1. Cowboy Bebop
Few science fiction franchises lend themselves to a big budget Hollywood adaptation as well as Cowboy Bebop, Shinichiro Watanabe's incredible genre mash-up which boosted the popularity anime in the west in the late 90s just as Akira had done a decade before. Playfully gliding between comedy and tragedy, space adventure and tech noir, the Cowboy Bebop TV series both toyed with and subverted genre expectations as much as it paid them respect. Following the bounty hunting crew of the titular space ship, the universe in which it is set is a beautifully realised blend of new and old, with crumbling architecture and contemporary ballistic handguns sitting alongside Phase Difference Space Gates, all set against a backdrop of an ever-increasing gap between the rich and the poor and a proliferation of criminal syndicates. It is a lawlessness which deliberately evokes the Western, with characters of dubious morality blurring the line between protagonists and antagonists. In 2008, 20th Century Fox announced that they had signed the rights to develop a live-action remake of the series, and Keanu Reeves was lined up to play the central role of Spike Spiegel (a character so effortlessly cool that it is doubtful there's any actor alive who could truly do him justice). With the key creators of the original series on board as associate producers, it looked as if the project had good prospects for living up to the source material, but once again the problems of finding a decent script and meeting budgetary requirements reared their ugly heads. As of last year, Cowboy Bebop has gone back into development hell, with Keanu Reeves stating that, "Cowboy Bebop does not look like it is going to happen with me in it." Reeves is perhaps too old now to play Spike - perhaps Watanabe and his collaborators will find a suitable replacement and Cowboy Bebop will be resurrected. Which sci-fi films in development hell are you eager to see go into production? Why not post a comment below?