It’s hard to make a film, but it’s even harder to get a film made. The period between pitch and the first day of shooting can be a long one, and many potentially great movies never find their way out of Development Hell.

The average cost of shooting a film is around $65 million, and many films come in at over $100 million. With such huge costs involved, production companies will only go ahead with a shoot if they are completely happy with every tiny detail.

And even after the project has received the green light, there are still plenty of opportunities for the studios to pull the plug. Here we look at 10 movies that might have been great, if only they had made it out of Development Hell.

10 Well Known Movies With Bizarre Backstories

10 When The Perfect Location Isn’t

Some films get all the way to shooting before they fail.
Terry Gilliam spent 10 years trying to get The man Who killed Don Quixote out of the starting blocks and on to location in Bardenas Reales in Spain.

The desert location had unique sandstone hills which had been eroded over time to form strange and beautiful shapes. Could there be a better place to tell the story of the great Spanish dreamer, Don Quixote?

Well, actually, there probably could.

The location scout must have missed the NATO airbase nearby. And the constant noise of aircraft carrying out target practices.

Gilliam decided to plow on, and try to replace the audio in post-production.

That was Day One of the shoot. When cast and crew arrived on set for Day Two, they discovered that a flash flood and gigantic hail stones had damaged all the equipment, and, what’s more, changed the beautiful landscape, so that it no longer matched the shots from the day before.

Not only that but Jean Rochefort, who was playing Quixote, had developed a herniated disc and couldn’t sit on his horse.

It was the end of the line for the production. A second film crew, who had been filming a Making Of documentary, made a different kind of film about the debacle, titled Lost In La Mancha, later released to critical acclaim, which must have been a kicker.

Terry Gilliam did manage to complete his film in 2018 with a different cast, almost 30 years after first pitching it. However, its troubles were not over as he had trouble releasing the film due to a legal dispute and only managed a limited release in 2020 and as a result had very poor box office receipts.

9 When Old Enough Isn’t Good Enough

Guillermo del Toro wanted to make At The Mountains Of Madness, an adaptation of a novel by HP Lovecraft about a group of explorers in the Antarctic who discover sinister ancient ruins. The book had long been considered unfilmable, but if anyone could bring it to life, del Toro could.

Or not.

In 2006, while everyone agreed that the screenplay looked great, Del Toro could not get Warner Bros to put up the money. They were concerned at the lack of love interest and the downbeat ending.

He tried again in 2010 with a different studio. Universal, after protracted negotiations, and with producers and stars lined up, decided not to green light the film because Del Toro insisted that the film should be R-rated, rather than the PG-13 the studio wanted.

Del Toro wouldn’t compromise, and the movie was cancelled. He later said he wished he had lied, until it was too late. He said, “The R [rating] was what made it. If ‘Mountains’ had been PG-13, or I had said PG-13 … I’m too much of a Boy Scout, I should have lied, but I didn’t.”

He made Pan’s Labyrinth, instead.

8 When The Money Runs Out

In the 1980’s the production company Carolco became a major Hollywood player, focusing mainly on action movies. They scored a hit with their first movie, First Blood, the first movie in the Rambo franchise, and they went on to score notable successes with, among others, Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Fortunes change, however, and by the early nineties Carolco was beginning to struggle financially, largely due to having to buy out one of its partners.

In 1994, Arnold Schwarzenegger had signed on to star in Crusade, which was billed as a cross between Spartacus and Conan The Barbarian. Sets were already being built when the director, Paul Verhoeven, went to a finance meeting at Carolco.

The meeting, which was said to last only twenty minutes, did not go well. Verhoeven refused to guarantee that he would not exceed his $100 million budget. It may be that Verhoeven thought that the production company were bluffing.

They weren’t. They plugged the plug on Crusade and decided to place their bets on another action film, Cutthroat Island, instead.

That film bombed and Carolco declared bankruptcy shortly after.

7 When A Sequel Just Doesn’t Work

Gladiator was such an immense hit that the possibility of a sequel was always going to be considered by someone. There were a couple of hurdles, however, the first being, did Maximus Decimus Meridius actually die (Yes).

But that is just a minor detail, surely.

Ridley Scott, director of the first Gladiator, wanted a sequel that was set in the world of Gladiator, but without Russell Crowe’s character in it. Russell Crowe had other ideas. He hired Nick Cave to come up with a script that he could actually have a part in.

Although Cave was primarily a musician, he had produced one screenplay before, so he took on Crowe’s challenge to ‘sort out’ the minor snafu of mortality.

Cave did his best. His screenplay turned the Elysian Fields from the end of the first movie into a kind of miserable purgatory on the edge of a black sea. But, being Maximus, he manages to find a spirit guide to take him to a meeting with the Gods where he is offered the chance to be reunited with his family if he just kills one of them.

OK.

And then he is somehow (not quite clearly defined) transported back to the real-world Rome, ten years after his death, and he sets out to find his son (the one who also died in Gladiator 1)

There is some incidental persecution of Christians, just to set the tone, and a fight scene in the Colosseum, which has been flooded with water and filled with 100 alligators (don’t ask)

Finally, Maximus, that great warrior does a kind of time travel through the centuries, stopping off at every war along the way, before he ends up sitting behind a desk in the Pentagon waiting for the next big fight.

Even Russell Crowe found this script hard to swallow. When asked what he thought of the final script, he replied with his famous terseness, “Don’t like it, mate.”

However, Ridley Scott is still said to be developing his own sequel, so you never know.

6 When Life Imitates Art Imitating Life

When Francis Ford Coppola wants to make a film, you might think that nothing would be easier. But it seems that no matter how bankable you are, your projects can still fail, especially when real life gets in the way.

Coppola wanted to make Megalopolis, a sci-fi film about the rebuilding of New York after a major disaster. Talks had gone well, and he had begun to screen test actors. That was in 2001. And then, on September 11 of that year, disaster really struck New York when the twin towers where hit in a terrorist attack.

For a while, Coppola considered continuing with his project, but in the end felt that he couldn’t make Megalopolis without it turning into a film about 9/11, and he shelved the idea.

In 2019, he announced that he was finally ready to begin developing the film again, although to date no further progress seems to have been made. Coppola is now over 80, so if shooting doesn’t begin soon, it is unlikely to ever happen.
Coppola is largely retired. But he can rest on his laurels. Not only did he bring us Apocalypse Now, he also made The Godfather II, still regarded as the best Mafia movie ever.

10 Of The Most Sought-after Lost Films

5 When Someone Else Had The Same Idea

Stanley Kubrick wanted to make a movie about Napoleon.

After the huge success of 2001: A Space Odyssey, he “sent an assistant” to travel around the world in Napoleon’s footsteps.

Nice work if you can get it.

Kubrick himself had done a lot of research on his subject, and had an all-star cast lined up. He had even arranged to ‘borrow’ tens of thousands of real-life soldiers as extras.

Things began to fall apart when, in 1970, another film was released on the same subject. Waterloo, which starred Rod Steiger and Orson Welles, among others, bombed at the box office. Producers began to get nervous, and quickly withdrew the funding.

Kubrick tried again to revive the project during the 1980’s but in the end, like Napoleon, he had to admit defeat.

4 When The Director Really Doesn’t Want To

Close Encounters Of the Third Kind had been a massive hit for Steven Spielberg, and Columbia Pictures were anxious to have a sequel. Spielberg wasn’t so keen.

However, he knew from bitter experience, that if he turned down the opportunity to make a sequel (Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind?) they might offer the film to another director. When he had declined to make Jaws 2, they gave the movie to Jeanot Swarc and the result was horrible.

So, Spielberg came up with Night Skies, a dramatization of the so-called ‘Kelly Hopkinsville Encounter’, a real-life farm that was, allegedly, besieged by aliens. The script aliens were lost on a strange planet and terrorized first the livestock and then the humans.

OK. Spielberg then announced he would produce, rather than direct.

Although Night Skies was roughly in the same ballpark as Close Encounters – i.e. they both featured aliens, it was definitely not a sequel, which, Spielberg hoped, would be enough to preserve the reputation of the first movie.

A rather dark script was written, and NASA announced that Spielberg had booked a slot on their next space flight from which to film the opening shots of earth from space.

Possibly because of Spielberg’s lack of enthusiasm for the project, however, Night Skies ultimately did not go ahead. However, it was not all bad news. The script inspired several other projects, including Critters, about livestock terrorizing aliens, which was not made by Spielberg, and ET, which was.

3 When The Source Material Isn’t Film Material

Adaptations are always tricky. An adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman was almost impossible. First there were the 75 comic books, none of which were traditional stories, and all of which would be extremely difficult to translate to film.

Roger Avary decided to try; he hired Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, the team that had created Pirates of the Caribbean, to write the screenplay based on the first two volumes of the graphic novel.

Roger Avary liked it.

Warner Bros didn’t.

The producer, Jon Peters, in particular, didn’t seem to understand the Sandman premise and kept asking for more traditional film tropes. Another draft was called for.

Another screenplay was produced, this time by William Farmer. This script went down slightly better, but the studios still had issues. Who is the bad guy? Where is the love interest?

At one stage the studio wanted superhero capes, fistfights and a plot based around the Y2K disaster theories.

Thankfully, the project was put on hold indefinitely.

Since then, the rights to Gaiman’s most famous work has been acquired by Netflix. It is hoped the TV format, combined with Netflix’s big budget productions will finally bring The Sandman to life.

2 Sometimes an idea is just too weird

We all love new innovations in movies. A new way of telling a story, a never-before-seen special effect, or a cool new stunt.

Sometimes, however, writers can get a bit carried away.

Take The Tourist, for instance.

Not the Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie travelogue for Venice, but the screenplay written by Clair Noto in 1980 about a hidden world of alien refugees, living beneath Manhattan. It has been described as one of the most influential sci-fi movies ever.

Which is pretty impressive when you consider that it was never made.

HR Giger, the artist who helped bring Ridley Scott’s Alien to life, produced concept art for the screenplay, which was considered a hot property in Hollywood. Francis Ford Coppola signed on to produce the movie, which was described as a kind of alien-erotica

The studios were worried that alien-erotica, however, would be something of a niche market. Noto refused to compromise on the script, and the studio backed out. The screenplay has influenced a number of later sci-fi films, including, it is said, Blade Runner.

Meanwhile, Clair Noto has barely been heard of since.

1 When The Script Just Doesn’t Make Sense

In 1977, after Eraserhead was released to widespread, uh, acclaim, and its director David Lynch announced that his next film would be Ronnie Rocket, a movie inspired by his favorite 1950’s sci-fi movies.

The film is listed on IMDB as having been ‘in development’ ever since.

Lynch found it difficult to raise the money he needed for the project. Possibly, the problem was the script, which was certainly on the strange side. The elevator pitch would have gone something like this: “A detective is able to enter the Second Dimension, by standing on one leg. However, when he gets there, he is chased by Donut Men, and gets lost in a never-ending maze of rooms. The detective is chasing Ronnie Rocket, a teenage rock-star of small stature, and his tap-dancing girlfriend, who uses his ability to control electricity to make cool music and kill people.”

Right.

In an interview in 2012, Lynch said he was still considering Ronnie Rocket, but there were still a few things he “hadn’t figured out yet”.

Things like, what the hell is going on in this film?

10 Insane Sequels That Were Almost Released

About The Author: Ward Hazell is a freelance writer and travel writer, currently also studying for a PhD in English Literature.

Potentially deadly incidents and accidents like earthquakes, lightning strikes, and hard falls are not always bad—at least to people who have benefited from them. Over the centuries, people have been cured of illnesses and other medical conditions after experiencing some of the aforementioned incidents and accidents.

Their medical conditions ranged from blindness and deafness to mental illnesses and even cancer. Yes! People have been cured of cancer after they were struck by lightning, Others miraculously regained their sight after they were headbutted by animals. One man was even cured of deafness after an earthquake.

10 Blind Man Gets Sight Restored After He Is Struck By Lightning

In 1971, Edwin Robinson was in a terrible truck accident that left him blind and partly deaf. That changed on June 9, 1980, when he was hit by a bolt of lightning outside his home in Falmouth, Maine, while trying to get his pet chicken out of the rain. The lightning blasted him to the ground and left him stunned.

That night, Robinson’s sight and hearing were miraculously restored. The incident was widely reported at the time. Robinson and his wife, Doris, received so many calls that they had to unhook their landline telephone—that is, separate the headset from the phone body—to get some sleep. They also received requests to be guests on several television shows.

The couple never made money from the extensive media coverage. All they earned was a hundred bucks and some money to cover travel expenses to television stations. They scuttled an opportunity to make money from the incident when they turned down a television station that approached them to do a show.

The Robinsons rejected the offer because the station wanted full rights to the production. Robinson said the television station would have exaggerated the incident instead of focusing on his miraculous recovery. Doris also mentioned that she preferred a movie focusing on their lives after Robinson went blind and deaf and not just on the lightning accident.^[1]

9 Man Gets Sight Restored After He Is Headbutted By Horse

Don Karkos was one of the many Americans who enlisted in the US military after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Karkos joined the US Navy and was posted to the tanker ship USS Rapaden.

The vessel was tasked with refueling Allied ships in the North Atlantic, which was filled with German U-boats. USS Rapaden was on one of its many runs to the North Atlantic when an explosion occurred in 1942. A metal fragment dispersed by the blast hit Karkos above the right eye and injured his forehead.

Karkos lost consciousness after the accident and awakened in an Icelandic hospital. There, doctors informed him that he was blind in his right eye. Doctors even offered to remove the eye, but Karkos refused. He returned to the US where he worked in a mill before setting up a horse farm in 1978.

The loss of the eye was troublesome for Karkos. He had problems seeing the walls right in front of him and often ran into them headfirst. It got worse when he slowly started losing the vision in his left eye to cataracts. Fortunately, he recovered the sight in his right eye in an accident 64 years later.

Karkos was preparing a horse called My Buddy Chimo for a race when it headbutted him in the blinded right eye and slammed him against a wall. Karkos returned home that night feeling sick. However, he soon discovered that he could see with the right eye—the same one that the horse had hit.^[2]

8 Woman Cured Of Multiple Sclerosis After Lightning Strike

On August 17, 1994, Mary Clamser was cured of multiple sclerosis after she was struck by lightning right inside her Oklahoma home. Multiple sclerosis is a disease that affects the central nervous system and slowly paralyzes sufferers.

Clamser suffered from the disease for 22 years during which she slowly lost control of her legs and ended up in a wheelchair. Clamser was in the shower when the lightning struck. One of her hands was on the metal bar in the shower while the other was on the handle of the flush toilet. She also had metal braces on her legs.

The lightning struck her home and traveled through the main to hit her in the shower. She lost consciousness and woke up in a hospital. A doctor was checking if her bones had been broken at the time she regained consciousness.

However, she could feel the doctor’s hands on her legs even though paralyzed people cannot feel sensations on the paralyzed body part. She was able to walk without the braces three weeks later and was wearing high heels two months later.^[3]

7 Man Regains Hearing After Earthquake

On August 23, 2011, a 5.8-magnitude earthquake hit Louisa County, Virginia, and was felt along the East Coast and nearby areas. Rail and air traffic were delayed, and two nuclear reactors were shut down. Several buildings—including the Pentagon, Capitol, State Department offices, and several hospitals—were hurriedly evacuated.

While the earthquake scared everyone, it was a blessing for Robert Valderzak of Washington, DC, after it cured him of his deafness. Valderzak had gone deaf after suffering a bad fall on Father’s Day two months earlier in June. He fractured his skull and lost his hearing. He learned lip-reading and required a special microphone when talking.

Valderzak was a patient in the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Washington, DC, when the earthquake struck. His daughter and three sons were visiting him at the time. Valderzak realized that he could hear his son talk after the earthquake was over.

Doctors think Valderzak regained his hearing because he suffered from “conductive hearing loss,” which is caused by fluids getting trapped in the ear. Doctors say the vibrations of the earthquake and the drugs they administered caused the fluid to drain and allowed Valderzak to hear once more. He believes the incident was a miracle.^[4]

6 Lightning Cured A Man’s Cancer

In 1855, Reuben Stephenson was plowing a field in Langtoft, England, when he was struck by lightning, which killed the two horses connected to the plow. Stephenson was so badly injured that people thought he was going to die. However, he survived after one Dr. Allison nursed him back to health.

While administering treatment, the doctor noticed that Stephenson had a cancerous tumor on his lip. Dr. Alison attempted to operate on the tumor after Stephenson recovered only to discover that the tumor had disappeared. Alison believed that Stephenson was cured of the cancer as he recovered from the lightning strike.^[5]

5 Teenager Stops Using Prescription Glasses After Getting Struck By Lightning

In July 2017, 16-year-old Faith Mobley was doing the dishes at a McDonald’s drive-thru in Haleyville, Alabama, when she was struck by lightning. It hit the restaurant and traveled through the pipes to wherever Mobley was doing the dishes.

The lightning went through the drive-thru headset that Mobley was wearing and exited through her left foot, creating a large hole in her shoe. Mobley lost consciousness but was saved by a coworker who called 911. Mobley later said that she felt her body tighten as she was struck, just before she went numb and lost consciousness.^[6]

Her only injury was a burn on her foot where the lightning had left her body. Miraculously, her eyesight seemed to have been restored. She had worn glasses before the incident but did not need them any longer. The color of her eyes also changed.

4 Man Cured Of Mental Illness After Shooting Himself In The Head

In February 1988, the Associated Press reported that a man only identified as “George” unwittingly cured himself of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) during a failed suicide attempt five years earlier. George was 19 years old at the time of the incident.

OCD is a frustrating personality disorder that makes sufferers develop weird perfectionist behaviors. For instance, George showered and washed his hands unusually often because he was afraid of germs. This would later cost him his job and education. He became depressed and decided to commit suicide.

George got a .22-caliber rifle and aimed at his brain through his mouth. He pulled the trigger but did not die. Instead, the bullet went through his skull and stopped in the left front part of his brain. Doctors extracted the bullet, which only damaged the area of the brain causing the OCD.

Afterward, George’s IQ returned to the level it was before the disorder had set in. He recovered, got a job, and went back to school where he became an A student. Physician’s Weekly called the whole incident a “successful radical surgery.”^[7]

3 Woman Recovers Sight After Falling And Hitting Her Head

In 1993, Mary Ann Franco was in an auto accident that left her with serious spinal injuries that caused blindness. However, she regained her sight after another accident in her Florida home in August 2015.

Franco was walking across her living room to the door when she tripped and fell, hitting her head on what she thought was the fireplace. Franco also broke her neck during the accident. She underwent surgery on the neck and recovered from anesthesia to discover that her sight had been restored.^[8]

2 Woman Cured Of Her Super Senses After Getting Struck By Lightning

In January 2017, some researchers at Trinity College Dublin published a research paper about a woman who was cured of synesthesia after getting struck by lightning. The researchers did not reveal the identity of the woman and only called her “AB.”

Synesthesia is a strange condition with many variations, including those in which people taste words, smell sound, hear colors, and feel the atmosphere around other people. However, sufferers sometimes hate the condition because of its undesirable side effects. Some even end up on medications.

AB was temporarily cured of the condition after she was struck by lightning. We say temporarily because the synesthesia later returned.^[9]

1 Blind Man Cured After Falling Down Stairs

In 2013, 68-year-old Pierre-Paul Thomas was partly cured of blindness that he had from birth. Thomas was not actually cured by the accident. It just happened to be the major reason that he underwent the surgery that led to his cure.

Since birth, Thomas had suffered from congenital nystagmus, a medical condition caused when the eyes are not properly fitted in the sockets. Sufferers are unable to control their eyes, which wander about the sockets, leading to blindness.

Thomas was cured after a fall in his home in Montreal. He broke several facial bones, including some bones in his eyes. He underwent surgery to fix the bones. After the surgery, a plastic surgeon asked if he wanted his eyes fixed. Thomas agreed.

The surgeons operated on Thomas’s eyes and removed the cataract that caused the blindness. Doctors suspect that Thomas still had his sight despite the congenital nystagmus but lost it after damage by the cataract. However, Thomas’s sight was not perfect as congenital nystagmus is incurable.^[10]