10 Guillermo Del Toro Movies That Are Never Going To Happen

2. Pinocchio

What is it? In a marriage made in heaven, Del Toro signed up in 2008 to direct a Jim Henson Company stop motion version of Carlo Collodi's Victorian fairytale about the moral dilemmas of a puppet who wants to be a real boy, all accompanied by music from goth rocker and The Proposition scripter Nick Cave (whose Red Right Hand made the perfect accompaniment to Del Toro's Hellboy), animation direction from Fantastic Mr Fox's Mark Gustafson and voice acting from Tom Waits as Gepetto. A screenplay was written with Mimic, Don't Be Afraid Of The Dark and Crimson Peak collaborator Matthew Robbins that Del Toro described as "more faithful to the take that Collodi wrote" and "more surreal and slightly darker than what we've seen before." Concept art was released with an expressionistic Henry Selick style to the animated figures and pre-production begun through ShadowMachine, makers of Robot Chicken, with an eye on a 2014 release. Why won't it happen? Stop motion, for all the critical kudos it gets, is simply too expensive and makes too little money for studios to back it. In 2013 Gris Grimly, maker of the short film Cannibal Flesh Riot and a further collaborator on Del Toro's Pinocchio, remarked that "it appears that this is not the right time for such a superior adventurous flick," pointing to the recent box office struggles of the similarly styled Frankenweenie and ParaNorman. In April 2015, Disney announced their own plans to remake Pinocchio to add to their recent raft of live action adaptations of their animated classics (Del Toro himself was even briefly tapped up to direct the Emma Watson Beauty And The Beast, now coming from Bill Condon). Likely to be a more mainstream, crowdpleasing effort, it is easy to see how this will trump Del Toro's version in getting to cinemas first and finding a much wider audience.