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Imagine a Howard Hughes biopic starring Jim Carrey, or a James Dean drama with a young Leonardo DiCaprio playing the Hollywood icon. What about Robert Downey Jr. as Edgar Allen Poe? Or how about a trilogy-ending “Star Wars” movie that is not “The Rise of Skywalker”? Film history is jam-packed with auteur passion projects and franchise tentpoles that never got off the ground. When a failed project includes Christopher Nolan directing Carrey, it especially hurts.

Variety runs down some of the greatest movies never made in the list below.

  • Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s “Deepfake: The Movie”

    “South Park” creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker went viral during the pandemic thanks to their surprise deepfake video, “Sassy Justice,” a 14-minute short starring a deepfake Donald Trump, voiced by Peter Serafinowicz. The duo said at the time that “Sassy Justice” came about because “we just wanted to make fun of [deepfakes] because it makes it less scary.” But it turns out the project had its roots in a full-length Donald Trump deepfake movie that Parker and Stone were working on and then scrapped because of the pandemic.

    “It was going to be ‘Deep Fake: The Movie,’” Parker told the Los Angeles Times. “It was about this guy who looked exactly like Trump because we deepfake Trump’s face onto him. And it was this whole funny thing because, of course, it ends up with Trump just naked and getting run through the wringer and everything, and that’s why it was so funny and so timely.”

    Stone said the deepfake movie is “sort of on hold.” Why? “It was very timely and the timeliness of it has passed,” Parker added. “We’d have to majorly rethink it to do it now.”

  • Micheal Mann’s James Dean Biopic, Starring Leonardo DiCaprio

    Michael Mann revealed earlier this year that he was developing a biographical drama about “Rebel Without a Cause” icon James Dean that would’ve starred a young Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role. According to Mann, the movie had a “brilliant screenplay” but couldn’t be made at the time because DiCaprio was too young looking for the role.

    “That was so weird about James Dean,” Mann said. “It’s, ‘Who the hell could play James Dean?’ And I found a chap who could play James Dean, but he was too young. It was Leo. We did a screen test that’s quite amazing. I think he must’ve been 19 at the time. From one angle, he totally had it with him,” Mann said of DiCaprio. “I mean, it’s brilliance. He would turn his face in one direction and we see a vision of James Dean, and then he’d turn his face another direction and it’s no, that’s a young kid.”

  • Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” Sequel

    Luca Guadagnino had been touting his plans to direct a sequel to his 2018 “Suspira” reimagining before the first movie opened in theaters. He originally was going to title the first movie “Suspiria: Part One,” but ultimately decided against it. Thank goodness he did, since the movie’s poor box office performance killed any chance of Guadagnino getting to make a second movie. “Suspiria” only grossed around $2 million at the U.S. box office and globally reached $7 million, a disaster considering the film had a $20 million production budget.

    “How? How, my dear? The movie made absolutely nothing. It was a disaster at the box office,” Guadagnino told The Film Stage when asked if a sequel could still happen. “I know that people are liking it more and more now. I loved making that movie. It’s very dear to me. But writer David Kajganich and I had really conceived it as the first half of a bigger story.”

    As for what the sequel would’ve covered, Guadagnino teased that “the storyline was layered in five different time zones and spaces. One of these was Helena Markos being a charlatan woman in the year 1200 in Scotland and how she got the secret of longevity.”

  • Christopher Nolan’s Howard Hughes Biopic, Starring Jim Carrey

    Martin Scorsese’s Howard Hughes biopic, “The Aviator,” grossed over $200 million worldwide and earned 11 Academy Award nominations, including best picture and best actor for Leonardo DiCaprio’s performance as the iconic mogul. The movie also killed any shot of Christopher Nolan ever making his own Howard Hughes biographical drama, which the filmmaker had long planned until Scorsese’s acclaimed movie stole the thunder. Nolan told The Daily Beast in 2007 that the script for his Hughes biopic was the best thing he’d written, and he even lined up Jim Carrey to star as Hughes. According to Nolan, Hughes was the role that Carrey was “born to play.” Once Scorsese’s “The Aviator” opened and killed Nolan’s Hughes movies, the “Dunkirk” Oscar nominee went ahead and revamped Batman with Warner Bros.’ “Batman Begins.”

  • “Star Wars: Duel of the Fates”

    J.J. Abrams’ “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” ended the most recent “Star Wars” trilogy on a disastrous note, and the movie that fans got was miles away from the ninth “Star Wars” film that Lucasfilm originally planned with “Jurassic World” director Colin Trevorrow. That movie was titled “Star Wars: Duel of the Fates” and did not include any of the Emperor Palpatine nonsense that dragged down “The Rise of Skywalker.” The script for Trevorrow’s movie included bigger roles for John Boyega’s Finn and Kelly Marie Tran’s Rose, the latter of whom was nearly absent from “The Rise of Skywalker.” In “Duel of the Fates,” these two characters set out on a mission to unite the galaxy in a rebellion against the First Order and lead a Stormtrooper uprising. Daisy Ridley’s Rey still goes to find the good in Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, but his storyline was far more darker as he confronted the history of the Sith after getting in contact with Palpatine’s Sith master, Tor Valum. There’s no way to know if “Duel of the Fates” would’ve been great, but its storyline sounds far stronger than what fans got in “The Rise of Skywalker.”

  • Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill. Vol 3”

    Despite Quentin Tarantino stirring up buzz for “Kill Bill Vol. 3” in interviews over the last few years, franchise star Uma Thurman confirmed on SiriusXM’s “The Jess Cagle Show” earlier this year that a third entry in the series is “not immediately on the horizon.” The director has often said that a potential “Kill Bill Vol. 3” would focus in part on the daughter of Vivica A. Fox’s character, Vernita Green, as she sets out to avenge her mother’s death by killing Thurman’s The Bride. The plot would also include The Bride’s daughter. Tarantino said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” in June 2021 that he’d want Thurman’s own daughter, Maya Hawke, for the role. Tarantino is only making one more film before he retires from directing, so “Kill Bill Vol. 3” might remain unmade forever.

    “I think it’s just revisiting the characters 20 years later and just imagining The Bride and her daughter, Bebe, having 20 years of peace, and then that peace is shattered,” Tarantino said of a third “Kill Bill” film. “And now The Bride and Bebe are on the run, and just the idea of being able to cast Uma [Thurman] and cast her daughter Maya [Hawke] in the thing would be fucking exciting. Elle Driver is still out there, Sophie Fatale got her arm cut off, but she’s still out there. They all got Bill’s money. Actually, Gogo had a twin sister Shiaki and so her twin sister could show up.”

  • Spike Lee’s Jackie Robinson Biopic

    Spike Lee planned to director a biographical drama about Jackie Robinson, based on the baseball icon’s autobiography “I Never Had It Made,” but the project never got off the ground. Lee decided to make the screenplay to the movie public for the first time during the pandemic in 2020. In a video post accompanying the screenplay’s publication, Lee said, “We’ve all had a lot of time to think about stuff, our life, what happened, what didn’t happen. And I began to think about one of my dream projects. I wrote a script for Jackie Robinson. I wanted Denzel to play Jackie, but Denzel said he was too old. And I pulled this script out of the vault. And so, I’m gonna share this script with you. And also — don’t worry about if you don’t like baseball, sports. This is a great American story. Never got made, but I wanna share this script with you…It’s the fifth draft, 1996…Hope you enjoy it. If you don’t, that’s alright, too.”

  • Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon”

    Stanley Kubrick’s “Napoleon” passion project might be the most massive movie never made. Kubrick failed to get the historical drama off the ground at two studios, MGM and United Artists, because his vision for the project was simply too big. As documented in the book “Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made,” the filmmaker researched the epic for two full years and worked with dozens of historical advisors and a Napoleon specialist from Oxford to ensure the script remained historically accurate. Kubrick’s research included 15,000 location-scouting photographs and 17,000 slides of Napoleonic imagery. Historical epics were largely out of fashion at the time of Kubrick’s development, which is why neither studio was willing to front such a large budget to greenlight Kubrick’s vision, which also included using thousands of human extras and horses to accurately represent the French military.

  • Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Dune”

    Is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Dune” the greatest movie never made? It’s certainly one of the most ambitious, so big in fact that it got an entire documentary devoted to it with 2013’s “Jodorowsky’s Dune.” The director was deep into development when he realized his vision was simply too big and expensive to pull off. It’s a shame given that Jodorowsky had courted the likes of H.R. Giger, Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Udo Kier and Mick Jagger to collaborate with him on his “Dune” movie.

    “‘Dune’ is a book that’s like Proust,” Jodorowsky told IndieWire about why getting his movie made was so tough. “It’s science fiction but it’s very, very literary. It’s very difficult to find images to put in the film because pictures are optical. When I had the idea to do that, it was in an ecological [crisis]. I was feeling what all the people feel today. We’re in an ecological problem, because the Earth is changing, and your crazy President doesn’t believe that. That is ‘Dune’ in the beginning.”

  • Quentin Tarantino’s “Double V Vega”

    Quentin Tarantino has over a dozen movies he planned but never made, but perhaps the most enticing is “Double V Vega.” The movie would’ve been a crossover between “Pulp Fiction” and “Reservoir Dogs,” with John Travolta and Michael Madsen reprising their sibling characters Vincent Vega and Vic Vega. “The only thing I did know was the premise,” Tarantino told Cinema Blend about the movie. “I had a premise. It would’ve taken place in Amsterdam, during the time Vincent was in Amsterdam. He was running some club for Marsellus Wallace in Amsterdam, he was there for a couple years. In some point during his two years spent running that club, Vic shows up to visit him and it would’ve been their weekend. Exactly what happened to them or what trouble they got into I never took it that far.”

  • Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man”

    Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man” is the most notable Marvel movie never made. The “Shaun of the Dead” visionary worked with “Attack the Block” director Joe Cornish to develop “Ant-Man,” and the duo was deep into pre-production when they decided to step away because of creative differences with Marvel. A filming start date had already been set when Wright exited. Marvel brought in Peyton Reed to direct the film, and he has since gone on to direct two more “Ant-Man” sequels.

    Wright once told Variety, “It was a really heartbreaking decision to have to walk away after having worked on it for so long, because me and Joe Cornish in some form — it’s funny some people say, ‘Oh they’ve been working on it for eight years’ and that was somewhat true, but in that time I had made three movies so it wasn’t like I was working on it full time.”

    Wright continued, “But after ‘The World’s End’ I did work on it for like a year, I was gonna make the movie. But then I was the writer-director on it and then they wanted to do a draft without me, and having written all my other movies, that’s a tough thing to move forward thinking if I do one of these movies I would like to be the writer-director. Suddenly becoming a director for hire on it, you’re sort of less emotionally invested and you start to wonder why you’re there, really.”

  • Lynn Ramsay’s “Jane Got a Gun” and “The Lovely Bones”

    Lynn Ramsay was all set to direct Natalie Portman in the Western drama “Jane Got a Gun,” but the director notoriously didn’t show up to set on the first day of filming due to creative differences with Harvey Weinstein. The producer refused to give Ramsay final cut of the film, so she was replaced by Gavin O’Connor. “I was really devastated,” Ramsay would go on to say. “I really wanted to make the film. It was a hard decision to do that (walking away), but it was becoming a different movie. In my head, I made it. That was a tough time, I wouldn’t bullshit about that.”

    Ramsay would also drop out of adapting “The Lovely Bones” adaptation, which Peter Jackson ended up directing. Film4 brought on Ramsay to direct the movie originally, but she planned to divert from Alice Sebold’s novel because she wasn’t a fan of the book’s “My Little Pony, she’s in heaven, everything’s O.K. aspects.” DreamWorks refused to let Ramsay stray too far from the source material, so she exited the project. Ramsay called developing “The Lovely Bones” movie a “debacle” and a “a weird, Kafkaesque nightmare.”

  • George Miller’s “Justice League: Mortal”

    Long before Warner Bros. tasked Zack Snyder with mounting a “Justice League” movie, it was “Mad Max” legend George Miller who was developing the superhero team-up tentpole. Miller got far along enough to cast Armie Hammer as Batman and Adrien Brody as The Flash, but the 2008 writers’ strike made it impossible for the movie to go into production. Miller was planning an incredibly dark take on the material, with Hammer once saying, “I wanted this Batman character to be so dark. I was like look, no one – and this was George’s idea as well, this was really in the script – but no one ever really shows how truly psychotic this man has to be. Like this is a guy who chooses to put on a costume, in all black, and sneak around at night and beat the shit out of people.”

  • Patty Jenkins’ “Thor 2”

    “Thor: The Dark World” is widely considered the worst Marvel Cinematic Universe movie ever made, but perhaps it could’ve turned out a whole lot better if Patty Jenkins stayed on to direct it. Jenkins left the movie after battling Marvel over the script. “I did not believe that I could make a good movie out of the script that they were planning on doing,” Jenkins told Vanity Fair in 2020. “I think it would have been a huge deal — it would have looked like it was my fault. It would’ve looked like, ‘Oh my God, this woman directed it and she missed all these things.’” Jenkins passed and ended up delivering her own superhero blockbuster with her acclaimed “Wonder Woman.”

    “[‘Thor’] was the one time in my career where I really felt like, ‘Do this with [another director] and it’s not going to be a big deal. And maybe they’ll understand it and love it more than I do,’” Jenkins added. “You can’t do movies you don’t believe in. The only reason to do it would be to prove to people that I could. But it wouldn’t have proved anything if I didn’t succeed. I don’t think that I would have gotten another chance. And so, I’m super grateful.”

  • Darren Aronofsky’s “Batman: Year One”

    Darren Aronofsky has gotten close to directing several franchise films over the years, from his scrapped Wolverine movie with Hugh Jackman to Warner Bros.’ “Watchmen” adaptation that Zack Snyder ultimately helmed, but no lost Aronofsky project is quite as intriguing as “Batman: Year One.” News broke in 2000 that Aronofsky was set to reboot the “Batman” franchise with a story based on Frank Miller’s revered comic arc of the same name. Miller was set to write the screenplay himself, with Aronofsky’s cinematographer Mattew Libatique also on board. With two indies under his belt (“Pi” and “Requiem for a Dream”), Aronofsky was gearing up to shoot his first Hollywood studio movie with “Batman: Year One.” Warner Bros. took longer developing the project than Aronofsky anticipated, so scheduling conflicts ultimately led the filmmaker to step away. The studio was eager to have Aronofsky make a grittier “Batman” movie after the blowback against 1997’s campy “Batman & Robin,” and that mentality persisted once Aronofsky left as the seeds of his project gave rise to Christopher Nolan’s “Batman Begins.”

  • Guillermo del Toro’s “At the Mountains of Madness”

    Guillermo del Toro’s unmade passion project remains “At the Mountains of Madness,” based on the H.P. Lovecraft novella of the same name. The story centers on a disastrous expedition to Antarctica in the 1930s. Del Toro originally got a film adaptation of “At the Mountains of Madness” off the ground at Universal Pictures with James Cameron attached as a producer, but creative differences drove a wedge between the studio and the filmmaker. Del Toro was adamant about making an R-rated movie, but the studio didn’t have faith in the rating.

    “We thought we had a very good, safe package,” del Toro once told Collider about the unmade movie. “It was $150 million, Tom Cruise and James Cameron producing, ILM doing the effects, here’s the art, this is the concept, because I really think big-scale horror would be great. But there was a difference of opinion; the studio didn’t think so. The R [rating] was what made it. If ‘Mountains’ had been PG-13, or I had said PG-13 … I’m too much of a Boy Scout, I should have lied, but I didn’t.”

  • David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises 2”

    Viggo Mortensen earned an Oscar nomination for best actor thanks to his performance in David Cronenberg’s “Eastern Promises,” which would’ve spawned a sequel had the director’s vision gone according to plan. Cronenberg was all set to start filming a second “Eastern Promises” movie in October 2012, but Focus Featured dropped the sequel ahead of cameras rolling.

    “It was something I really wanted to explore because it was the first time I had ever been tempted to do a sequel because I felt I wasn’t finished with the character of Nikolai, played by Viggo Mortensen, and Kirill played by Vincent Cassel,” Cronenberg told The Playlist. “I really wanted to see Nikolai go back to Russia, because one of the things I wanted in the first movie was that you see a bunch of Russians in London but you never see them in Russia. In other words, you experience their exile and they are trying to recreate some of Russia within London…In the sequel, we would see Nikolai go to Russia and there would be Russian elements and so on and so on. And [original screenwriter] Steve Knight wrote a lovely script.”

  • Sylvester Stallone’s Edgar Allen Poe Movie, Starring Robert Downey Jr.

    Christian Bale and his “Out of the Furnance” director Scott Cooper are bringing an Edgar Allen Poe movie to Netflix later this year with “The Pale Blue Eye,” but a Poe movie has long been the dream for Sylvester Stallone. The “Rocky” icon spent over two decades trying to get a Poe movie together. Eventually Robert Downey Jr. boarded the movie as the lead after being personally recruited by Stallone. Downey Jr. told Screen Rant in 2009 that Stallone “wrote a great script,” but the film has never been made.

    “What fascinates me about Poe is that he was such an iconoclast,” Stallone once said about his Poe movie. “It’s a story for every young man or woman who sees themselves as a bit outside the box, or has been ostracized during their life as an oddball or too eccentric. It didn’t work for him either…His work was too hip for the room…but he developed the modern mystery story. He was also one of the great cryptologists; there were very few codes he couldn’t crack. He was just an extraordinary guy.”

  • Sofia Coppola’s “The Little Mermaid”

    Sofia Coppola joined forces with Universal Pictures and Working Title for a live-action “The Little Mermaid” movie that would’ve side-stepped the famous Disney animated film and returned the story back to its darker roots in the original Hans Christian Anderson fairytale. Coppola’s determination not to make her “Little Mermaid” fun for the whole family ultimately clashed with the studios, who ended up not wanting to spend so much money on underwater effects for such a risky take on the material. Coppola left the movie after spending a year developing it.

    “It wasn’t the Disney version, it was actually the original fairy tale, which is much darker,” Coppola told IndieWire. “I thought it would be fun to do a fairy tale, I’ve always loved fairy tales, so I was curious about doing that… It became too big of a scale. “I wanted to shoot it really underwater, which would have been a nightmare. But underwater photography is so beautiful. We even did some tests. It was not very realistic, that approach. But it was interesting to think about.”

  • Spike Jonze’s “Harold and the Purple Crayon”

    Sony Pictures is currently in production on “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” an adaptation of the beloved Crockett Johnson novel with “Rio” helmer Carlos Saldanha in the director’s chair and a cast that includes Zachary Levi, Zooey Deschanel, Lil Rel Howery and Ravi Patel. Unfortunately, Sony’s new “Harold” movie means Spike Jonze’s version is officially dead. Jonze, who hasn’t directed a feature film since “Her,” originally wanted to get “Harold and the Purple Crayon” off the ground before he went into production on “Where the Wild Things Are,” based on another fantastical children’s story. Jonze had actually met with “Wild Things” author Maurice Sendak to develop a new way to blend live-action photography and animation for his “Harold” movie. A short test film was created to show executives at TriStar that a full feature could be made, but they ended up backing out  of the movie two months before cameras were set to start rolling over fears the budget wouldn’t turn a profit.

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