7 Films That Must Be Saved From Development Hell
Suggesting new ways to jerk some life into &lsquꦍo;em…
Some films linger for years in the dusty vaults of studio development.
With Ghostbusters 3 - a notorious Development Hell-dweller -ღ finally getting hosed down and shoved blinking into production, we✃'ve had a think about other projects that have been stuck in limbo for too long.
So as a helpful service to Hollywood, here's a few of the movies that clearly need to be transferred out of cold storage and into the fa💞st-track microwave…
The Brazilian Job
The Pitch: Mark Wahlberg, Chaౠrlize Theron, Jason Statham, Seth Green and Mos Def get their crime team b🅠ack together for a heist in Rio de Janeiro.
The original was a surprisingly fun, purist-annoying diversion. We want more. It's been sixꦡ years now…
The Status: After a series of 𒉰stops and starts, with various scripts written and junked, the movie seems no nea🔯rer to actually reaching the screen.
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Plus the various actors are busy with their own projects, so scheduling must ✃be a nightmare. “We're trying right now. They all want to do the sequel," blabbed producer Donald De Line as recently as this month. "We have a version at Paramount that we're talking very seriously about, so hopefully, if we're lucky in the next year we can pull it together."
Our Fix: Enough with the arsing about. Get all the actors&rsqu💮o; representatives together in a room and hash out a schedule - even if it means they shoot some scenes at differ♛ent times.
Also, get the Bourne stunt team together and throw enough money at Crank co-directors Bria🔯n Taylor and Mark Neveldine to let them go crazy.[page-break]
Fahrenheit 451
The Pitch: R✃ay Bradbury’s famous sci-fi tale of a world where books are seen as the source of rebellion and readers ar𓄧e hunted down.
The Status: Poor Frank Darabont has suffered some terrible luck tr🥂ying to get this bad boy off the ground.
It’s been in the works since at least 2003, crawling close to a greenlight many times before being shut down. The director even went to Hungary to scout locations at one point, while his Green Mile star Tom Hanks was♛ briefly ﷽attached for a while.
Our Fix: Let Darabont 🐷be Darabont. While he probably won’t get exactly the budget he needs to make his perfect vision of the film, someone needs to step up and realise he could be on to something amazing here. Give Frank a few pennies and artistic freedom and he comes up w🎉ith the likes of The Mist...
Oh, and prod Hanks into going back - that’ll help ease the studio money w♍orries. [page-break]
Rendezvous With Rama
The Pitch: A sprawling, futuristic ta𝄹le of a massive, mysterious space vessel arriving in the solar system sparks an exploration and several revelations about man’s destiny.
The Status: David Fincher and Morgan Freeman have been trying to wrangle Arthur C Clarke’s epicꦡ tome onto the big screen for more than six years now.
The sheer size, scale and scope of the thing seems to have finally defeated them – at least for now. "It looks like it's not going to happen," said Fincher recently. "There's no script and as you know, Morgan Freeman's not in the best of health right now. We've been trying to do it but it's probably not going to happen." Even worse, the IM♚DB page for the movie has been removed…
Our Fix: We’re not sure this one can actually work as a movie. But perhaps a canny 🍬channel like HBO could step up and do something truly different - a story so big could be mಞuch more easily told over several hours of well-funded TV.
An🔯d never mind Fincher - get Darren Aronofsky involved. He worked wonders with The Fountain. Oh yes he did.[page-break]
A Confederacy Of Dunces
The Pitch: John Kennedy Toole’s comedy novel finds the lazy yet intelligent Ignatius J Reilly content to 💯live with his mother. But then he suddenly has 𓄧to go and get a job to survive...
The Status: This is one of those 'l🎃egacy' f🎃ilms that defeats everyone who attempts it: Harold Ramis, Stephen Fry, Steven Soderbergh...
Soderbergh’s version was even lined up with Pineapple Express’s David Gordon Green helming. “I’ve been obsessed with the book since I was sixteen,” Green has said. “It’s a character piece that could go the wrong way and become a cartoon of New Orleans and it’s importa🅰nt to me to bring an authenticity to the characters."
Our Fix: Hurricane Katrina and development issues at Paramount have both contributed to Dunces' most recent problems, but New Orleans has recently wo💎rked wonders in reviving its filmmaking community ▨and resources.
It just needs Paramount to realise that a post-Pineapple Green can still get this thing made - and a more mature, de-zanyfied Will Ferrell is the 💙man to play Reilly.[page-break]
The Sandman
The Pitch: Coraline auth♎or Neil Gaiman's spellbinding story weaves and warps around Morpheus, the Lord Of Dreams and his various siblings, The Endless.
The Status: Hollywood has had its claws in this one for a long t😼ime. Like Watchmen, it’s not easy to see how Gaiman's swirling ideas could be sewn up into a movie, but that hasn’t stopped Warners from trying several times.
Pirates🐼 writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio are just two of the scribblers who've taken a crack at the script and Roger Avary was line🐼d up to direct at one point.
But subsequent treatments haven't gone down well. Gaiman himself called the last exa🐟mple he saw “not only the worst Sandman script I've ever seen, but quite easily the worst script I've ever read.”
Our Fix: We’d love to get Guillermo del Toro to make it, but he’s so very busy with 10,000 other projects, including a litt🌟le thing about Hobbits...
Still▨, Gaiman’s work deserves to be respected if it’s made at all, so Warners need to hire a decent writer (Gaiman himself?) and possibly Alfonso Cuaron to tackle directing duties. Oh, and don’t try to cover the whole sprawling story in one film. [page-break]
Fantastic Voyage
The Pitch: When aꦆ w♋orld leader’s brain is injured, a crack team of scientists are miniaturised and injected into his body to solve the problem. Originally made in 1966.
The Status: On again. Off again. On again… You get the idea. On the slowburn since 1997, 澳洲幸运5开奖号码历史查询:James Cameron flirted with the idea back in 2000, then ditche🐬d it to concentrate on Avatar (which has itself taken about nine years to m꧟ake it to the screen).
The latest version saw Roland Emmerich planning a new take with – shudder – writers Marianne and Cormac Wibberley (National Tre🔯asure) hard at work on a script. Fortunately for everyone, the writer's strike put the kibosh on it and Emmerich went back to destroying the world on fi👍lm.
Our Fix: This needs to b♑e wrestled away from Emmerich quickly and handed over to someone who can do it justice. What’s JJ doing after Star Trek?[page-break]
Icarus
The Pitch: A soon-to-be-retired F-15 pilot decides his life will be too empty without combat missions and makes off with one of the jets. A friend on theജ ground has to talk him down before he runs out of fuel.
The Status: Hands up how many people have heardꦺ of this one? Writer Bob Stitzel pitched it during the early ‘80s and the movie was set to go before military ty♓pes got cold feet about using the jets.
Then, in 1995,𝐆 producer Patrick Duncan attache♚d Bruce Willis to star for Paramount but studio politics shot the project down again.
Our Fix: You know who can get anything from the military, don’t you? Michael Bay! No, we&r𒁃squo;re n🐟ot suggesting he directs it (despite its high concept, high-flying plot, the film seems to suggest a need for subtle, talky drama), but he could be a helpful producer...
And Willis still has some clout – he could probably get it going again. But 🔥who to direct? Clint Eastwood, of course!
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