Your Favorite "Unrealized" Production

Alright, here's the criteria: favorite unrealized horror project. I'm thinking of things like Romero's original big-budget script for Day of the Dead or Carpenter's Halloween 4 treatment or Mick Garris' The Mummy from a screenplay by Clive Barker.

I don't mean hypothetical, made-up "what-ifs." You have to be able to substantiate the ill-fated project. I don't want to hear about "what if Alfred Hitchcock had made his own sequel to Psycho" or if Martin Scorsese had directed Bride of Re-Animator. I mean items which you had at least heard a rumor about, if not read a script or an article confirming it's one-time development. The films that could've been.

Other examples:
--Stuart Gordon's own sequel to Re-Animator, or his original screenplay for Shadow Over Innsmouth.

--The Scott Spiegel / Quentin Tarantino Halloween 6.

--Carpenter's or Landis' or whoever's remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon.

--Alex Proyas' remake of Quatermass and the Pit.

--Romero's various Stephen King projects that got made by other people (The Stand, Salem's Lot, Pet Sematary).

--Spielberg's Jaws 2.

--John Sayles' Night Skies.

--Tobe Hooper's Poltergeist II.

--The Ridley Scott / James Cameron back-to-back Alien 3 and 4. (Or any of the unrealized Alien movies for that matter.)

--Raimi's The Fly 2.

What are your favorite "if only they'd done that" projects? (And please, no "if they'd made my sequel to Texas Chainsaw...")

These are all great! Keep 'em coming.

Regarding the afformentioned Halloween 4: Carpenter collaborated with Dennis Etchison on a screenplay for a fourth film which saw the townspeople of Haddonfield haunted by the memory of Michael Myers. My understanding is that Michael may or may not have physically existed in this story. He was basically a "nightmare man" of sorts, in a Candyman, New Nightmare type way. His existence was based on peoples paranoia and fear of him.

Believe it or not, Carpenter really was trying to give the Akkad's what they wanted while still attempting to move the series into a different, arguably more interesting direction. His concept was humored, but the final script (obviously) rejected.

I've never been able to get ahold of the script, but it's always been on my list of gotta-haves.

You want to talk about wacky formatting, you should see the screenplay for Ronnie Rocket. It's like a stream-of-consciousness novel in script form. There are drawings and whole pages of continous description and then of course, the thing is incomprehensible. Freaky little guy who has to plug himself into a wall-socket every so often to charge his artificial life source. Positive and negative electrical forces working against each other, and of course there's a detective. A lot of the core ideas wound up making there way into other Lynch projects (the electrical stuff showed up in Fire Walk With Me).

I've always been curious about Lynch's Return of the Jedi, though I doubt it would've been much different from the overbearing Lucas version we eventually got.

How about Cronenberg's Total Recall, which was to star Richard Dreyfus and that he worked on for a year? Or Cronenberg's Basic Instinct 2?

I read the script for The Sky Is Falling years ago. I think Fincher passed and Gore Verbinski was set to direct it, at the time. It wasn't proof that there was never a Jesus, it was that God was dead.

Two priests unearthed irrefutable evidence of this while on an archelogical dig. We never see what the proof is, but they stick it in a bag and go on a sex/murder/crime spree because they (A.) know there are no consequences, and (B.) feel like they'd wasted an awful lot of time being penitent. Whatever's in the bag is stone cold proof on sight of God's death many centuries ago.

Bruce Willis was attached to star as a Chow Yun-Fat type character, a former assassin doing self-imposed penance in a monastery somewhere with monks. He's got some sort of weird terminal illness (the story was set in a not-so-distant future) and has grown a conscience about his countless murders for hire. (I saw it like De Niro's character at the beginning of The Mission.)

The Catholic Church, learning of this evidence and the crime spree and fearing for their livelyhood, tricks Bruce Yun Fat into going after the Two Insane Priests "for the good of the church."

What follows from there was your basic John Woo movie. Picture Natural Born Killers meets The Killer. Bruce goes back to his old ways while hunting down Fr. Mickey and Fr. Malory. The climax was even a gun battle in a church. I mean this in a so-so way: the fact is it was a great set up that went nowhere. Would've been interesting to see just the same.

And we were never shown what was in the bag.

Gibson's draft of Alien 3 would've been a disaster. It was extremely long and dealt mostly with a political tug of war for the rights to the information gathered by the Sulaco. Huge stretches of screentime spent on lots of meetings and arguments with no Aliens (they show up eventually).

Getting William Gibson sounded great on paper, but the result...

...yikes...