These days, releasing a superhero movie is a sure-fire way to make a billion dollars
— but over the years, many have tried and failed to add to the ever-growing roster of
comic book flicks.
These are the most overhyped superhero movies that never actually happened.
The 21st-century superhero film craze began in earnest in 2002 with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man,
which starred Tobey Maguire as the masked, web-spinning crimefighter.
When Raimi's first Spider-venture raked in an American box office take of $403 million,
Spider-Man 2 became pretty much inevitable.
That movie did just as well when it was released in 2004, too, and so Sony naturally followed
it up with 2007's Spider-Man 3 — a movie best known for… this.
"How's the pie?"
"So good."
Despite attracting so-so reviews, the third movie still earned more money than both its
predecessors, meaning Sony was more than justified in greenlighting Spider-Man 4 and Spider-Man
5.
Veteran actors John Malkovich and Anne Hathaway were both attached to the franchise, and were
to appear as villain Vulture and love interest Felicia Hardy, respectively, and the crew
was supposed to start filming the fourth movie in early 2010.
But in January 2010, just before cameras were set to roll, Deadline reported that Raimi
had walked away from the franchise, having reportedly insisted that a year wasn't enough
time to make a good enough movie.
Rather than looking for a replacement, Sony canceled Spider-Man 4 altogether, opting instead
to reboot the series with a new cast and crew.
Sony successfully started their Spider-franchise anew with 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man, starring
Andrew Garfield as the world's favorite spider-bite victim.
The movie made a hugely impressive $757 million at the worldwide box office, spurring the
release of a sequel in 2014.
Shortly after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 hit theaters, Sony announced its next big steps
into the Spider-Verse at San Diego Comic-Con.
November 2016 would see the release of a Sinister Six movie, debuting the villainous super-team
on screen for the very first time.
Consequently, the previously-announced Amazing Spider-Man 3 was pushed from June 2016 to
a 2018 release date.
But the future of both movies was thrown into chaos when Sony struck a deal with Marvel
Studios in 2015, allowing Spider-Man to finally appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
"You got heart, kid.
Where you from?"
"Queens."
"Brooklyn."
The Sony/Marvel co-production Spider-Man: Homecoming hit theaters in 2017, rebooting
the franchise yet again with Tom Holland in the starring role.
The character has only featured in MCU films since then, while Sony has gone on to develop
its own villain-based Spidey universe.
The Superman film franchise lay dormant for years after the thundering flop that was 1987's
Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.
That movie earned a genuinely insulting $15 million at the box office, which was just
less than its already-modest $17 million budget.
But in 1996, after Tim Burton's Batman movies had reinvigorated the superhero movie genre,
Warner Bros.’ Jon Peters brought in filmmaker Kevin Smith to carry on Superman's story.
Smith was supposed to rewrite a screenplay, then titled Superman Reborn, which was subsequently
renamed Superman Lives.
But Peters had some bizarre demands for Smith.
For example, Superman wasn't allowed to fly in the movie, and he also had to wear an all-black
suit.
There were also a number of polar bear bodyguards involved, for some reason, and at one point
Supes had to fight a giant mechanical spider.
Smith somehow incorporated all these requirements into his script, and even recommended that
his frequent collaborator, Ben Affleck, play Superman.
Tim Burton was hired to direct, however, and he brought in his own choice to wear the cape:
Nicolas Cage.
Months of rewrites, delays, studio maneuvering, and budgetary issues ensued, with Superman
Lives finally kicking the bucket when Burton stepped down to film Sleepy Hollow instead.
The franchise was thrown back into limbo, and Kal-El wouldn't reappear on the silver
screen until the release of Superman Returns in 2006.
Fox churned out a couple of Fantastic Four movies back in the 2000s: the appropriately
named The Fantastic Four and its follow-up, Rise of the Silver Surfer.
Since that second film made significantly less money than the first, Fox didn't go for
the full trilogy, but the studio certainly wasn't done with the characters.
The studio hired Green Lantern co-writer Michael Green to pen a reboot, but three years later
the movie was still stuck in development hell.
So Fox brought in Jeremy Slater to write and hired Josh Trank to direct.
But shooting on Fantastic Four was a straight-up disaster, with Trank alleging multiple instances
of executive meddling.
He later told Polygon that his creative input was often ignored, and that Fox brought in
new writers for reshoots, which the studio had allegedly planned from the outset.
Scenes that Trank had wanted to film wound up cut from the script, while other fully-completed
scenes were left out of the movie's theatrical cut.
The summer 2015 release Fantastic Four didn't exactly please the fans, earning just $56.1
million in North America and amassing an atrocious 9 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
"It's fantastic."
"Say that again."
In the wake of that cinematic debacle, Fox removed their planned Fantastic Four sequel
from its 2017 release schedule.
And now that Marvel Studios are producing their own Fantastic Four movie, you can probably
safely bet that this particular version of Marvel's First Family is dead and buried.
Superhero team-up movies are commonplace nowadays, what with Marvel's hugely successful Avengers
movies and D.C. Comics' slightly-less-successful Justice League.
But that whole phenomenon might have begun far earlier if Warner Bros. had seen Justice
League: Mortal to its completion.
Production on this superstar superhero movie began in 2007, with a target release date
of 2009.
George Miller, the filmmaker behind Mad Max: Fury Road, agreed to direct, sets were built,
and a cast was hired and fitted for costumes.
Armie Hammer was to star as Batman, D.J.
Cotrona was going to play Superman, Megan Gale would be Wonder Woman, Common came on
as Green Lantern, and Adam Brody was cast as the Flash.
Warner Bros. earmarked an astounding $200 million for Justice League: Mortal, which
would have ranked it among the most costly films of all time.
Unfortunately, the script still needed a good amount of work, and any potential rewrites
were delayed by the Writers' Guild of America strike in 2007 and 2008.
By the time that had been resolved, most of the cast members' contracts had expired, and
they'd long moved on to other projects.
Movie audiences were introduced to the X-Force in 2018's Deadpool 2, in which the iconic
super-squad was personally assembled by the Merc with a Mouth himself.
Unfortunately, it… doesn't end well.
"Oh yeah, that's right, Bedlam."
[screams] The X-Force has been around in the comics
in various forms since the early '90s, conceived as a spinoff of the X-Men.
Suitably, plans for a now-abandoned X-Force trilogy were set in motion long before the
Deadpool films were released.
In 2013, Fox hired Kick-Ass 2 filmmaker Jeff Wadlow to write and direct an X-Force movie.
He later teased the project's premise to ComicBookMovie, saying:
"If X-Men was about mutants who get to go to private school with Wolverine and Professor
X, what about the mutants that have to go to public school?
What about the ones who don't have the benefactor looking out for them?"
Wadlow apparently developed a story that would unfold over three movies, following a band
of kids who eventually form a hit squad and black-ops team.
Now that Disney has acquired Fox, however, it seems the chances of an X-Force movie happening
anytime soon have flown straight into the woodchipper.
After the X-Men and the Avengers, it seemed like the next big thing in the world of Marvel
was destined to be the Inhumans.
The studio whetted the public's appetite for the lesser-known team of X-Men-like individuals,
first by introducing them to the MCU on ABC's popular series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and
then by announcing plans to spin them off into their own movie.
At a Marvel media event in 2014, studio boss Kevin Feige said that Inhumans would mark
the 20th MCU entry, comprising a huge part of the studio's "Phase 3" slate of films.
It was due to hit theaters on November 2nd, 2018.
Then it was suddenly delayed until summer 2019.
And then Marvel delayed the project indefinitely.
The reason?
Well, when Marvel made a deal with Sony to include Peter Parker in the MCU, the studio
pivoted its attention towards their burgeoning Spider-Man franchise.
Considering the Inhumans were second-tier at best compared to Spidey, the project was
quickly shelved in his place — and eventually turned into a widely-panned and quickly canceled
ABC television series.
Long before Marvel Comics realized it could make its own movies in-house, the publisher
would contract with various different movie studios to bring its most popular superheroes
to life on the big screen.
While Fox wound up with the rights to the X-Men and its assorted characters, for example,
Universal Pictures got the rights to make an Incredible Hulk movie.
Production on Hulk began in 2002, starring Australian actor Eric Bana as the brilliant
but troubled scientist Bruce Banner — and it was all under the direction of the acclaimed
and award-winning filmmaker Ang Lee.
Marvel was so optimistic that Hulk would be a hit that it contracted with Universal to
make a couple more Marvel movies.
Marvel Studios' CEO Avi Arad said at the time:
"Universal Pictures has proven to us that it has the vision and creativity to bring
our superheroes to the big screen in grand fashion."
He subsequently announced an upcoming "epic underwater tale of majestic fantasy."
No, not that one — this film was actually Sub-Mariner, a story about the aquatic anti-hero
and classic Marvel character Namor.
Screenwriter David Self, best known at the time for Road to Perdition, was attached to
write the screenplay.
Apparently, the story was to follow the protector of Atlantis as he discovers his deep-sea powers
and wages war against the evil Krang.
Sub-Mariner failed to come up for air, however, and after the project bounced between a number
of other filmmakers, the rights to the character eventually reverted back to Marvel.
As of right now, the character has yet to make his silver screen debut.
At the same time that a Hulk-inspired contracting frenzy led Marvel to ink their deal with Universal,
the two entertainment behemoths announced another movie based on Prime, a relatively
obscure comic book character dating back to the early 1990s.
Avi Arad announced at the time:
"Prime is a complete departure from the standard superhero story.
With this film, we are developing what we think will be Marvel's first superhero action-comedy."
Marvel big shots Kevin Feige and Stan Lee were cited as executive producers, while Arad
was set to actively produce the film.
It was supposed to tell an extremely Shazam-like tale of a teenager who, as the result of a
government experiment, could instantly turn into an adult — who's also a superhero.
Screenwriting duo Don Calame and Chris Conroy were responsible for the script, even though
they had just one feature film credit between them: the 2001 Disney Channel original movie
Hounded.
Seeing as how no progress has been made on this film in nearly two decades, it's probably
fair to say that the time for Prime has passed.
In late 2018, Deadline reported that Fox had hired Julius Avery, director of the horror
movie Overlord, to helm a new, big-budget film version of Flash Gordon.
A popular comic strip in the early 20th century, it centered on the exploits of muscular American
athlete Flash Gordon, who heads into space to fight the evil Ming the Merciless.
The last time it appeared on the big screen was as a campy low-budget movie in 1980, starring
Sam J. Jones as Flash and featuring an iconic soundtrack by Queen.
"Gordon's alive?!"
After Kingsman filmmaker Matthew Vaughn opted to produce but not direct the movie, Fox accepted
a story pitch from Avery, who is a lifelong fan of the Flash Gordon comic strip.
That version of the movie ultimately fell apart, but shortly after Disney acquired Fox
in 2019, Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi was announced as the new director of the long-gestating
Flash Gordon revival, which had apparently been reworked as an animated feature.
Not more than a few weeks later, however, Flash Gordon appeared on a long list of projects
in various states of pre-production that Disney had inherited from Fox... and which the Mouse
House had summarily cancelled.
Ming isn't the only merciless one, it would seem.
For decades now, Sony has controlled all of Spider-Man's many villains and supporting
characters, and a few years ago the studio decided to tell their stories as part of a
shared universe.
Now officially titled the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel's Characters, this wide-ranging
franchise includes every Spider-Verse move that isn't specifically centered on Spider-Man,
such as the Tom Hardy vehicle Venom and its sequel, as well as Morbius, starring Jared
Leto as the titular "Living Vampire."
Sony also planned a team-up movie featuring two other Spider-Man characters — the mercenary
Silver Sable and the ace cat burglar Black Cat.
In May 2017, Sony tapped Gina Prince-Bythewood to direct Silver and Black, with plans for
a theatrical release date of February 2019.
That all changed in June 2018, however, when Sony took the movie off of its schedule.
There were apparently internal problems with the production — specifically that Prince-Bythewood
reportedly didn't much care for the shooting script she'd been given.
Continuous delays over the script meant that meeting a theatrical release eight months
later would have been next to impossible.
However, it wasn't long after scrapping Silver and Black that Sony decided it would instead
pursue separate movies for the two characters, both of which are currently in development…
for now.
James Franco is an artist with many passions, from writing to directing to painting — and
he isn't above showing up in the odd superhero movie, either.
Early in his acting career, he played Harry Osborn in Sam Raimi's 2000s Spider-Man trilogy.
Not only that, he nearly became one of the few actors to play more than one comic book
character in different franchises, having been attached to star as the mutant Multiple
Man in a standalone film for Fox.
In 2017, Deadline reported that the man of multiple talents would both produce and star
in a film about the mutant James Madrox, who is able to create clones of himself at will.
Franco told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017 that he wanted to make a different, edgier
comic book movie, akin to Deadpool or Logan.
He said:
"Our bottom line MO is, how can we push this into new ground?
We're going to take this superhero thing and push it into a new genre."
X-Men franchise overseer Simon Kinberg was also actively involved in the project, and
nearly a year after its announcement, he told IGN that a script was currently being worked
on.
That, of course, was in 2018 — and with Disney having acquired Fox soon after, it's
definitely not looking good for Multiple Man.
There are three things that almost everyone can agree are fantastic: cowboys, ninjas,
and vikings.
Most filmgoers are also of the consensus that Chris Pratt is awesome, as the likable actor
has headlined blockbusters as disparate as Jurassic World, Guardians of the Galaxy, and
The Lego Movie.
Hollywood producers searching for a surefire hit didn't have to think too hard, then, to
combine cowboys, ninjas, Vikings, and Chris Pratt via the movie Cowboy Ninja Viking.
Based on the graphic novel of the same name by A.J.
Lieberman and Riley Rossmo, the film was to depict the mind-blowing adventures of Dr.
Sebastian Ghislain, a psychotherapist who can transform into three different secret
agent personas — a cowboy, a ninja, and a Viking.
Pratt signed on to star as Dr. Ghislain, with Priyanka Chopra featuring in a supporting
role.
Game of Thrones director Michelle MacLaren would make her feature film debut with a $65
million budget to play with.
This fun action comedy was scheduled to hit movie theaters on June 28th, 2019, but just
a week after Chopra's involvement was announced, Universal pulled the movie from its schedule
and ended production, delaying the film indefinitely.
According to an insider, the film had a number of script issues still to work out.
Its problems were apparently so bad, in fact, that rumors Universal would cancel the movie
had floated around for nearly half a year before the studio finally called it a day.
Over the course of the last two decades, the X-Men series has been one of Hollywood's most
lucrative and expansive franchises.
The dozen-plus films in the series raked in more than $6 billion altogether, and Fox explored
all kinds of offshoots and sub-franchises, such as Hugh Jackman's Wolverine standalones.
These included the instant classic Logan, the less-beloved The Wolverine, and the much-derided
X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
The studio also toyed with other Origins movies, however — such as one about the rise of
super-villain Magneto, which was later reworked into the team-up prequel X-Men: First Class.
They also considered a film about Remy LeBeau, otherwise known as Gambit, the Louisiana-born
mutant with a thing for explosive playing cards.
Gambit has made a few appearances in X-Men-related media over the years.
He was a main character on Fox's 1990s X-Men animated series, and he showed up for a cameo
in X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
"Now, bub, you listen to me."
When announcing a solo Gambit film, however, Fox ignored Taylor Kitsch, who played the
character in that film, in favor of 21 Jump Street and G.I.
Joe star Channing Tatum.
A succession of high-profile directors circled the movie, including The Bourne Identity's
Doug Liman and Pirates of the Caribbean's Gore Verbinski.
Somehow, though, Fox just couldn't get this movie off the ground, and the studio delayed
its release once or twice in 2019, before settling on March 2020.
After Disney acquired Fox, the House of Mouse quietly canceled the movie, finally consigning
it to the ash heap of Hollywood history.
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