Everyone loves watching a good movie, and, sometimes, people love watching a bad movie! But nobody likes it when finished movies are shelved and never see the light of day. For weird tax write-off reasons, some movies just need to never get a proper release, which is bad for moviegoers altogether.
In God’s Hands
Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard met on the set of 2002 movie In God’s Hands, which sounds reasonable until you remember that no such movie exists. Right? Well, it did. The original negatives for the Lodge Kerrigan-directed movie were somehow destroyed, which meant the entire project had to be abandoned. The worst part is, those who saw early cuts of the movie say it was pretty good!
Black Water Transit
Director Tony Kaye tried to adapt the Carsten Stroud novel Black Water Transit in 2009, complete with big-name actors like Karl Urban and Laurence Fishburne. Fishburne himself saw screenings of the movie that he said he “loved,” but the movie got slammed with a complicated web of lawsuits between investors, producers, and other parties involved in the production. It’s still stuck in legal limbo to this day.
Fantastic Four (1994)
Marvel has struggled mightily to ever translate their first family, The Fantastic Four, to the big screen. A 1994 attempt by Bernd Eichinger was slapped together at the last minute and was reportedly so unlikable that Marvel Studios founder Avi Arad bought it just to destroy it and preserve the FF’s reputation.
Elizabeth, Michael & Marlon
There’s a rumor out there that Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson, and Marlon Brando went on a cross-country road trip together immediately after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The movie was completed but never released due to the weird choice of casting a white British actor, Joseph Fiennes, as Michael Jackson, a black man. Public outcry over this odd choice saw the movie shelved.
Killing Winston Jones
Joel David Moore had a rare chance to direct an ensemble cast in the 2012 black comedy Killing Winston Jones, which would have starred Danny Clover, Jon Heder, and Richard Dreyfuss. One notable wrinkle with the film is that Danny Masterson also starred, and he’s been convicted on some pretty serious criminal charges, though this doesn’t quite explain why a movie that was finished in 2012 wasn’t released before the charges against Masterson went public in 2017.
The Long Home
James Franco was at the center of a firestorm over his alleged misconduct, including accusations of some pretty serious criminal activity. His movie The Long Home, which he directed and starred in, was set to be released in 2017—the same year the allegations against him became public, putting the film off the table.
All-Star Weekend
Jaime Foxx produced and directed All-Star Weekend, a 2018 movie that was meant to coincide with the NBA All-Star Game. It starred Foxx, Robert Downey Jr., Ken Jeong, and more big names. Foxx has stated the movie never released because he realized having RDJ play a Mexican character wouldn’t go over as well in 2018 as his role as a black man in Tropic Thunder did in 2008.
The Mothership
Netflix sank a lot of money into The Mothership, a sci-fi project that wrapped in 2021. However, newbie director Matthew Charman made some miscalculations that led to him needing reshoots in 2022. The child actors who needed to pop back in for reshoots have already visibility aged out of their roles, though, rendering the film impossible to complete and leading Netflix to have to bin the project altogether rather than cast new actors and reshoot the entire thing.
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Coyote vs Acme
The 2023 live action and animated comedy Coyote vs. Acme looked pretty promising, but Warner Bros employed their infuriating new policy of canning it to take a $30 million tax write-off. The movie was actually planned to be unreleased at some point during production, but Warner Bros decided to finish it to get the tax break and recoup some of the losses. If that sounds like it should be straight-up illegal, you’re right! It should be, but it isn’t, so Warner Bros got away with making a movie just to throw it away.
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Batgirl
Get ready to get really, really mad. Warner Bros canned Batgirl after it was finished to get a juicy tax break. The studio made it sounds like it was a cost-cutting measure, alleging that the movie simply would be too expensive to finish. But this is the same studio that released garbage like Blue Beetle, The Flash, and the abysmal Black Adam. Clearly, they have no problem releasing objectively awful movies, so their decision to simply can Batgirl is infuriating.
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