20 Failed Movie Plans That'll Ruin Your Day

7. Spike Lee's Joe Louis Boxing Drama

Now, here's an idea that never came to be that may still be saved, since Spike Lee has said as recently as 2025 that he was close to making it a reality. Until then, though, his long-gestating Joe Louis boxing movie will forever be a dream. 

The idea of a Joe Louis biopic has been on Lee's mind since the early 2000s, when he proposed a film about Louis's famous bouts with rival Max Schmeling in 1936 and 1938. He initially wrote a script with boxing expert Bert Randolph Sugar, with his close friend Budd Schulberg in their corner. 

Unable to acquire funding, the biopic never took flight, and Lee - forever a prolific worker - moved onto an array of new hits, leaving it yet another in a long line of the unrealised projects from the director. 

Given Louis's influence and the political implications of his and Schmeling's fights, Lee would have been a brilliant fit for the would-be drama. But so far, it's not meant to be. And man that sucks.