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By Ryan Fleming. Watchmen: The Deluxe Edition cover, image courtesy Amazon. Hollywood loves to throw around the word ‘unfilmable’ for any work they can’t quickly turn into a motion picture for immediate profit. One such ‘unfilmable’ work was Watchmen  – past tense, because like many works at one point considered ‘unfilmable’ like The Lord of the Rings  or Dune , it was only ‘unfilmable’ until it was filmed. Although it lingered in development hell for more than two decades, W

By Ryan Fleming. The trial didn't go well for him in this unmade film! Image courtesy Amazon marketplace. There are some films that are ahead of their time and perhaps not appreciated upon release. There are others that missed their moment and are dated on arrival. The same is true for films that are never made. Some scripts might not get a look in until the market is seemingly more receptive: Alien (1979) being one such example only picked up after the success of Star Wars

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 Will Smith (left) in I Am Legend. Picture courtesy Wired. I’m afraid I have some sad news. This is the last article in this series. Ryan has reached the end of his material. I suspect that there will be an upsurge in withdrawal symptoms in the near future.   The last in this series. Appropriately, it is entitled I am Legend :   *****   It takes a lot for a film to become legendary. One thing that is not required, however, is for a film to actually be made in o

By Ryan Fleming. A publicity poster for On The Waterfront. It could equally have been used for The Hook. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes, a film can be made at the wrong time. It can come either too early or too late to resonate properly with audiences than it might have done had it been made at a more appropriate time. This might be frustrating to the writers of those scripts. Imagine how frustrating it must be, however, to have an idea seemingly not appropriat

By Ryan Fleming Idris Elba looking out of place. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. As film development drags into the dreaded development hell, there usually comes a point of no return. The point at which, no matter what, a film must be made, because so much effort (and, more importantly, money) has been sunk into the project. This is especially true in the modern days where news, rumours, and filmmakers are so readily accessible, and interactive, to the potential audience.

By Ryan Fleming. No. Not this alien. Not quite. Picture courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Too often in the West, success or impact in film is couched purely in terms of the American film industry based in Hollywood. Despite most nations having their own native film industry, many of them since the earliest days of film and some of them actually predating Hollywood. Such was the success of Satyajit Ray, whose films produced in his native India had earned major awards in Europe throu

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