What are some film collaborations you wish happened? Could be either total fantasy on your part, or actual collaborations that fell through for one reason or another.
IE, for example, I so wish that Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro had been put together in a film (ideally a gangster film) somewhere between 1975 and 1980, when Al still had his voice and hadn’t become a cartoon, and DeNiro had begun to come into his own as an actor.
Or, in earlier Hollywood, I would’ve liked to have seen Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in a movie together - I consider them the two titans of the Golden Era of Hollywood. Could’ve been a movie sort of like Gable’s Manhattan Melodrama.
The Beatles at one point wanted to get the film rights to The Lord of the Rings. Would the resulting movie have been an epic disaster? Probably. But it would have been interesting to watch.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune. Definitely would have been a trainwreck, but it would have been spectacular.
In the late 1960s, there was talk of Chuck Connors playing Doc Savage. It would probably have been just as bad as the Ron Ely film that eventually got made, but it might have been awesome.
Bob Clampett wanted to do Burroughs’ Mars stories. I would love to have seen that.
Not a collaboration, but a wished-for combination. Two of them, actually –
as has been pointed out many times, Boris Karloff was unable to appear in the movie arsenic and Old Lace because he was still performing it on Broadway. So Raymond Massey took the role of Jonathan Brewster. If you had to have someone else take the part, Masey was it, but I would’ve liked to have seen Karloff in the role.
Karloff played the role of prosecutor Bishop Peter Cauchon in Jean Anhouilh’s The Lark (l’Alouette ) both on stage (1955) and in a TV movie (1957). It’s about Joan of Arc. I would’ve loved to have seen him play the part in George Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan. (Anton Walbrook played the role in the 1957 film by Otto Preminger)
It was a financial decision. Karloff could have taken a break from the play but he would have lost money doing it. He had a share in the profits of the Broadway show. But he would have only been paid a straight salary for appearing in the movie. His salary would have been less than he would have lost due to the reduced tickets sales for the play.
Gable and Bogart were to have starred in The Man Who Would Be King but Bogart was diagnosed with cancer so director John Huston put the project on the back burner for another 20 years until he finally made the movie with Sean Connery and Michael Caine in 1975.