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By Ryan Fleming. This man doesn't know he'll be hired for Bogart Slept Here. De Niro in the Mean Streets trailer, image public domain and courtesy Wikipedia. The right role can make or break an actor’s career. Often too we hear about the roles an actor may have missed out on that they regret. If a missed role can carry a pang of regret, can the opposite hold true? Can an actor missing out on a role they were all lined up for in fact be a benefit? Not so much in the sense of d

By Ryan Fleming. The man himself. Public domain image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Since its 1912 sinking, the Titanic  has loomed large in popular culture, including multiple films. When Alfred Hitchcock, another titanic figure, left the United Kingdom for the United States in the late 1930s, it was common knowledge that his first project would be a drama based on the sinking of the Titanic . For several reasons, that project wound up never happening and Hitchcock’s first Ame

By Ryan Fleming. In no way mediocre! Special edition blu-ray, image courtesy Amazon. Mad Max: Fury Road was released in May 2015. It was the fourth film in the Mad Max  series, and the first without original leading man Mel Gibson. Though it saw disappointing returns as far as the studio was concerned, it received critical acclaim, received ten nominations at the Academy Awards and won six of them, was critically acclaimed, making multiple top ten films that year, and later

By Ryan Fleming. Not actually The Thief and the Cobbler, nor a family classic. DVD cover for the Arabian Knight edit (retitled) courtesy Amazon - could another world have an early 2000s DVD of the real thing? There are some films whose development hell has made them infamous, usually for ruining what could have been a good film. Then there are those whose development hell has made them legendary. We’ve touched upon a couple of these in this series already: A Confederacy of Du

By Ryan Fleming. A famous Hollywood celebrity poses with his co-star Julie Adams. Image courtesy the FDA (who Adams autographed it for after playing an FDA chemist later), via wikimedia commons. In many respects, the monster movies of the 1930s and 1940s from Universal were the first film franchise as we understand them today. A stable of characters, sequels, spin-offs, crossovers, later a ton of merchandise. Despite many attempts by Universal since their heyday however, most

By Ryan Fleming. All Eyez on Me, Tupac Shakur's last album released while he was alive and shortly after he first wrote Live 2 Tell. Image courtesy wikipedia, under fair use. Musicians dabbling in acting was nothing new by the 1990s. Sometimes the musician didn’t even need to have any acting ability whatsoever and the roles would be written around them, as was the case for almost all of Elvis Presley’s film career. Other times, acting can become a bona fide second career to w

By Ryan Fleming. Release poster, image courtesy wikipedia. The notion of Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg collaborating on a film feels like something from an alternate history. It happened, however, at in the year Stanley Kubrick had made famous, with A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). Perhaps sometimes we forget this was the case because of Kubrick’s death before the film finally entered production. Without knowing the long production history, and how long Spielberg h

By Ryan Fleming. The infamous dino-humanoid concept art by Carlos Huante that made it online after the news of the script broke. Picture taken from the Jurassic Park wiki. In Hollywood, a decade is an eternity. The exact same film can be in development for that entire time and wind up radically different from how it was initially envisioned. Such was production on the third sequel to Jurassic Park  (1993). That film would eventually be released as Jurassic World  (2015), but

By Ryan Fleming. The 'ghost with the most', image courtesy Amazon   Beetlejuice Beetlejuice  was released in 2024 to box office success and a mostly positive response. It reunited much of the cast of the original film, no easy feat coming thirty-six years after Beetlejuice (1988). It was not meant to take that long to generate a sequel: one was commissioned almost as soon as Beetlejuice  proved successful. There were multiple scripts and ideas, but the one that saw the most

By Ryan Fleming. Vincent Price stumbles through the end of the world (taken from Last Man on Earth). Since the birth of film censorship, the relationship between censors and film production companies has veered from vitriolic to chummy, depending on how intertwined the censors are to the industry and how much capital the production company commands. Even at the most contentious of relationships, however, it is very rare that a film can be completely abandoned by a production

By Ryan Fleming Ridley Scott doing a Q&A in 2015, picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. There have been many attempts to adapt Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune . Most of them have spent much time in development hell. The most famous was the mid-1970s attempt by Alejandro Jodorowsky, chronicled in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune  (2013). We’re not going to talk about that one. The first successful adaptation of the book, David Lynch’s Dune  (1984), had its own t

By Ryan Fleming. The original 1963 cover for the book; image courtesy Wikipedia, under fair use Hollywood is a very superstitious industry. Perhaps not overly so compared to others but given its sheer scale of self-promotion, even these superstitions are given the limelight. In some cases, it is an actual film that is the subject of superstition. Atuk is one such film. Despite remaining unfilmed, it is supposedly responsible for the deaths of many associated with its develop

By Ryan Fleming Everyone loves a Styracosaurus. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. In any industry, advances in technology can alter the trajectory of companies, people’s careers, and projects in a very rapid fashion. The film industry is no exception, and the fleeting nature of fame and fortune perhaps is even more susceptible to these changes than other more staid industries. Advances in technology can include the move from silent to talkie pictures, from back-and-white to

By Ryan Fleming HP Lovecraft. Unfilmable? Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Unfilmable is mostly spoken about as a certitude, that certain works cannot be adapted into a filmed medium. It is in fact an inconclusive state. We know this because many works that were previously deemed unfilmable have already been filmed. William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch was adapted in 1991, Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho in 2000, and JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings from 2011 to 2003. T

By Ryan Fleming Inevitably, it was also made into a Musical. Bodyguards don't normally burst into song. Trust me on that. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. There are many measures by which the success of a film can be graded. Probably the most important to those that control the production of films is getting a return on the budget they put up. It is why they are more willing to bet money on something that is likely to be a success than take a risk on something completely n

By Ryan Fleming Who else? Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. The success or failure of a film often comes down to its script. There are myriad other factors that can make or break a film, but the script is the component that a production is sold on. Most cases of development hell involve the script being constantly rewritten. Even in a successful film, however, the script is largely provisional right up to filming. So, whilst a script can often take the blame, or praise, for

By Ryan Fleming. Katsuhiro Otomo riding Kaneda's motorcycle. That must be fun. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Remakes are everywhere in film. In every form, so much so that we even have a whole new vocabulary to describe essentially the same idea of a new version of an older film. There are remakes, reimaginings, and reboots. It’s reached a stage where there is actual disagreement over which term to use in the case of the emergence of seboots or requels. A lot of these a

By Ryan Fleming. A potential saviour. Picture Courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Can the existence of an entire film studio depend on the existence of a single film? There are numerous examples of studios whose success can be traced to a single film. New Line Cinema acquired their nickname “The House That Freddy Built” after their long-term survival was confirmed by the success of A Nightmare on Elm Street in 1984, and innumerable sequels featuring its villain Freddy Kruger. If the

By Ryan Fleming Can a work of fiction be cursed? If people, places or things can be cursed then why not a work of fiction too? Such legends have been attached to horror films like The Exorcist , The Omen or Poltergeist . These conflate various difficulties and/or tragedies that happened during or after production into a through line of bad luck. In those instances, one might conclude that these acted as an insidious form of marketing like that pioneered by William Castle and

By Ryan Fleming In popular culture there are some works that have managed to become famous despite never happening at all. Projects can be delayed, radically changed, or just straight abandoned for many reasons and at all stages of development. Due to the nature of filmmaking, projects necessarily involve many people from development to release. In that regard, we are perhaps more likely to hear of failed projects in that and similar mediums given the sheer number of people,