For every movie that hits the theater, there are dozens that don’t. Maybe their screenplays were never picked up, maybe their director died mid-shoot, or maybe the studio changed their minds mid-production. Most of these ideas never see the light of day, and would be lucky to retire to an unoptioned script database—but sometimes, the failures of renowned directors seep through the cracks and into the public eye. The following are some of the most famous, infamous, and bizarre almost-movies that make the grass look greener (or the screen silverer) on the other side.
Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon Biopic
It was 1968, and Stanley Kubrick had the industry’s biggest studios at his beck and call. For nearly a decade, he’d been the man behind the most controversial and innovative films in theaters, whether that be Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), or 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Telling the story of Napoleon Bonaparte, then, was a natural move for the director just as infatuated with filmmaking as his subject was with imperialism. Like so many other men who went on to leave indelible yet ethically questionable marks on history, the story of Napoleon was an obsession for a young Stanley Kubrick. He watched cinema history’s then-greatest renditions Bonaparte’s life, such as the five-hour epic Napoleon (1927), thought “I could do better,” and so set his eyes on realizing a biopic as grand as the summed egos of him and his boyhood hero. Right off the heels of 2001, Kubrick assembled a department of historians, chartered a comprehensive biography of Napoleon, and planned out full-scale battle reenactments that leveraged the labor of 50,000 Romanian soldiers. After a year of living, breathing, and writing Napoleon, Kubrick finished his screenplay only to learn that three other Bonaparte biopics had already started production. At the same time, his partner studio MGM underwent restructuring and severe funding problems, so the biopic was shelved. Like a boarder at Trafalgar, Kubrick jumped ship to Warner Bros. and signed on to direct what became A Clockwork Orange (1971) with an intent to return to Napoleon. Despite his future efforts, Kubrick never managed to secure the funding and talent to produce his historical epic.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, starring Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger
Jodorowsky’s Dune is infamous in cinephilic circles as perhaps the most unhinged, yet widely mourned, failure in Hollywood history. When Alejandro Jodorowsky, the visionary director behind The Holy Mountain (1973) and El Topo (1970), was approached to direct a filmization of Frank Herbert’s Dune (after David Lean turned it down three years earlier), perhaps the first thought that passed through his mind was “I’m gonna get real weird with it.” The cast? Why, the Francoist provocateur, the stocky Shakespearean , and the skinny guy who paints things black, of course. The runtime? 14 hours. The score? Pink Floyd. The art director? H. R. Giger, naturally. For a variety of reasons, including Dalí’s $100,000-an-hour rate and other budgetary constraints, production petered out. After falling through, the special effects director Dan O’Bannon was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and shortly afterwards wrote the screenplay for Alien (1979).
A 2013 documentary that details the history of Jodorowsky’s Dune is available for checkout from the library, as are the 1984 David Lynch and 2022 Villeneuve adaptations.
Sergio Leone’s Leningrad: The 900 Days
The director practically synonymous with long runtimes, long shots, and wide aspect ratios would have been a perfect candidate for depicting one of the longest slogs in modern military history: the Siege of Leningrad. After reading Harrison Salisbury’s The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, Sergio Leone shifted his sights from Spaghetti Westerns1,2,3,4,5 and mobster dramas back to his bread and butter, the historical epic1,2. Leone tapped Robert Deniro to star as the intrepid American photographer protagonist, and Ennio Morricone was on board to score the film. Nearly half of the $100 million budget was secured before Leone’s unexpected death in 1990: director Alex Cox of Repo Man (1984) fame tried to swoop in and save the production, but was unable to find further funding.
Gladiator II by Nick Cave (AKA Christ Killer)
After the whelming theatrical success of Gladiator (2000), director Ridley Scott set his eyes on a sequel. Though the original movie has a resolutory ending with no apparent need for continuation, Scott thought that reincarnation would be a perfectly fitting plot device to restart the story. Musician Nick Cave was commissioned to write the script, which he “…enjoyed [] very much because I knew on every level that it was never going to get made.” In Cave’s screenplay, the first film’s protagonist Maximus returns to Earth after death with the task of killing Jesus Christ. In subsequent lives, he fights in the Crusades, World War II, the Vietnam War, and works at the Pentagon. Two decades later, a sequel was finally released, rebuffing the time travel and messianic murders audiences hoped for with penitent scenes of rhinos and sharks mauling gladiators.
David Lynch’s I’ll Test My Log with Every Branch of Knowledge
If you’ve seen Twin Peaks, you might remember the character Log Lady, a local clairvoyant known for her psychic connection to a beloved log. Her inclusion in the show was something of a compromise for creator David Lynch who, along with Log Lady’s portrayer Catherine Coulson, initially conceived of the character as the protagonist of the unrealized series I’ll Test My Log with Every Branch of Knowledge. In an interview with the two, Lynch recalled that the “idea was that Catherine would go with the log to various experts; a dentist, a doctor, a physicist. And they would talk only to the log and we would learn information as an audience.” Coulson followed up, “for example, I would go to a dentist, and he’d clip a little blue towel on the log and the dentist would probe the rings and talk about dentistry as well as the wood. There would be a different expert every week and that was the idea for the series.” Lynch never seriously pursued the concept, but years later while working on Twin Peaks, finally found the chance to incarnate the log-obsessed lady that obsessed him.
The Wachowski’s Cobalt Neural 9
From the brains of the Wachowski siblings (of The Matrix tetralogy, V for Vendetta (2005), and others) echoed rumors of something called Cobalt Neural 9. Little is known about the project; most intel was leaked by Jesse Ventura (WWF-heel turned Minnesota governor) and Arianna Huffington (founder of HuffPost), who were both apparently involved in preproduction. According to Vulture, it’s a found-footage mockumentary set 100 years in the future about two queer Iraq War combatants that fall in love and conspire to assassinate George Bush. Unfortunately, no news has mounted about the project since that article in 2010: it’s likely that Cobalt was overshadowed by Cloud Atlas which the Wachowskis released in 2012. And while Cloud Atlas might not quench your thirst for what could have been Brokeback Mountain-meets-The Hurt Locker-meets-Vantage Point, it’s worth a watch if a spiritist sci-fi movie spanning 472 years starring Tom Hanks sounds good to you.