyndon Johnson. Caro started research in the late 1970s. The first volume was published in 1982, the second in 1990, the third in 2002 and the fourth in 2012. A fifth volume is still in the works.
• The Divine Comedy took over 12 years for Dante to compose, leaving him only a year on Earth left after writing an adventure set "midway through the journey of our life".
• According to Christopher Paolini, he worked on To Sleep in a Sea of Stars for around a decade before it was published.
• Margret Mitchell began working on Gone with the Wind in 1926. The book wasn't published until a decade later in 1936.
• Mrs Mike by Benedict Freedman was published in 1947. The sequel, The Search for Joyful, came out in 2002 followed by Kathy Little Bird in 2004.
• Murder for the Modern Girl: The novel was first conceptualized in 2015, getting written later that year and early 2016. However, it was published seven years later in 2022.
• The Lightlark Saga: According to Alex Aster, she first came up with the concept for Lightlark in 2012, ten years before the completed novel was published in 2022. Aster stated she worked on different drafts over the years, but had difficulty getting the publishing industry interested in the book, with publishers repeatedly rejecting Lightlark due to feeling it wouldn't sell well in a market saturated with similar books. It wasn't until 2021, when Aster made TikTok videos about Lightlark which gained a massive following, that Lightlark was picked up for publication.

Music

• Wish Upon a Blackstar by Celldweller: Production began in 2005; the full album was finally released in 2012.
• Guns N' Roses, Chinese Democracy: Production began in 1994, and the actual album was released in 2008. A long-running joke held that China would become a democracy before the album would ever get released. Unfortunately, that didn't happen.
• George Harrison: Brainwashed started production in 1988 and wasn't finished and released until 2002, one year after Harrison's death and roughly 14 years after he began working on it.
• Miracle Musical's Hawaii: Part II. Some of the songs date back to even before Tally Hall's first releases, such as "Stranded Lullaby" being derived from a song one of the band members wrote in 2004. "The Mind Electric" had a demo written in 2005 and "Time Machine" was finished in 2006. The final album released in 2012, including songs that had been conceptualized around eight years ago.

Theatre and Opera

• The Master And Margarita opera took Alexander Gradsky 30 years.

Video Games

• Brutal Mario, a Super Mario World ROM hack, released its first demo in 2008, and a final release is still nowhere in sight. Well, we think the first version released in 2008, since it was labeled as version 6, meaning that it could well have spent many more years in development prior to that.
• Duke Nukem Forever took 14 years to make, in part thanks to all the engine switching and extra features added to 'be the most technologically advanced game ever'.
• Final Fantasy XV is one of the most infamous examples from video games. Originally announced at Sony's E3 2006 conference, it was originally titled Final Fantasy Versus XIII and was set to be part of a trilogy that consisted of Final Fantasy XIII, Final Fantasy Agito XIII (later renamed to Final Fantasy Type-0), and Final Fantasy Versus XIII, collectively named Fabula Nova Crystallis and set to be released exclusively for the PlayStation 3. However, news on the game was scarce for more than half a decade aside from trailers being shown in 2008 and 2011, largely due to issues in making the Crystal Tools Engine and the need to take the team away to finish Final Fantasy XIII. The game eventually managed to start production in late 2009 and managed to release its first major gameplay trailers behind closed doors before its first big trailer in early 2011. However, the failure of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 forced the team down from 200 to around 20 in an attempt to help save the game, leading them to combine the Type-0 team with the remaining team. In 2012, the game ended being internally rebranded and then announced in 2013 to the world as Final Fantasy XV, this time as a Multi-Platform game for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Another major hit happened when the game's director was replaced, the new director decided to completely cut out what had already been done and the game basically started over from scratch in early 2014. It eventually released in 2016, albeit in a clearly rushed and incomplete state. This sparked debate on whether it lived up to the decade of development and years of hype, but it was commercially a success and sparked a Newbie Boom for the Final Fantasy franchise.
• The Doom mod Mordeth was planned to have at least two episodes, with the first one coming out in a fairly reasonable time frame. The second one? Well it started sometime in 1997, and spent so long in development that Duke Nukem Forever ended up being announced, developed and released in the meantime.
• Mother 3 took over 12 years to make. Work started on it as soon as EarthBound (1994) released in Japan in 1994. Originally planned as a Super Nintendo Entertainment System game, it was soon moved to the Nintendo 64 as the SNES was nearing the end of its life. Specifically, the game was planned to release on the Nintendo 64DD add-on, which itself faced several delays and flopped in sales after its eventually release in 1999, and was never released outside of Japan. This led to the game being further delayed so it could be released on a standard N64 cartridge, but the team's inexperience with the then-new technology of 3D graphics (and the absence of Genius Programmer Satoru Iwata) caused development to progress slowly even before the DD failed, and the game was ultimately cancelled in 2000 when it became clear it was not going to be done while the N64 was still relevant. The project remained dormant for a few years until Nintendo decided to try again on the Game Boy Advance, where sprite-based graphics would hopefully result in a less overambitious project; even then, it didn’t release until 2006, the very end of the GBA’s life, which was a major factor in why it never came out outside of Japan.
• Koei Tecmo's Nioh had been in development as far as 2004, years prior to the merger between Koei and Tecmo. Initially conceived as a PlayStation 3 Eastern RPG based off of an unfinished Akira Kurosawa movie script, the game had its development shut down and restarted numerous times throughout the years. Eventually, after the merger, Tecmo's Team Ninja was brought onto the project in 2010, but their first attempt at the project also ended up being shut down due to it being too similar to their own Ninja Gaiden games. After the project shifted from the PlayStation 3 to the PlayStation 4, production was restarted on the game in 2014, with the game now envisioned as a Souls-like RPG. This time it did stick, and the game was released in 2017 to rave reviews and commercial success, receiving a PC port later that year and a sequel four years later.
• Pikmin 4 was first announced as being "very close to completion" in 2015, just a couple of years after the third game in the series came out. After that… nothing. A few ports and spinoffs, like Hey! Pikmin and Pikmin Bloom, released in the interim, but nothing resembling a full-fledged fourth installment. The game finally received a gameplay trailer in February 2023 and released that July, eight years after the "close to completion" remark.
• Storyteller, a simple game that takes less than 2 hours to complete, had been in development since 2009 but was released in 2023. There were a few years when the development of this game was abandoned though.
• The remake of System Shock took eight years to develop. Development started in 2015 and was steady until 2017, when they decided to switch engines to make it easier to develop on consoles (it was initially envisioned as a PC exclusive like the original) and so had to restart from square one. In 2018 development was restarted again due to management taking the project so far off the rails the game was barely resembling the game it was supposed to be a remake of, with Nightdive CEO canning the entire creative staff and taking over directorial duties himself. Then in 2019 COVID happened, and in 2020 there was another staff shuffle due to a number of employees also working on Fall Guys, which was bought by Epic Games, who made them sign non-compete contracts. The game was finally released in 2023 to positive reviews.
• Team Fortress 2 took Valve nine years to make and were damn close to spending ten on it. The devs were working on Team Fortress 2 after they made Team Fortress Classic. Then they became part of Valve and started working on a GoldSrc version, then constantly changed everything around until they released it in 2007.
• Tobias and the Dark Sceptres spent 13 years in development. Its creator even made a video about it titled 'the game that time forgot' going over why it took so long.
• The Shmups Forum post announcing ZeroRanger was posted in 2009, and the devs explained that they had been working on it for "a while" already at the time. The game was finally released in 2018, nine years later, and extra modes are still being worked on.

Delayed Creation

Film — Animated

• At 29 years, Richard Williams' animation opus, The Thief and the Cobbler, a.k.a. The Princess and the Cobbler, a.k.a. Arabian Night, currently holds the Guinness World Record for the longest production time for an animated feature and the fourth longest production time for a film overall. Development began in 1964 and Williams was in and out of production working on other things, repeatedly getting into trouble financing it, having it go through all kinds of Development Hell, eventually losing the rights to the movie, before it finally saw a release in 1993.
• Very common in the Disney Animated Canon:
  • Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953) and Lady and the Tramp (1955) were in various stages of production when feature film production was halted in 1941 when America's entry in World War II rerouted the studio's output to the war effort. (Alice, in fact, was one of the stories considered for feature adaptation before Snow White.) Some of the segments in the "package features" of the second half of the 1940s were also unfinished feature projects from before the war, particularly the The Wind in the Willows segment of The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, which was already being animated in 1941.
  • Disney originally planned to update Fantasia every year, but its initial failure put a halt to that. After the success of the 50th anniversary re-release in 1990 and subsequent home-video sales, a second Fantasia feature was put into production, with each segment being made during production lulls starting in 1995. Fantasia 2000 was finally released in 2000, sixty years after the original.
  • Lilo & Stitch was first conceived by Chris Sanders as a children's book in 1985. When that idea fell through, Sanders pitched it for a film after Thomas Schumacher suggested that he come up with the "Dumbo for our generation." From there, it was incrementally worked on up to its 2002 release.
  • Treasure Planet was first pitched back in 1985. It only went into production in 1997 because the directors would only do Hercules if the studio let them do Planet after that.
  • The king, or queen of Disney examples is probably Frozen. Disney had ideas for adaptations of The Snow Queen for seventy years, and had initially wanted to do a hand-drawn feature, but by then there had been changes in management and the audience had grown tired of Disney Princess films. It wasn't picked up again until the success of Tangled.
• The King and the Mockingbird began production in 1948 and was released unfinished in 1952; director Paul Grimault was dissatisfied with it and spent the next fifteen years trying to get the rights back, then another ten years attempting to gain financing to be able to finish it the way he wanted it. That definitive version finally came to theaters in 1980.^note During the premiere, the seat next to Grimault was kept empty in remembrance of the film's scriptwriter, Jacques Prévert, who died from lung cancer in 1977.
• Hey Arnold! The Jungle Movie (which was meant to be the series' Grand Finale) began production in 1998 and had been partially animated in 2001. A Made-for-TV Movie called Arnold Saves the Neighborhood was developed alongside it. However, Nickelodeon expected the film to be a hit after the two Rugrats movies took off and gave it a theatrical release in 2002 under the title Hey Arnold! The Movie. The Movie did horribly and both critics and audiences responded negatively to it. The Jungle Movie was then cancelled and the series ended with two big unresolved plot points^note The answer to the whereabouts of Arnold's long lost parents and Arnold's response to Helga's Anguished Declaration of Love. In 2009, fans of the series began petitioning for the film to resume production and the series gained a new surge in popularity once it began airing as part of TeenNick's The '90s are All That block in The New '10s. In an attempt to Win Back the Crowd and cash-in on 90s nostalgia, Bartlett confirmed in late 2015 that The Jungle Movie would resume production. The film ultimately premiered simultaneously on Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, and NickSplat on November 24, 2017.

Film — Live-Action

• Christopher Nolan's ideas for his later films came well before he turned famous. He decided to sit on them until he had the experience and the backing to make big-budget films. Inception was in his mind for years before he finally made the film. The initial idea for Dunkirk (2017) came to him in 1992 when sailing to Dunkirk (France) with his now-wife Emma Thomas.
• James Cameron started to work on the film that would eventually become Avatar (2009) almost right after Titanic (1997) was finished. Unfortunately, because he kept waiting for the technology to catch up to his vision, people started to place it on lists of "movies that will never be made".
  • The sequels went the same way, to the point Avatar: The Way of Water was released thirteen years after the original. In the meantime, another pet project of Cameron, Alita: Battle Angel, had to be handed over to Robert Rodriguez.
• The sequel to the first Indiana Jones trilogy had been planned for over a decade, but it had to wait for a plot that all the major players (Spielberg, Lucas, and Harrison Ford) felt was worthy of the title character.
• George Miller thought up the concept for Mad Max: Fury Road back in 1997-98. After a long pre-production (during which he released three other movies), over seven months of filming with a very Troubled Production, and over two years in post-production, it finally released in 2015, nearly twenty years later and thirty years after Thunderdome.
• Sergio Leone first got the idea for Once Upon a Time in America after reading The Hoods in the mid-1960s. He spent much of the sixties and seventies trying to get the film off the ground, meeting with author Harry Grey several times to understand America through his point of view. Casting for the film began in 1975 and at one point, Leone passed on directing The Godfather in order to get it made.
• Gandhi: In 1962 Richard Attenborough was contacted by Motilal Kothari, an Indian-born civil servant working with the Indian High Commission in London and a devout follower of Gandhi. Kothari insisted that Attenborough meet him to discuss a film about Gandhi. Attenborough agreed, after reading Louis Fischer's biography of Gandhi and spent the next 18 years attempting to get the film made. He was able to meet prime minister Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi through a connection with Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India. Nehru approved of the film and promised to help support its production, but his death in 1964 was one of the film's many setbacks. Attenborough would dedicate the film to the memory of Kothari, Mountbatten, and Nehru. Attenborough first offered Candice Bergen her cameo role in 1966 while they were filming The Sand Pebbles.
• Reds (1981): The film was conceptualized in 1966, the script was first put together in 1969, and it took an additional 12 years to make it to theaters. Part of this was due to the sheer length of time needed to gather all the interview footage used, which was being shot as early as 1971. Another, bigger part was the fact that the film's controversial subject matter made it difficult to find a financer; Warren Beatty would eventually get the money he needed after the success of 1978's Heaven Can't Wait, which gave him enough clout to get Reds off the ground.
• Saving Sally started production in 2005 but came to a halt due to lack of financing. French producers took a shine to the film, allowing for production to resume in 2010. It released in 2016 as an entry for the Metro Manila Film Festival, whose entries for that year's edition was predominantly made up of indie and arthouse films instead of the usual mainstream fare.
• Star Wars:
  • The Prequel Trilogy was something George Lucas had hoped to do as early as the filming of the original A New Hope in 1976, and which was set in stone when The Empire Strikes Back was designated "Episode V". It wasn't until Jurassic Park debuted in 1993 that he started writing the prequels, as he felt CGI special effects would be able to achieve the kinds of visuals he wanted to depict. The first of these three films, The Phantom Menace, debuted in 1999, 22 years after A New Hope.
  • The Sequel Trilogy also counts: Lucas had ideas for it at the same time as the prequels (each trilogy would be about a generation of Skywalkers), although some of these were eventually folded into Return of the Jedi ^note Including Luke becoming a Jedi, discovering his sister, and confronting the Emperor. By the 1990s, Lucas had shelved the idea of making them, as he was merely curious about what the sequels would be like, as well as his advancing age (and by 2012 he was frustrated with people saying how terrible he was due to the prequels). In the end he started early work on a sequel trilogy in 2012, which was crystallized by his sale of Lucasfilm to Disney. Disney announced the sequel trilogy that would begin with The Force Awakens that would debut in 2015, 32 years after Return of the Jedi. While the sequels diverged greatly from Lucas' ideas, they still included several of his ideas in some fashion.^note This includes following the next Skywalker generation, Han Solo no longer being alive, Leia being trained as a Jedi by Luke, Luke continuing his life alone, and a pair of Force users confronting the Emperor.
• Maïwenn began planning for Jeanne du Barry in 2006, spent three years writing the script... and then spent a decade trying to find her ideal actor for the role of Louis XIV. As she was determined to hire Johnny Depp, the opportunity to hire him did not emerge until 2019. While he signed on immediately, filming did not begin for another three years due to his various legal issues. The film was finally released in 2023.

Literature

• The Chronicles of Narnia: C. S. Lewis first pictured the faun from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe when he was sixteen. He finished the book when he was fifty.
• E. L. James stated she originally came up with the idea for The Mister before writing Fifty Shades of Grey; she wrote a rough draft of The Mister in 2009 but didn't fully know how to make it work, plus she then got preoccupied writing Fifty Shades and working on the movies. She finally completed it and got it published in 2019, ten years after writing the initial draft.
• Elie Wiesel waited ten years before writing about his experiences during the holocaust, as he felt he was was too close to it emotionally 'to see clearly'. The first manuscript for what would become Night was more than 850 pages. He spent the next few years whittling it down to just a lean 116 pages for the American publication.
• The Sholan Alliance by Lisanne Norman: The first book was published in 1993, the 7th in 2003. The eighth book wasn't published until 2010. Some of the delays can be traced to the author moving from England to the Eastern U.S.A., then to the Pacific Coast.

Live-Action TV

• Iginio Straffi had wanted to make a "flesh-and-blood" version of Winx Club since 2011. He hesitated to pitch the adaptation until he gained some experience with live-action himself. After working on Nickelodeon's live-action series Club 57, Straffi approved Fate: The Winx Saga for production, and the first season was filmed from September to December 2019.

Music

• David Bowie: Bowie wanted to "redo" his much-maligned and personally loathed 1987 album Never Let Me Down ever since the supporting tour for it wrapped up at the end of that year, but the idea was put on hold for over three decades. Reeves Gabrels encouraged him to hold off on the idea in '87 because it had been too soon since the original album released, and a second attempt at a redo in 1996 never got past the planning phase. Eventually, Bowie hand-picked several musicians for the project shortly before his death in 2016, and they put together a Remix Album two years later that replaced almost all the instrumental tracks with ones more in line with Bowie's original intention for a Revisiting the Roots album.
• Brian Wilson's album SMiLE (The Beach Boys): Production started in 1966 while Wilson was with The Beach Boys. The album was abandoned in 1967 due to a number of factors. Brian revisited the project in 2004 with his own band and released an album of the material that same year. Finally, a version created from the orignal recordings was released in 2011.

Video Games

• Metroid Dread first entered development for the Nintendo DS around 2005, with its existence becoming known through leaked internal documents. The game would be alluded to and referenced over the years, particularly in the North American release of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, with one of the easter eggs claiming that it was nearing completion. Series producer Yoshio Sakamoto would later reveal that the project was scrapped on two different occasions due to him being unsatisfied with the technical specifications of the handheld system. He'd leave Dread on the backburner and spend years working on various other Nintendo games, including other Metroid titles, instead. It wouldn't be until 2017 that the project would be revived, with Sakamoto being impressed with the work that MercurySteam did with Metroid: Samus Returns. The game released in October 2021 on the Nintendo Switch, making it the first original 2D Metroid installment in over 19 years.
• Following Tail Concerto, there was a ten year gap for its Non-Linear Sequel Solatorobo: Red the Hunter to release; half of that time was spent by CyberConnect2 trying to convince Bandai Namco Entertainment to even greenlight the damn project at all.
• The remake of Tsukihime was originally announced back in 2008, but Type-Moon wouldn't begin serious development until 2012 upon the completion of Witch on the Holy Night. But then in 2013 they were side-tracked with the development of Fate/Grand Order, which, alongside the general explosion of the Fate series, left them with minimal resources to focus on the remake. It was only around 2017 that general development towards a sellable product was restarted, and even then, the scope of the product was so large that its contents were to be divided up, with the first part only coming out in 2021, 13 years since the original announcement, with the second part being announced with no date.

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