10 Cancelled Movies (That SECRETLY Lived On)
5. Mathilda
The Film
To this day, Leon: The Professional is easily Luc Besson's best film. It is profound and complex and has some truly brilliant action sequences, which helped announce Besson and his protégé Olivier Megaton as mainstream breakouts in 1994.
On the back of it, Besson wanted to make a sequel called Mathilda, which would have starred Natalie Portman as an "older" and "more mature" version of the character from Leon, who was working as a cleaner. They necessarily needed to wait until Portman got older, but then her fame got in the way and Besson's clash with Gaumont Film Company - who he left to form his own studio - meant he couldn't retrieve the rights for a sequel.
How It Lived On
Though it was cancelled, Olivier Megaton revealed in 2011 that Mathilda lived on as another film: Colombiana. That film, starring a young Zoe Saldana focused on a young cleaner who goes to war with a drug cartel as revenge for the murder of her family when she was a child.
It's very much the film that Mathilda was supposed to be.