12 Cancelled Sci-Fi Moves We Wish We Could Have Seen

Human-velociraptor super soldiers! Batman Vs Godzilla! A Transformers sequel which made sense!

By Cathal Gunning /

There’s nothing like picking through the many projects left languishing in development hell and looking for gems among the countless flicks which never came to fruition.

Advertisement

Sure, there are always a few near misses we’re glad the multiplexes weren’t subjected to, but whether it’s Quentin Tarantino’s desire to script Silver Surfer or Guillermo del Toro’s longstanding wish to adapt H.P Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, there is a great number of potentially incredible movies which we never had the chance to see and never will.

As a genre science fiction in particular is a rich breeding ground for these unfulfilled filmic promises, given the fact that the lofty budgets which are required to realize ambitious visions are often sums that most studios are reluctant to pony up.

So whether they were cancelled were before the long process of pre-production even began or almost came to be but were lost to overzealous studio interference just before shooting would have started, here are the sci-fi flicks we wish we could have seen for ourselves.

12. Stanley Kubrick's A.I: Artificial Intelligence

Iconic director Stanley Kubrick had delved into the world of sci-fi via satires like A Clockwork Orange and Dr Strangelove before he began work on what could have been his final film, A.I: Artificial Intelligence. But the director’s best known foray into the genre was the psychedelic 2001: A Space Odyssey, a mediation on existentialism and transcendentalism which went on to spawn entire subgenre of trippy sci-fi in the decades that followed.

Advertisement

Despite this impressive pedigree, Kubrick could never get a handle on the short story he acquired rights for in the early seventies, Brian Aldiss’s seminal tale of artificial intelligence “Supertoys Last All Summer Long”.

Eventually after decades spent workshopping the project, Kubrick abandoned it to fellow auteur Steven Spielberg, who produced a 2001 sentimental over-budgeted family drama from the material. It’s by no means an awful film, but watching Spielberg’s Kubrick-dedicated version leaves the viewer wishing we could see what The Shining director would have produced from the source story.

Advertisement