Ever since Warner Bros. Discovery pulled the plug on Batgirl, fans have been diving deep into cinema history to see if there were any other high-profile and costly productions that were tossed onto the scrapheap when they were so agonizingly close to reaching the finish line.
Leslie Grace’s scrapped debut as Barbara Gordon is definitely going to become a talking point and trivia question for years to come, one that’s now emboldened cinephiles to list off the other abandoned projects they wished had made it to the screen. While others eventually arrived in a very different form, the contenders being floated on Reddit are enough to make you grow wistful.
There’s a distinct chance that Tim Burton and Nicolas Cage’s Superman Lives would have been an unmitigated clusterf*ck, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have loved to watch it unfold in front of our eyes. In a similar vein, Guillermo del Toro’s At the Mountains of Madness is the one that’s gotten away several times already, just like his planned Hellboy III.
Quentin Tarantino’s John Travolta/Michael Madsen crossover The Vega Brothers, District 9 director Neil Blomkamp’s Halo with Peter Jackson producing, Gore Verbinski’s $100+ million R-rated take on Bioshock, and Paul Verhoeven’s Crusade with Arnold Schwarzenegger could have all been awesome had they come to fruition, but it wasn’t to be.
As mentioned, a couple of those aforementioned titles have either been made or are on the way, but that won’t matter much to those who feel pangs of regret every time they think of the original versions.