We hear it all the time, movies scripts/ideas get announced by studios but wind up never getting made. Tons of spec scripts eventually make their way onto the internet for everyone to laugh at, or we see a blurb on IMDB about how some classic movie is slated to get a “modern” remake with a flash-in-the-pan star. But what are some potential movies you saw get announced (either as a fresh announcement or way after the fact) that you’re glad never got made, or at least find the concept so dumb it’s at least still funny to remember?
In 2010 it was announced by Fox that the classic 1985 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Commando” was going to be remade, but in the style of the time as a more serious “Taken” style action-drama with Sam Worthington as the potential star. This of course has both “Flash-in-the-pan star vehicle” as well as “Misguided remake” written all over it. Nobody liked Commando for it’s serious look of a father doing whatever it takes to save his daughter, instead it was a movie where Arnold threw a saw blade at a dude and cut his head off. It’s one of the last movies you want to have a “serious remake” of. And Fox most-likely agreed because we’ve heard nothing since.
Video game movie adaptions are announced all the time and then nothing more is ever heard of them. Pac-Man, Pole Position, Galaga, and Frogger have all had movies announced at some point (Galaga even got announced last year) despite their source material offering incredibly little in terms of story material. A more recent example is the 2009 game “Kane & Lynch: Dead Men” which most likely would have followed the same path, taking the title of a popular video game and just throwing an unrelated script at it. It even had a teaser poster with a firm cast, Bruce Willis as Adam “Kane” Marcus, and Jamie Fox as James Lynch (taking over from Billy Bob Thorton initially of all people) But the movie most likely would have been a generic “two ex-cons have one last score while also getting revenge” style of movies, as opposed to the plot of the game which would be seemingly unfilmable, as it involves a sequence where they steal a dumptruck, bust it through the walls of a prison and murder every single guard and cop on their way inside to extract a prisoner, and a finale where they help the Cuban Military stop a coup d’etat in Havana financed by their ex-boss. I just find it amazing they somehow even made it to the teaser poster stage before the whole thing got canceled.
John: We also talked about the UNO movie as an example of pitching on a board game IP. Frank from LA wrote, “I, too, was approached to write the UNO movie. And the log line given to me by the studio is a gem that I thought would be helpful for young screenwriters to hear, so they can better understand the ‘jumping off’ point that potentially paid gigs really get at.” So this is the quote.
Craig: Oh man.
John: “The UNO movie series lives in a world of diverse character relationships, high stakes, and unexpected turn of events.” Should be turns of event, but OK. “Where anyone could be a wild card.” Really have to underline that. “Where anyone could be a wild card.”
Craig: Whoa.
John: “It’s a fun four-quadrant PG-13 film that races from beginning to end with themes that are social and culturally relevant and totally like Ocean’s 11 or Now You See Me.”
Not just movies that didn’t get made, but movies that did but differently than originally conceived.
Research “Back to the Future” and all the differences they originally intended. From having different actors to traveling to different eras, different plot and subplots, to the time machine being a refrigerator. What an absolute pile of dog shit that flick would be.
taraA few years ago ‘Atlas Shrugged’ was supposed to be in development, and Angelona Jolie and Brad Pitt were trying to get the main roles.
I guess it *could have been okay in the right director’s hands, but more likely it would have been a disaster.
I heard that Verhoeven was planning to make a movie version of ‘Starship Troopers’. Man, that would have been awful, but luckily in my substitute reality that didn’t happen.
Sometime in the seventies, I came across a full-page ad in Variety from some small time producer touting a film called “Whiteman Meets Bigfoot”, to be based on a comic by R. Crumb. Actually, it was more like a casting call - they were looking for a very tall, very muscular woman with superabundant body hair to play the romantic lead.
I’m pretty sure Crumb had no interest in actually making that movie. He just wanted to meet that woman.
Well, there IS a line, and at least in Ahnold’s mind they crossed it for a bit. They filmmakers did leave out the scripted scene where John cuts off a guy’s arm and proceeds to beat him with it. So a “taken”-esque version might be OK. I just don’t see it being worth the effort.
And in the same thing as BTTF, did anyone ever watch the bonus material on the Monsters Inc DVD? They had the original storyboard for the movie. It was totally different: different plot, different tone, different ending. You could theoretically make that movie and people might not even notice its connection to Monsters Inc.
Anyone who thinks a remake of “Commando” is going to work is missing the entire point of why the movie worked- it was a vehicle for Arnold Schwarzenegger, not anything special in its own right. Had they made it with any of the other action movie stars of that era, it would have been right there with “American Ninja”.
I’m not surprised that the Hollywood suits who do this stuff don’t get that- they don’t seem to always have a good handle on why shows/movies that work actually do work. They just see $$$ and then try to recapture the lightning in the bottle without knowing what the lightning was, or how it got in the bottle in the first place.