10 Finished Movies That Disappeared Without A Trace
Coming never to a theatre nowhere near you.
Getting a movie made is a hugely difficult task. It's tough to get a pitch or a script picked up by a studio, just as hard getting that project through development hell to actually go into production, and equally challenging surviving the shoot and pulling the whole thing together into a satisfying final cut.
That's where your problems end, though, right? The movie's done. It's finished and ready to go out into the world and be judged by snarky internet critics with too much time on their hands. Or so you'd think.
Sometimes a movie can make it all the way to completion and still not actually see the light of day or get pulled immediately after a festival or test screening.
You might expect, as with the recent The Hunt, that a movie studio has poured enough money into a production that a "cancelled" release is going to show up eventually just to recoup a little of that spending. But sometimes even a completely finished film can be so bad, so controversial, or so offensive that to release it would cause the studio more harm than good.
These ten movies made it all the way to completion but were buried anyway. Let's find out why.
10. Glitterati
Right in the middle of the 2001 shoot for The Rules Of Attraction, director Roger Avary took the unusual step of taking a couple of weeks off to shoot a whole other movie in Europe, one which ended up never getting released anyway.
Rules, an adaptation of American Psycho novelist Bret Easton Ellis's story of college debauchery, featured Shannyn Sossamon as a virgin saving herself for her boyfriend until he returns from travelling overseas. Victor, the boyfriend, made no such commitment and instead spends his travels sleeping his way around Europe.
Victor is an incidental character in the movie and his European sex tour is summed up in a brief montage. So you'd think Avary wouldn't bother expending much effort on that part of the story.
What Avary did, though, was to travel, self-funded, around Europe with actor Kip Pardue. Pardue stayed in character as Victor for a whirlwind DIY shoot across London, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Venice and Rome in which Avary captured 70 hours of video footage, from which Rules Of Attraction's short montage was assembled.
Meanwhile, Avary also assembled those reams of footage into another movie called Glitterati, inspired by Ellis' novel Glamorama, a Zoolander-esque story of Victor as a vapid male model-turned-terrorist.
Glitterati was announced as a companion piece to Rules Of Attraction, but never made it to release.
Described by Avary later as "ethically questionable", Glitterati's lack of public screenings is probably down to the fact that it is made up of actual footage of Pardue in-character behaving like a pick-up artist to seduce real women. That Rules Of Attraction itself kind of bombed didn't help either.