10 Famous Unmade Comic Book Movies We WISH We Could Have Seen
Not seeing Nicolas Cage as Superman will always go down as a huge missed opportunity.
People have been predicting for a while that the comic book bubble is on the verge of bursting, but we're now two decades deep into the boom that spawned at the turn of the 21st Century thanks to Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man, and the genre is more popular than ever.
We're going to keep seeing new adaptations of familiar characters for a long time yet, and even when they fail - as many invariably do - they'll just end up getting rebooted anyway. Captain America: Civil War saw Spider-Man appear in his third separate franchise in nine years, Ben Affleck has played Batman the same number of times as Christian Bale, while new versions of the X-Men and Fantastic Four are already on the way under new management at Marvel Studios.
The cycle continues in apparent perpetuity.
However, on some rare occasions a high-profile superhero movie is either discussed, pitched, written or even given the go-ahead to start production before ultimately falling apart for a variety of reasons.
The comic book genre may be the bread and butter of Hollywood these days, but not everything gets to make it in front of cameras, no matter how great an idea seemed at the time.
10. Wolfgang Petersen's Batman V Superman
Superhero crossover movies have become such a regular occurrence these days that we're used to them by this point, and it would have been interesting to see a mega-budget showdown like Batman v Superman spring up out of nowhere back in the mid-2000s without establishing either character in their own solo outing first.
While the script by Seven writer Andrew Kevin Walker that's circulated online isn't the greatest, Akiva Goldsman recently claimed that his re-write would have been 'the darkest thing you'd ever seen', and he might have been right. The movie was said to open with Alfred's funeral, before the Joker ends up killing Bruce Wayne's wife and the two title heroes eventually come to blows over their disagreements surrounding the Dark Knight's quest for vengeance.
Wolfgang Petersen, the thinking man's Roland Emmerich, was set to direct with Colin Farrell as Batman and Jude Law as Superman, with a release date even set for the summer of 2004. However, the studio eventually soured on the idea and made Catwoman instead, which turned out to be a great idea.
Of course, we eventually ended up with a relentlessly dark take on Batman v Superman over a decade later, while Petersen's abandoned project had to make do with a visual cameo in I Am Legend. Back when cinematic universes weren't even a thing, it would have been a huge deal to see DC's two crown jewels go head-to-head on the big screen for the first time ever.