The Best Movies Never Made (Volume 1)

This Weekend’s Releases

Anticipated films that are releasing this weekend.

Poor Things (Limited)

One of the most anticipated (and definitely the strangest) movies of the year comes from Yorgos Lanthimos starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef. Can’t wait for this one.

Brought back to life by an unorthodox scientist, a young woman runs off with a lawyer on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, she grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.

The Boy and the Heron

Crafted by the notorious Studio Ghibli comes another visually stunning anime with a star-studded voicing cast including Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Robert Pattinson and Florence Pugh.

While the Second World War rages, the teenage Mahito, haunted by his mother’s tragic death, is relocated from Tokyo to the serene rural home of his new stepmother Natsuko, a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the boy’s mother. As he tries to adjust, this strange new world grows even stranger following the appearance of a persistent gray heron, who perplexes and bedevils Mahito, dubbing him the “long-awaited one.”

Trailer Watch

All of Us Strangers

New film from Searchlight Pictures starring Paul Mescal, based on the award winning novel (aren’t they all?) with the same name.

Masters of the Air

From the producers of Band of Brothers comes a new series following pilots during WW2 starring Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan and Stephen Spielberg’s son. Austin Butler is going to keep doing the accent until we forget isn’t he (we never will).

The Best Movies Never Made (Volume 1)

As Mick Jagger once said, “you can’t always get what you want”. Far too often are the audiences robbed of great films due to legal disparities, financing issues and the worst of all, “creative differences”. This week we take a look at some of the most infamous movies that audiences can ever only dream of seeing. Note that this list is not comprehensive so there will be more on this topic in future editions.

Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon

Perhaps the biggest “what if” stories in cinema is Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon. Kubrick has made some of the greatest films of all time (2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Clockwork Orange) and is widely considered to be one of the greatest directors of all time. Fresh off the surprising critical and commercial success of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, Kubrick was set to turn the incredible life of Napoleon Bonaparte into an extravagant motion picture.

Unlike Ridley Scott’s approach to the film, Kubrick was dedicated to getting every detail of Napoleon’s life correct. Stanley was a notorious reader and known to devour a book in one night. He read every book he could find and enlisted dozens of experts to consult him in order to paint a precise portrait of the French Emperor. Kubrick devoted two years to crafting the script, carefully plotting an exact timeline of events in Napoleon’s life. He spent considerable time analyzing the Emperor’s daily habits and scouting film locations to determine the precise time of day each specific scene must be shot.

He had plans to shoot the film on location in France as well as Romania, where he supposedly recruited over 50,000 soldiers from the Romanian People’s Army to participate in battle sequences. Kubrick’s ideal casting choice for the role was Jack Nicholson following his performance in Easy Rider which was over a decade before The Shining. Alongside him was rumored to be Audrey Hepburn as Napoleon’s lover Joséphine.

Tragically, after years of orchestrating what Kubrick planned to be “the best movie ever made”, the film was cancelled due to financing issues. The box-office failure of the 1970’s film Waterloo (about the battle of Waterloo) gave the studio executives cold feet about the large budget required to shoot the movie the way Kubrick intended. Although we never had the chance to see Kubrick’s take on Napoleon, his work on the project would greatly influence his 1975 masterpiece Barry Lyndon, which takes place 15 years prior to the Napoleon era. There is a significant amount of content surrounding this would-be-movie, including a Taschen book as well as an upcoming series based on his script made by Stephen Spielberg.

Guillermo Del Toro’s The Hobbit

Following the mega success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and a lengthly legal battle over the rights to films, Guillermo Del Toro signed on to direct The Hobbit in 2008. Instead of the three films we eventually got, Del Toro had planned to make the story into two films and implementing a more “fairytale” approach to the source material. The first film would be a stand-alone while the second would bridge the gap between The Hobbit and Peter Jackson’s trilogy (which Del Toro is a massive fan of). Del Toro wanted to keep the main plot intact while adding additional plot lines from the book’s appendices including Gandalf’s exploration of Dol Goldur and The Necromancer.

Del Toro, Jackson and other writers went through multiple iterations of the script but failed to fully agree, which delayed the project. Additionally, the studio who was funding the film ran into financial troubles at the time (see the movie The Big Short for a full explanation of what happened at the time). After continuous delays, Guillermo Del Toro decided to step away from the project. He announced, “In light of ongoing delays in the setting of a start date for filming The Hobbit, I am faced with the hardest decision of my life. After nearly two years of living, breathing and designing a world as rich as Tolkien’s Middle Earth, I must, with great regret, take leave from helming these wonderful pictures.”

James Cameron’s Spiderman

Following the success of The Terminator and Aliens, in the early 1990’s renowned director James Cameron had his sights on produced a X-men movie with Katheryn Bigalow directing. His eyes wandered to Spider-man after a meeting with Stan Lee , who convinced Cameron to bring the character to the big screen. He was hired by Carolco Pictures to write and direct the film, with rumours that Leonardo DiCaprio would have starred as Peter Parker and Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doctor Octopus.

There is a “script” of the film floating around that showed the film would had a gritty reality to it, that matched the tone of The Terminator. It also had R-rated language and Spider-man and Mary Jane getting it on. Cameron also came up with the idea for the webs to come out of Peter’s hands, since he felt it was unrealistic that a teenager could design such a technology on his own. This idea, along with many others from Cameron’s work on the project, was adapted in Sam Rami’s version of Spider-man. So in a way, we can thank James Cameron in part for this scene.

If you are wondering what Carolco Pictures is, it’s because they went bankrupt in 1996. Following this, a massive legal battle ensued over who Spider-man now belonged to, which seems to still be the case 30 years later. With or without James Cameron, the Spider-man films have been a massive success with audiences. Still it is hard to not dream when the director who made Avatar, Titanic and The Terminator called this, “the greatest movie [he] never made”.

Spotlight Film: Thief

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