By Stephen Saito

In a summer full of threequels, it might seem as though Hollywood has run out of original ideas — but we beg to differ. For every Shrek the Third, there are hundreds of scripts (and even some completed films) in studio vaults that have been waiting to emerge. Some have stars ranging from Tom Hanks to Johnny Depp attached and still find themselves waiting to see the light of day. For every film that collects dust but eventually gets its happy, Hollywood ending — like Dreamgirls or the full-steam-ahead Speed Racer — there is a dream project like Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon, which likely died with the director.

Here are just 20 of the films we'd still like to see dug out of development hell and brought to a multiplex near you.


1) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
Potential Cast: Natalie Portman and Tobey Maguire

Michael Chabon is probably sick of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by now. The author went through 10 drafts of his 2000 novel about Sam Clay and Josef Kavalier, two immigrant cousins who meet each other in America during World War II to create a comic book called The Escapist. With a few superhero moves of its own, the film was greenlit by producer Scott Rudin at Paramount with The Hours director Stephen Daldry onboard to direct, while Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman were set to star. However, the stars weren't aligned at Paramount, who put the film in turnaround in 2007 after turnover in the studio's management.

Project Status: Chabon said recently in a Washington Post web chat that Rudin "assures me that there is no reason to despair and that it will all come back together again."


Closer star Natalie Portman never got around to joining The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.


2) A Cold Case
Potential Cast: Tom Hanks

Perhaps the title was self-fulfilling Before Kathryn Morris's Lily Rush ever solved her first moldy mystery on the CBS procedural with a similar title, A Cold Case was ready to be Tom Hanks's dramatic follow-up to the 2004 comedies The Ladykillers and The Terminal. One Hour Photo helmer Mark Romanek had signed on to bring his acutely dark vision to the film based on the true-life story of New York investigator Andy Rosenzwieg, who before retiring set out to solve the 27-year-old murder of his best friend. John Sayles and Forrest Gump scribe Eric Roth worked on the adaptation of Philip Gourevitch's bestseller, but A Cold Case frosted over when Hanks chose to conduct The Polar Express instead.

Project Status: Romanek has scared up The Wolf Man as his next film, but Hanks reportedly is still attached to the project, so we can only wait and see if Hollywood warms up to A Cold Case again.


Tom Hanks may have cracked The Da Vinci Code, but A Cold Case is a different matter.


3) A Confederacy of Dunces
Potential Cast: Will Ferrell, Mos Def, Drew Barrymore, and Lily Tomlin

The 2003 Nantucket Film Festival seemed like the end of a long journey for producer Scott Kramer. Back in the early '80s as an executive a Fox, Kramer had set up an adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's Pulitzer Prize-winning, New Orleans-set character study of the portly underachiever Ignatius J. Reilly, starring John Belushi and Richard Pryor and set to be directed by Harold Ramis. Now Will Ferrell, Mos Def, and All the Real Girls' David Gordon Green picked up where they had left off by participating in a public table-read of the Confederacy adaptation, co-written by Kramer and Steven Soderbergh and set to start filming by the end of the year. But as is wont to happen on films with the eccentricity of Confederacy, Paramount shuffled their feet, even with Ferrell and Drew Barrymore onboard, and Dunces was done in by studio ambivalence and issues concerning ownership of the book rights.

Project Status: Green told Roger Ebert in April 2006 that "the project is in development once again." However, Green is currently directing the Judd Apatow-produced stoner comedy The Pineapple Express.


Will Ferrell slayed audiences in Anchorman, but his dramatic A Confederacy of Dunces has been weighted down in development.


4) Dino
Potential Cast: Tom Hanks, John Travolta, Hugh Grant, Adam Sandler, and Jim Carrey

Amidst the 1990's swing of nostalgia for the retro cool of the 1950s, Warner Bros. commissioned a script from Casino screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi about the life of Dean Martin, which would reunite Pileggi with Casino director Martin Scorsese. A planned cast of Tom Hanks as Martin, John Travolta as Frank Sinatra, Hugh Grant as Peter Lawford, Adam Sandler as Joey Bishop, and Jim Carrey as Jerry Lewis was lined up for Scorsese's first biopic since 1981's Raging Bull. But Dino suffered a kick to the head when Warner Bros. allowed Scorsese a window to direct Gangs of New York for Miramax. Its long and expensive shoot led to the Rat Pack pic being shown the door.

Project Status: Scorsese would fulfill his commitment to Warner Bros. in 2003 by making The Aviator, a biopic about Howard Hughes, but Dino remains on the shelf.


Click's Adam Sandler was set to star as Rat Packer Joey Bishop in Dino until the project was checkmated.


5) The Dreyfus Affair
Potential Cast: Ben Affleck and Don Cheadle

Now that Brokeback Mountain has brought cowboys out of the closet, it finally might be time for a studio to take The Dreyfus Affair out of its closet as well. Everyone from Barbara Streisand to Nancy Drew helmer Andrew Fleming has wanted to direct an adaptation of Peter Lefcourt's satire about the national pastime turning into a national identity crisis when two baseball teammates round third base with each other. During the film's pre-production at Disney, Garth Brooks caused a stir when he took an interest to star in the film, if only the main character Randy wasn't gay. Ben Affleck and Don Cheadle would get as close as anyone to actually making the film in the late 1990s, with New Line for Dr. Doolittle director Betty Thomas. But as Lefcourt recently said in a panel discussion, one of the stars bowed out when a studio head told him his career wouldn't recover from playing a gay character on screen.

Project Status: Thanks to the Brokeback effect, Lefcourt is once again inching towards the plate with another adaptation.


Talk to Me's Don Cheadle was ready to play ball in the gay baseball satire The Dreyfus Affair


6) Dieter
Potential Cast: Mike Myers, Jack Black, Will Ferrell, and David Hasselhoff

If Saturday Night Live character Mary Catherine Gallagher could make it to the big screen, it should've been a walk in the park for Dieter, Mike Myers' effeminate German talk-show host. In fact, Universal felt the same way in 2000 and gave Myers the leeway to concoct a wild adventure involving his Kraftwerk-inspired creation traveling to America to rescue his beloved monkey from the clutches of David Hasselhoff. With Will Ferrell and Jack Black signed on to play Dieter's U.S. compatriots, Dieter was all set to be Myers' first success away from the Austin Powers franchise. However, shortly before production, Myers wouldn't approve the script that he actually cowrote, leading to an ugly legal battle between Myers and the film's producer Brian Grazer.

Project status: Myers and Grazer ultimately settled their differences out of court and even made a movie together (The Cat in the Hat), but Dieter's monkey remains caged.


Nacho Libre's Jack Black couldn’t save the day for Mike Myers' Dieter.


7) Halo

Even by Hollywood standards, it was strange to see Master Chief hand deliver the Halo script, written by 28 Days Later scribe Alex Garland, to all the major studios, and stranger still when no studio immediately committed to the film adaptation of the mega-selling Xbox game in early 2005. Studios held firm when faced with the demands of the game's creator Microsoft, which included complete creative control and a $10 million fee for the rights. Since established franchises are few and far between, Fox and Universal agreed to team up on the project and, shortly after, Peter Jackson came aboard to produce with Pan's Labyrinth director Guillermo del Toro in talks to direct. But that's where Master Chief started to run out of bullets. In 2006, Del Toro bowed out to direct Hellboy 2 and Jackson hired first-time director Neill Blomkamp to shore up the alien flood. Unfortunately, the studios balked at the cost of bringing the flood to the screen, which was said to be close to $200 million.

Project Status: Jackson has said recently that he hopes the release of Halo 3 the video game will make studio heads realize what they're missing.


The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson may be one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, but he couldn't lift up Halo.


8) Hands on a Hard Body
Potential Cast: Billy Bob Thornton, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and Hilary Swank

Robert Altman's films were known for their open-ended conclusions, and the late Nashville director continued that tradition even in death, leaving behind an array of work as scattered as the dialogue in his films. The unfinished projects include a tell-all autobiography and a satiric film called Paint about a murder mystery in the art world that would've starred Salma Hayek. Yet the furthest along was a fictional adaptation of the documentary Hands on a Hard Body, which was planned to start shooting in February 2007. Billy Bob Thornton, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and Hilary Swank were all prepared to put their hands on the $10 million Picturehouse comedy about eccentric characters who hope to win a truck by holding on to it the longest.

Project Status: Picturehouse chief Bob Berney was publicly skeptical of an Altman-less Hard Body, but left the door open by not making an official decision. If a project does come to pass, might we suggest A Prairie Home Companion's assistant director Paul Thomas Anderson for the gig?


The Rock carried a big gun in Doom, but he could never put his Hands on a Hard Body.


9) A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Potential Cast: Tom Cruise

True to its ambitious title, Dave Eggers' memoir of his unexpected guardianship of his eight-year-old brother after both their parents die of cancer was hailed by critics in 2000, became a bestseller, and ultimately became the subject of a bidding war between New Line and Miramax. Eggers chose New Line after the studio offered him $2 million, complete creative control, and the right to cowrite the screenplay. New Line could also offer Paul Thomas Anderson, who had just completed Magnolia for the studio and could possibly lure Tom Cruise to star. But once About a Boy author Nick Hornby and High Fidelity scribe D.V. DeVincentis turned in a script, New Line made the heartbreaking move to put the film into turnaround. Universal picked up rights to the film for Kimberly Peirce, director of Boys Don't Cry, but she left the tearjerker and finally settled into the Iraq War drama Stop-Loss.

Project Status: There may be too much in development costs going against Genius, but we're still hoping it's a Work in progress.


Tom Cruise evaded aliens in War of the Worlds, but missed a chance at showing his human side in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.


10) The Man Who Killed Don Quixote
Cast: Johnny Depp and Jean Rochefort

For anyone who wants the whole story on how The Man Who Killed Don Quixote conquered Terry Gilliam, just rent the "unmaking of" documentary Lost in La Mancha. A quick recap: Gilliam had set out to adapt Miguel de Cervantes' classic about the self-styled conquistador, starring Jean Rochefort as the titular protagonist and a pre-Pirates Johnny Depp as the contemporary marketing exec who drops into the past and gets mistaken for Quixote's sidekick Sancho Panza. A hernia injury to Rochefort, a hailstorm that literally wiped out the production, and a host of other obstacles left Gilliam chasing windmills himself after the film's financing fell through.

Project Status: No stranger to long-gestating projects — including an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Good Omens — Gilliam remains hopeful about finishing Don Quixote, saying in 2006 that he and cowriter Tony Grisoni were close to getting back the rights to their script. At least the Brazil director is in good company: Orson Welles adaptation of Quixote was also left unfinished.


Johnny Depp was the ultimate candy man in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but he might not have been meant to be The Man Who Killed Don Quixote.


11) Megalopolis
Potential Cast: Nicolas Cage, Russell Crowe, Robert De Niro, Paul Newman, and Kevin Spacey.

Francis Ford Coppola has almost as impressive a career of films that never came to fruition as he does of films that have. Coppola's list of projects-not-made include his long-in-the-works adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (which he will now produce for Motorcycle Diaries director Walter Salles) and a personal take on Pinocchio (following the tragic death of his son in 1985) that led to a lengthy legal battle with Warner Bros. over the film's rights. As much as we'd like to see either of those films directed by Coppola, The Godfather director really broke our heart when he announced he was scrapping Megalopolis, an ultra-ambitious epic about the battles between art and commerce, history and the future, told through the architectural restructuring of New York City. The film, however, was hatched in early 2001 and crumbled in that same year following the September 11 attacks.

Project Status: Coppola isn't ruling out a return to the sci-fi epic, recently telling Ain't It Cool News, "I have abandoned that as of now. I plan to begin a process of making one personal movie after another and if something leads me back to look at that, which I'm sure it might, I'll see what makes sense to me."


Adaptation's Nicolas Cage never got a chance to reunite with his uncle Francis Ford Coppola on Megalopolis.


12) The Onion Movie
Cast: Steven Seagal

Unlike the rest of the films on this list, The Onion Movie was actually produced, but you won't find any trace of it on IMDB. The trail of tears begins back in late 2003, when the minds behind the satirical rag signed with Fox Searchlight to make a no-holds-barred sketch-comedy movie. Under the guidance of producer and well known spoofer David Zucker of Airplane fame, The Onion's then-editor Robert Siegel and writer Todd Hanson penned a script that tackled cultural mores with skits called "Who Is the Rapist?" and even convinced Steven Seagal to play himself as a superhero named "Cock Puncher." Fox Searchlight didn't see the humor. Now the only evidence that the film even exists is a review on the website JoBlo from a reader who "wanted to poke my eyes out" after seeing a test screening.

Project Status: In March 2007, The Onion's president Sean Mills said they were no longer associated with the film — but call us a glutton for punishment or just eternal optimists for still wanting a peek.


Steven Seagal actually played a character named Cock Puncher even though The Onion Movie got punched out


13) Rendezvous With Rama
Potential Cast: Morgan Freeman

When Morgan Freeman started his own production company in 1997, the first film announced was Rendezvous With Rama, an adaptation of 2001: A Space Odyssey author Arthur C. Clarke's novel about a human crew who investigates an alien starship. Regarded as a classic among the sci-fi community, Rama also boasted a director worthy of such material, Freeman's Se7en helmer David Fincher. Ever since then, the film has become a veritable black hole of Freeman and Fincher's careers, emerging every so often online in the form of a conceptual sketch or a teaser clip, but nothing more. As Fincher went on to direct Fight Club and Panic Room, the $100-million film always seemed to be next on the director's slate, yet we're still waiting for this Rendezvous to happen.

Project Status: Freeman's Revelations Entertainment still has a poster of Rama prominently displayed on its home page with Fincher as the film's director.


10 Items or Less star Morgan Freeman is still holding out hope that he'll Rendezvous with Rama.


14) Save Us Joe Louis
Potential Cast: Terrence Howard

We're as surprised as anybody that two films written by What Makes Sammy Run? author Budd Schulberg, a writer best known for his script for 1954's On the Waterfront, are making this list of unmade classics. The most intriguing, however, is Save Us Joe Louis, a drama about the 1930s rivalry between the African-American boxer and German Max Schmelling shortly before World War II. Spike Lee, who planned to direct the film in September 2001, told The New York Times earlier that year, "The subject matter is wonderful: Hitler, Goebbels, F.D.R., Mussolini. We see it in the same genre as the David Lean epics such as Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai." Nonetheless Joe Louis wasn't heard from again until 2005, when Lee insisted that the film would follow Inside Man. He even found a leading man in Hustle and Flow's Terrence Howard, but Lee's busy schedule after his first hit in years has left the director without time to lace up his boxing gloves.

Project Status: Call it a TKO for now, since Lee has the potential Tom Cruise thriller Selling Time and a sequel to Inside Man in the works.


Terrence Howard had another chance for Pride if only Spike Lee could pull together the biopic Save Us Joe Louis.


15) Tripoli
Potential Cast: Russell Crowe

Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe had been looking for a follow up to Gladiator and thought they found it when they set sail to the shores of Tripoli, a period drama penned by The Departed screenwriter William Monaghan. Crowe would play William Eaton, the U.S. diplomat during the Jefferson Administration who in the early 1800s sought to overthrow the ruler of Tripoli on the Barbary Coast by uniting the region's Christian and Muslim soldiers. Ben Kingsley had signed on to star alongside Crowe, and filming was supposed to start in 2003 after Scott had finished making Matchstick Men. But Fox, the studio producing Tripoli, had another Russell Crowe oceanic epic in the works with Master and Commander and deemed Tripoli not seaworthy at the time.

Project Status: Since Crowe and Scott disembarked from Tripoli to do two other films together, Keanu Reeves has been bandied about as a potential replacement for the lead, and Monaghan said in a 2007 IGN interview that "Tripoli will get made. There's no way it can't be."


Tripoli would've reunited Russell Crowe with Gladiator director Ridley Scott.


16) The Turtle and the Hare
Potential Cast: Michael Caine, Brenda Blethyn, Bob Hoskins, and Orlando Jones

After Chicken Run had become a massive international hit in 1999, the claymation geniuses at Aardman Animation set their sights on a faux documentary about the world's most famous race. By the time production started on the stop-motion film in February 2001, Michael Caine stepped up to the starting line in the role of Maurice the Tortoise, with Brenda Blethyn, Bob Hoskins, and Orlando Jones rounding out the cast of voices. But when the filmmakers decided the script needed some work in July 2001, Tortoise slowed to a halt and Aardman decided not to split hares by turning their full attention towards Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

Project Status: The Aesop's fable fell further down Aardman's list of priorities when computer-animated films became all the craze, and the studio turned its attention to the CG rat's tale Flushed Away. Still, Aardman signed a new production deal at Sony, so Tortoise is said to be closer to coming out of its shell.


Children of Men's Michael Caine knew slow and steady would win the race playing the Tortoise in the Aardman film, but the race never started.


17) Untitled Phil Spector biopic
Potential Cast: Tom Cruise

Long before Phil Spector was on trial for murder, Tom Cruise began developing a biopic of the legendary music producer who shepherded into superstardom artists ranging from the Ronettes to Ike and Tina Turner. Cruise enlisted his Jerry Maguire director Cameron Crowe, but their script about the "wall of sound" inventor stumbled when the duo couldn't figure out an ending. Even though Crowe left the Spector project to direct Almost Famous, Spector's specter has never really left Crowe: the director cast the music producer's daughter in bit parts in Almost Famous and Elizabethtown. Also, in an eerie coincidence, Lana Clarkson, the slain actress at the center of Spector's trial, made her acting debut in Crowe's Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

Project Status: Though the jury is literally out on Spector's real-life fate, the music producer is more likely to be the subject of a TV movie than a big screen one. Still, who wouldn't pay to see Cruise as a crazily coiffed Spector?


Cameron Crowe had the musical know-how for a Phil Spector biopic from his days at Rolling Stone, just not an ending for the film.


18) Used Guys
Potential Cast: Jim Carrey, Ben Stiller, and Emily Mortimer

Used Guys' futuristic premise may be downright quaint by the time someone revives this Ben Stiller-Jim Carrey comedy that an unnamed senior executive at Fox told The New York Times was a "prescription for unhappiness." With an estimated budget of $112 million, two $20 million comedy kings, and a decidedly strange premise about a world where men had been eradicated and replaced by "pleasure clones" — two of whom would be played by Stiller and Carrey —the film was a gamble. After all, who wants to be stuck with the next Adventures of Pluto Nash? But with Meet the Fockers director Jay Roach onboard to direct, Used Guys seemed like a safe bet. Profit participation beyond the two stars' regular fees and Carrey's commitment to another film (Ripley's Believe It Or Not, which also ultimately did not happen) were cited as reasons why we'll never get to see Roach's planned egg-shaped cars.

Project Status: Just like the men of Used Guys, the project seems extinct.


The Number 23 star Jim Carrey was ready to play a Used Guy until Fox pulled the plug.


19) What Makes Sammy Run
Potential Cast: Ben Stiller

While we can't say for certain what makes Sammy run, we do know that he's running a marathon and not a sprint. That may be because Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run is the ultimate Hollywood insider novel and, at the time of its publication in 1941, any studio wanting to adapt the tale of the ruthless and self-serving Hollywood screenwriter Sammy Glick would most likely find themselves part of its sordid storyline. Ben Stiller bought the rights to the book in the mid-1990s and wrote a script with Jerry Stahl, the man he played in Permanent Midnight, to direct for Warner Bros. In 2001, when Stiller moved his production company to DreamWorks, the then-burgeoning studio paid $2.6 million to Warners to have the project move along with him, but the ubiquitous Stiller hasn't been able to fit the film into his schedule.

Project Status: Stiller is currently directing Tropic Thunder, his first film since Zoolander which means Sammy will have to keep running offscreen.


Ben Stiller wanted to put his days of monkeying around in films like Night at the Museum behind him with the drama What Makes Sammy Run?


20) Wonder Woman
Potential Cast: Sandra Bullock

Not even Wonder Woman's golden lasso has been able to rein in the seemingly endless development that keeps Princess Diana of the Amazon in perpetual procession to the silver screen. As with all DC Comics characters, Wonder Woman seemed bound for the big screen via DC's corporate sibling, Warner Bros. However, no one besides Lynda Carter has ever been formally fitted for Wonder Woman's halter top since producer Joel Silver took control of the project in 2001. While Sandra Bullock and Jennifer Lopez were bandied about to put on the bulletproof bracelets, Antz screenwriter Todd Alcott took a stab at the film, followed by a series of scribes leading up to Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon being hired to helm in 2005. His version, said to be set in the present day and star an unknown, wasn't deemed wondrous by the studio. Warner Bros. unceremoniously dumped Whedon by buying a version set during World War II and written by two unknowns, though the studio claimed it was only a preemptive measure against a plagiarism lawsuit.

Project Status: Silver is considering leaving Wonder Woman in a league of her own until she can join a film about the DC all-star crime-fighting squad, the Justice League.

Sandra Bullock had a Premonition about Wonder Woman that never came to pass.

5) The Dreyfus Affair
Potential Cast: Ben Affleck and Don Cheadle

Now that Brokeback Mountain has brought cowboys out of the closet, it finally might be time for a studio to take The Dreyfus Affair out of its closet as well. Everyone from Barbara Streisand to Nancy Drew helmer Andrew Fleming has wanted to direct an adaptation of Peter Lefcourt's satire about the national pastime turning into a national identity crisis when two baseball teammates round third base with each other. During the film's pre-production at Disney, Garth Brooks caused a stir when he took an interest to star in the film, if only the main character Randy wasn't gay. Ben Affleck and Don Cheadle would get as close as anyone to actually making the film in the late 1990s, with New Line for Dr. Doolittle director Betty Thomas. But as Lefcourt recently said in a panel discussion, one of the stars bowed out when a studio head told him his career wouldn't recover from playing a gay character on screen.

Project Status: Thanks to the Brokeback effect, Lefcourt is once again inching towards the plate with another adaptation.

Yeah, I was hoping for a list like that too...like that DEVIL & DANIEL WEBSTER movie starring Alec Baldwin and Anthony Hopkins...is THAT ever going to see the light of day?