6. Rendezvous With Rama
Arthur C. Clarke has already had one of his bestselling novels adapted into perhaps the greatest science fiction movie of all time, Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. A movie which broke new grounds in on-screen effects and scope, it redefined the genre and made it respectable for perhaps the first time in cinema history. Clarke's 1972 novel Rendezvous with Rama might not have the same philosophical scope and ambition of 2001, which sought to explore both the origins of mankind and our ascending path of consciousness as we evolve as a species, but it certainly has the potential for being every bit as visually groundbreaking as Kubrick's earlier Clarke adaptation. Telling the story of the arrival in the solar system of a huge cylindrical alien starship and mankind's attempt to make contact, it is a story of such epic proportions that only an equally gargantuan budget and big names would give it a chance of succeeding as a movie. Morgan Freeman and director David Fincher are certainly names with enough clout to draw in a sufficient budget, and both have been linked to a big screen adaptation since the early 2000s - Freeman was even happy to use his own production company, Revelations Entertainment, to get the project off the ground. But without a decent script to work from Rendezvous with Rama soon found itself in development hell, and while Freeman reaffirmed in 2012 that "we are going to make that movie" nothing concrete has yet to be announced. It's a rendezvous which will have to wait a little while longer.