TOP 10: Films That Never Released
This week on the podcast we cover a slew of terrible sequel movies that probably should never have been made/released. But Hollywood is rife with stories of films that begin shooting, and in some cases even finish production, before they are pulled and shelved for various reasons.
That’s what we’ll be focusing on in this article. Below find 10 films that were publicly announced and started shooting, but which were either never finished, or finished and never released. (We won’t be covering films that were announced but never made it to production — that’s a whole separate list we may get to some time.)
Note that there are numerous cases of production shutting down due to the death of a key member of the cast or crew, or productions that were shut down due to a scandal involving one of the lead performers. We won’t be covering those here, as we don’t wish to make light of those situations.
We also aren’t touching the super obvious recent examples, like Warner Bros.’ infamous Batgirl, Scoob! Holiday Haunt, and Coyote vs. Acme, as they’ve all gotten plenty of press recently.
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10. Yuri On Ice: The Movie
“Yuri on Ice” was a cult-favorite Japanese anime about an aspiring figure skater and his potential same-sex love interest, as well as his love for pork katsu bowls. The first season was released in 2016, and a movie subtitled “Ice Adolescence” was announced in 2017. A teaser trailer (above) was released in 2019, featuring the character Viktor competing at the Winter Olympics Games. And then…nothing. Delay after delay, then silence, until April 2024, when animation studio MAPPA abruptly announced on social media that the film was scrapped and would never be released. I guess that’s one way to be a “history maker.”
9. Gambit
There are a slew of comic-book films that have ended up in the Hollywood graveyard, but this is one deserves discussing. Channing Tatum had been attached to star as the card-throwing Marvel mutant since at least 2014, and 21st Century Fox (which then held the rights to the X-Men characters) had brought in multiple directors to helm the project, including Doug Liman and Gore Verbinski. None of these worked out, the film kept getting pushed back, and then it was officially scrapped when Disney acquired Fox, rending all previous projects inert. But there is a happy ending: Tatum ultimately DID end up suiting up as the Ragin’ Cajun a decade after he was officially announced to be playing the role, fighting alongside the titular heroes in the 2024 mega-hit Deadpool & Wolverine.
8. Revenge of the Nerds (2006)
We nearly had a reboot of the classic 80s college comedy franchise in the early 2000s, with Adam Brody (“The OC”) and Jenna Dewan (ironically, Channing Tatum’s now-ex-wife) leading the film. Two weeks of filming took place, but then Emory University — where the movie was shooting — got a look at the script and rescinded permission to film on its premises. Additionally, studio execs were unhappy with the footage that was shot, so they opted to shut the whole thing down. Some say to this day that the nerds are still awaiting their revenge…
7. In God’s Hands
This 2002 movie was totally filmed by director Lodge Kerrigan — it was produced by king of 2000s cinema Stephen Soderbergh — and starred Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard as a couple whose young daughter was kidnapped. An accident left the film’s negative so badly damaged that literally all of the footage was deemed unusable, meaning that all that work by cast and crew will never be seen. There is one good element to the story: Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard met on the film, and have been married in real life for more than 15 years.
6. All-Star Weekend
This film, originally slated for release in 2018, was supposed to be Oscar-winning actor Jamie Foxx’s directorial debut. But that didn’t happen! The movie was fully shot, and starred Foxx and Jeremy Piven as basketball-obsessed roommates on a wild road trip to see the NBA All-Star Game, with Eva Longoria, Benicio del Toro, Gerard Butler, and Ken Jeong in supporting roles. Oh, and also Robert Downer Jr., who was cast to play a Mexican man. While Downey got tons of buzz doing blackface in 2008’s Tropic Thunder, white actors race swapping was not well received a decade later, and the Powers That Be opted to shelve the entire movie rather than try to maneuver around the controversy. In 2024 Foxx DID release the trailer for the film, which you can watch above.
5. Superman Lives
The other super-hero movie we HAVE to talk about on this list, Superman Lives was three years and $30 million into pre-production in the late 1990s when it was unceremoniously killed. The film would have been directed by Tim Burton, hot off his Batman reboots, and starred Nicolas Cage as a mulleted Superman (this was comics accurate at the time; 90s comics were a vibe), with a script by Clerks auteur Kevin Smith. The film never materialized, and that may be a good thing, based on what Smith has shared about producer Jon Peters’ absolutely insane story demands. These included Superman needing to fight a giant spider in the third act, Brainiac needing to fight a polar bear in the Fortress of Solitude, and Brainiac gifting Lex Luthor with an alien dog solely conceived to sell children’s toys. The whole thing was a debacle, as chronicled by the 2015 documentary The Death of Superman Lives. Cage did get to play Superman — kind of — when 2023’s The Flash movie included a horrible CGI version of him as the character (see above — yes that was actually in a movie) that brought to life the test shots that had been floating around the internet for decades.
4. Yellow Submarine (2000s)
Forrest Gump Director Robert Zemeckis worked for several years trying to launch a CGI remake of The Beatles’ trippy 1968 animated movie Yellow Submarine. Concept art had been generated, actors like Cary Elwes and David Tennant had been attached, and critical meetings with the remaining Beatles (and the families of the deceased members) had been scheduled. But a massive flop for Zemeckis’ Mars Needs Moms CGI film sent Disney panicking, and support for the project drowned. Zemeckis tried to shop the film to other studios before giving up himself. It was indeed all too much.
3. Broadway Brawler
Bruce Willis may be the king of unreleased films; he’s been involved in at least three projects that got scrapped at some point in shooting, including this 1997 sports-themed romantic comedy that would have also starred Maura Tierney and Daniel Baldwin. Willis allegedly had massive fights with the film’s crew, including director Lee Grant, and the situation became so untenable that filming was halted 20 days into shooting. The entire film was scrapped, and the real kicker is that because of the mess, Willis was forced into taking three roles at a reduced salary to satisfy the financial losses. Those roles? Disney’s The Kid (OK), the blockbuster Armeggedon, and The Sixth Sense, which brought him some of the best reviews of his career.
2. Elizabeth, Michael & Marlon
This story is crazy. Initially intended to be a standalone feature film by Director Ben Palmer and Writer Neil Forsyth, the project was fully shot and starred Stockard Channing as Elizabeth Taylor, Brian Cox as Marlon Brando, and Joseph Fiennes as Michael Jackson as the trio of showbiz royalty embarked on a cross-country road trip after all flights were canceled in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. This is based on a true story, and in concept is a movie I would LOVE to see. But there was one very large problem: the casting of very white (and very British) Fiennes to play the African-American icon Michael Jackson, complete with ghoulish facial prosthetics. There was simply no way that would ever be accepted by American audiences, especially not in 2016. The movie was going to be repackaged into an episode of the British TV series “Urban Myths,” but even that was pulled from ever airing due to the controversy. Fiennes tried to defend the casting saying that, by the 2000s, Jackson was “probably closer to my color,” which landed about as well as you would think. In this case it actually did matter if someone was black or white.
1. The Day the Clow Cried
Arguably the most notorious shelved major motion picture of all time. In 1971, comedian Jerry Lewis attempted to do something more serious — although still referring to his clownish persona — with The Day the Clown Cried. In it, Lewis played an unfunny circus clown in World War II-era Germany who eventually is sent to Auschwitz. There he tries and fails to use his comedy skills to gain recognition in the camp — and to get his prison sentence reconsidered. The camp overseer finds a use for him in entertaining the Jewish children, who find him funny. He realizes that his purpose is to lead these children to their deaths in the gas chambers, and ultimately sacrifices himself rather than let them die alone. Financial issues complicated the film’s release, and then discussion of its subject matter — and specifically its tone — led to intense pushback before. Because of all those reasons, it never was released, officially. Very few people have seen even a rough cut of the movie in the decades since, and reaction from those who did was brutal. Lewis ultimately donated the unfinished copy of the film in his possession to the Library of Congress, with the explicit instruction that it not be screened until fall of 2024. Select portions of the film are indeed now available for research at the institution, but the entire film has never been officially released, and likely never will be.
What are some unreleased/canceled movies that we missed? Leave a comment below!