One I’m thinking of is Sgt Rock staring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Been thinking about starting this thread myself, but never got around to it.
I'll start with my all time favorite example:
Dalton Trumbo's pacifist novel Johnny Got His Gun (about a WWI soldier who is wounded in battle and loses his limbs, as well as going blind, deaf, and dumb) was a surprise best seller in 1939. Paramount bought the film rights, and in late autumn 1941 was preparing to produce it, starring William Holden and directed by Mitchell Leisen.
After Dec 7, the project was permanently shelved.
Here is a radio dramatization from 1940 that may give some idea of how the material might have been handled at that time. Jimmy Cagney gives a bravura performance -- but during this plea for pacifist isolationism, note the plug for Cagney's current movie, the jingoistic The Fighting 69th.
1937 version of “I, Claudius” which fell through because Merle Oberon (Messalina) was injured in an auto accident. There were also conflicts between star Charles Laughton and director Josef von Sternberg
About 15 years ago there was talk of a Britney Spears movie in a NASCAR setting
FILM REVIEW; What Might Have Been of a Movie That Wasn't
You can just imagine the preview: Tyrone Power is the faithless husband, trapped in a South American prison! Ava Gardner is the loyal wife, who will do anything to help him escape! John Wayne is the spear-wielding "tigrero," the jaguar hunter she hires to set them all free! This romantic adventure was in the works in 1955, until it turned out that the stars would have to be insured for $18 million in case they were chomped on by piranhas while shooting in the Amazon. The movie was scrapped before it was begun. What remained was some film of the Karaja Indians the director Samuel Fuller had taken while scouting locations in Brazil the year before.
Mr. Fuller, the director of gritty movies like "Pickup on South Street," is now 82 and an idol to many young film makers. In "Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made," he and the director Jim Jarmusch travel to the Brazilian village Mr. Fuller filmed 40 years ago.
I was wondering if someone would mention this. It's really a different thing, as it did indeed "materialize".
It's better placed here:
Jews in Space. (At the end of History of the World Part I, they had Faux previews for the next Mel Brooks film) Hitler on Ice might have been funny too. No interest in the Viking funeral
Larry McMurtry originally wrote Lonesome Dove as a screenplay around 1974, intended to star John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Henry Fonda.
Which of them was to end up getting hanged?
Apparently Wayne was not satisfied with the script and the film was never made. McMurtry of course later reworked the material into a novel.
The Phil Lynott (Thin Lizzy) Biopic well before musical bio movies became the norm. Holly Hunter played Phils Mom and the Guy from one of the CSI shows played Phil. No idea what happened to this as I believe production was already under way. Funding must have been the issue.
Adding what I just found on internet:
Thin Lizzy Stops Phil Lynott Movie Being Made
Another Duke might have been... Around 1968 John Ford tried to set up an adaptation of Howard Fast's novel about the American Revolution, April Morning, to star Wayne and Laurence Olivier.
I don't know why it wasn't made -- perhaps something to do with Ford's age.
This is the SHF, after all...
A Talent For Loving
Once announced in 1965 as the Beatles third movie, “A Talent For Loving” would have been the Beatles experiment in the genre of the Western film. Richard Condon, the writer of “The Manchurian Candidate”, was the author of the novel “A Talent For Loving”. The script was based on a true-life horse race in the 1870’s in which the prize was a wealthy girl! The Beatles would play pioneers in the old West who had tralleled from Liverpool, so the accent problem was bypassed. The Beatles fascination with the cowboy west was evident when you see the group decked out in cowboy attire in various photo shoots from 1964-54 (and on the back of their RUBBER SOUL album). And Ringo Starr (in his pre-Beatle days) once wrote to the Houston Texas chamber of commerce about possible immigration. Although the rights to film were acquired, they finally rejected the film and “A Talent For Loving” was released by someone else in 1969 .
Beatles staring in Lord Of The Rings, Joe Orton screenplay. A bit of typecasting for Ringo.
No doubt ( assuming)would have had to have a title change as there was a Brit film in 1962 called A Kind Of Loving.
IIRC The Orton script was an original called Up Against It.
No Bail for the Judge - The Alfred Hitchcock Wiki
No Bail for the Judge was to be an adaptation of a thriller novel by Henry Cecil about a female barrister who, with the assistance of a gentleman thief, has to defend her father, a High Court judge, when he is accused of murdering a prostitute. In a change of pace from Hitchcock's usual blonde actresses, Audrey Hepburn would have played the barrister, with Laurence Harvey as the thief, and John Williams as the Hepburn character's father. Some sources, including "Writing with Hitchcock" author Steven DeRosa, say that Hitchcock's interest in the novel started in the summer of 1954 while filming To Catch a Thief, and that Hitchcock hoped to have John Michael Hayes write the screenplay. Hepburn was an admirer of Hitchcock's work and had long wanted to appear one of his films.
Samuel A. Taylor, scenarist for Vertigo and Topaz, wrote the screenplay after Ernest Lehman had rejected it. The Taylor screenplay included a scene, not in the original novel, where the heroine disguises herself as a prostitute and has to fend off a rapist. Hepburn left the film, partly because of the near-rape scene, but primarily due to a pregnancy. (Hepburn suffered a miscarriage during the filming of the 1960 film The Unforgiven then gave birth to son Sean Ferrer in July 1960.) Laurence Harvey still ended up working with Hitchcock in 1959, however, on an episode that Hitchcock directed of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
Without Hepburn, the project didn't have the same appeal for Hitchcock. Changes in British law concerning prostitution and entrapment — which took place after the novel was published — made some aspects of the screenplay implausible. Hitchcock told Paramount Pictures it was better to write off the $200,000 already spent on the film's development than to spend another $3 million for a film he no longer cared for. In the fall of 1959, a Paramount publicity brochure titled "Success in the Sixties!" had touted No Bail for the Judge as an upcoming feature film starring Hepburn, to be filmed in Technicolor and VistaVision.
No one else seems to remember this, but around 1988 I read in Goldmine that in the wake of La Bamba's success a biopic of Bobby Fuller was to be made. Never heard another word about it.