I desperately wanted “The Talisman” to come to screen with a young Brad Renfro.
From 2005-2010, they came out with 3 decent The Chronicles of Narnia movies (yeah, the second movie was iffy). But I would have paid to see the remaining 4. They let the rights expire and 10 years passed and now I see that Netflix will redo the series.
I suppose most people reading this already know, but “Los hijos del Topo” is out in at least comic book form. No film ever made, though there have long been various rumors…
Willis O’Brien, the creator of King Kong and other such films, had a number of unrealized projects he wanted to do.
King Kong vs. Frankenstein – he actually did lots of conceptual drawings of various over-sized artificial humans who would be his “Frankenstein”. He and King Kong would fight one-on-one using stop-motion animation puppets. My 8-year-old self would’ve loved it. It got retitled several times, including “King Kong vs. Prometheus”. Ultimately it served as the inspiration not only for “King Kong vs. Godzilla” but also “Frankenstein Conquers the World” and “War of the Gargantuas”.
http://www.roberthood.net/daikaiju-antho/unnatural_history/kkvsfrank.htm
The War Eagles
The idea sounds insane – Vikings riding on giant eagles to war, but I could see it working, in O’Brien’s hands
http://roberthood.net/blog/index.php/2008/03/26/will-the-eagles-fly/
http://roberthood.net/blog/index.php/2009/09/22/war-eagles-memorabilia/
O’Brien’s plans for Gwangi were ultimately realized by his protege, Ray Harryhausen, when he released the Valley of Gwangi in the 1960s.
Harryhausen himself had many unrealized projects. My favorite would have been his stop-motion version of War of the Worlds, done as a period piece. Unfortunately, George Pal beat him to it. But Harryhausen would’ve given us stop-motion tripods instead of those flying things, and I would’ve liked to have seen that. Stop motion “strobing” gives a great impression of massive mechanical motion, as Lucas showed us with the AT-ATs in The Empire Strikes Back.
I could have sworn I read a sequel to Empire Strikes Back by George Lucas. Maybe it was by somebody else. The only thing I remember about it is Luke and his wife have twins.
There was talk about making a sequel to “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” but I believe it got bogged down in rights issues with all the different cartoon characters.
Also James Cameron was once in talks to make a Spider-Man movie back in the mid-1990s.
Howard Stern was in negotiations to make “Adventures of Fartman” movie but it fell apart over merchandising rights.
Two sequel ideas that were bounced around in the 80s were “National Lampoon’s Jaws 3, People 0” and “Star Trek VI: Starfleet Academy”. Both sequels ended up substantially different.
My references: The 50 Greatest Movies NEVER made by Chris Gore. (FYI,it was originally published in 1999. So some of the entries may be out of date.)
Asimov’s “Foundation” series has yet to see the screen. Done right, it could be bigger than LOTR.
Machete kills again, in space.
Following the success of A Hard’s Day’s Night and Help! the Beatles wanted their third movie to be an adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Paul was going to play Frodo, Ringo would play Sam, George would play Gandalf, and John would play Gollum. They wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct and they planned on writing several new songs for the soundtrack. Obviously, this would have been a somewhat loose interpretation but I think it would have been interesting.
The roadblock that killed the project was Tolkien. He was still alive and absolutely refused to sell the film rights to the Beatles because he hated their music.
There was also Joe Orton’s unproduced Beatles script, Up Against It.
My wife and I went to see the 2007 release of Mongol: the Rise of Ghengis Khan. We were eager to see the sequels, but…
[Quote=IMDB at
Originally, ‘Mongol’ was the first part of a projected trilogy, but after the difficulty making this film, director Sergei Bodrov decided not to make the sequels. Several months after shooting wrapped, however, he changed his mind again and decided to conflate his scripts for parts 2 and 3, and just do the one sequel, entitled ‘The Great Kahn’. It was originally scheduled to be released in late 2010, but the project was held back for several months. In November 2010 however, it was announced that all work on the film had ceased, and was unlikely to resume. In July 2013, during a visit to the annual Naadam Festival in Ulan Bator, Bodrov told the press that the production of the sequel had started again. [/Quote]
I don’t believe the sequel(s) were ever finished.
I worked at the theaters around the time Empire Strikes Back was winding down. I managed to grab one of the posters near the theater exit: Coming Soon: Revenge of the Jedi*
I kinda would have preferred seeing Luke’s *revenge *rather than just the return-from-the-dojo-planet.
And, apparently unlike everyone else on the planet, I liked John Carter. I would have liked to have seen sequels, and they wouldn’t even need to be in 3D. Then again, I’ve never read the books so I have no idea how much the movies deviated from them
–G!
*I gave it to a friend as a birthday gift, explicitly telling him it would be worth a lot some day. He ended up tossing it in a corner and it didn’t go with him when he moved away from home.
It would really be great if someone made a GOOD film adaptation of The Wild Wild West.
I’m the one guy who saw and enjoyed Push. I wish the movie had been successful and the sequels had been made.
But who am I kidding? That guy Chris Evans obviously didn’t have what it takes to be the lead in a blockbuster action series.
What about “Argo”? The one slated to be filmed in Iran?
I was just reading yesterday that David Letterman did a screen test for the role of Ted Striker in Airplane!. The role went to Robert Hays instead. A golden opportunity was missed, I tells ya.
“Yeah, the plane’s going to crash. What are you going to do? Can I finally light a cigar? Like smoking now is really going to make things worse. Anybody seen Biff? Hey Paul, play us out.”
An advantage with Ringworld vs., say Game of Thrones, is that the characterization and plotting should be easier for your run of the mill TV writing staff to replicate. I love Niven, but I don’t think you read him for his intricate plots or his richly described characters. Unless the Ringworld itself counts as a character.
I’d love to see Known Space on an HBO budget.
Wow. Huh.
Lynch’s “Johnny Rocket”
I think a gigantic opportunity was missed when they (mis)cast Ralph Fiennes in “Maid in Manhattan” instead of Richard Kiel.
The Eric Red script to “Alien 3” (among the 10 or so completed scripts for the troubled film) that completely ignores Alien and Aliens to have a story where on a large space station containing a domed city that resembles an American farm town the military experiments with xenomorphs cause the aliens to break out and started impregnating the livestock, causing all sorts of bizarre crossbreeds including xenomorph chickens and xenomorph mosquitos, until eventually somehow all the xenomorphs merge into one giant xenomorph who is somehow able to assimilate the space station, so now we have a gigantic xenomorph flying through space fighting off space jets.
I agree with both of you: I’d love to see it on the screen, and I fear for what Hollywood would do to it. Also, TMIAHM is a very talky novel. The characters discuss how to build a revolutionary conspiracy, political philosophy, Loonie culture, Loonie marriage customs, etc., etc. When I re-read it a few years ago, I found it odd and striking how much conversation there was in a novel where the main characters constantly derided “talk-talk”. It makes for a great deconstructionist essay, but a novel with so much talk compared to the amount of action would be hard to translate to the screen, IMO.
I’d love to see the Vorkosigverse on the screen, but I’m not holding my breath. Bujold was quoted as saying some of the proposed scripts were awful. In one, she said the screenwriter had the Barrayarans in a space ship showing their barbarous nature by each squad cooking its own food over a wood fire. On a space ship. In space. Over an open fire. Teh stoopid - it buurrrns!
The proposed sequel to Cassablanca, “Brazzaville”, could have been great, but most likely would have been horrible.