The Greatest Movies Never Made
From the outside, making movies doesn’t seem that complicated, right? You whip up a script, get thrown a boatload of cash, chuck up a green screen, hire some pretty people to stand in front of camera, a bit of cutting and chopping here and there and voila, a movie is made. If you’ve got a truly great idea and some talented people involved, what could go wrong? Well, apparently quite a lot, and some productions go so disastrously wrong, their projects get postponed, indefinitely shelved, or even scrapped entirely. Here’s three high-profile examples of films that, for whatever reason, never quite made it onto the big screen.
Tim Burton’s Superman Lives
Tim Burton and Superman never seemed like a match made in heaven; in theory, Burton’s weird, gothic horror inspired vibe doesn’t mesh seamlessly with what we know of the clean cut, soft-edge image of Superman. But after he proved to the world that superhero movies were totally in his wheelhouse with his hugely successful 1989 rendition of Batman, Burton was hired to direct a Kevin Smith (another fish out of water here, Smith’s was only known for his stoner comedy credits) written screenplay, where Clark Kent was set to be played by none other than everyone’s favourite oddball, Nicolas Cage. But the film never came together, as a new writer was brought on and made heavy amendments to Smith’s original script which dissatisfied Burton.
Eventually, conflicting visions between writer, director and producers forced the whole thing to collapse. All we have from the ashes of Superman Lives is some bizarre looking stills of a long-haired Cage in the Superman suit that you would swear were photoshopped if you didn’t know the backstory. Oh well, at least recent reboots have been good… I guess?
Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon
Any unmade Stanley Kubrick film is worth mourning. They are all likely masterpieces we were robbed of, and boy there’s quite a few of them. But the legendary director’s never-made biopic on famed French military leader Napoleon Bonaparte might be the most tantalising. Fresh off of basically changing the medium of film forever with his iconic 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick set in his sights on creating a character study of incredibly ambitious scope with this proposed biopic, reportedly requesting a budget of over $5 million (that’s now equivalent to about $100 million) in order pull off battle scenes that would require tens of thousands of extras.
While Kubrick’s obsession and trademark determination to push the project forward might’ve seemed unstoppable, the price was deemed too lofty by studios, particularly after a similarly scoped film, Sergei Bondarchuk epic war film Waterloo (1970), flopped rather spectacularly as Kubrick was planning his own work. Still, not all of Kubrick’s vision was lost, as he would use much of his Napoleon research as inspiration for his period classic Barry Lyndon just a few years later.
Nick Cave’s Gladiator 2
Now, this would have been something truly off-the-wall. I’ll try not to spoil too much (it’s over 20 years old, you have had plenty of time to see the original), but the ending to Ridley Scott’s Best Picture winning Gladiator, doesn’t leave much room for a sequel. However, the 2000 original was a massive commercial success, so of course Hollywood execs were going to try. Well, try they did, and star of the original film, Russell Crowe, invited his musician and (semi-legitimate) screenwriter buddy, Nick Cave, a chance to give it a crack. Hilariously, when Cave astutely pointed out to his friend that his character, Maximus, dies in the final shot of the original (sorry, I didn’t try that hard), Crowe replied just brilliantly, “Yeah, you sort that out”.
Cave must have taken that as a challenge, as what he wrote was an absolutely insane screenplay, where Crowe’s Maximus is reincarnated as some kind of immortal time-travelling warrior who goes around getting into fights with Roman Gods and somehow ends up in 1970’s Vietnam with his (also reincarnated) son? Unsurprisingly, Scott wasn’t willing to absolutely light his creditability on fire by progressing with it and so it never developed beyond Cave’s script (which is incredibly still available to read for free on the internet). I’m just imagining it now; Crowe, dodging bullets in the Vietnamese jungle, still in full Roman arena garb turns to the camera and yells “are you still not entertained?!”. No, Russell, we are VERY entertained.