10 Insane Movies That Were Almost Made

8. The Train

Ridley Scott
2016 Getty Images

The Movie: From the minds of H.R. Giger and Ridley Scott, The Train was a sci-fi horror project described as a mixture of Blade Runner and Alien, the latter of which the two filmmakers had previously collaborated on.

The project - once known as Dead Reckoning - was set in a dystopian Los Angeles, and would've featured a genetically-altered monster as it terrorised passengers on an underground train. Based on this rough plot outline alone, Giger began drawing up some concepts for The Train's futuristic look, including imagining the titular vehicle as a sentient bio-mechanical creature with a skull-shaped head.

Why It Wasn't Made: As time went on and The Train never fully left the station, Scott began working on other projects (like Thelma and Louise) and the movie soon became stagnant. The script was later rewritten, and was even close to filming, with Independence Day's Roland Emmerich attached to direct - and Sly Stallone as the lead - but this never worked out either.

Part of the problem was that nobody could figure out exactly what the creature should look like, or what its abilities should be. With a high budget and continuous development problems, The Train simply faded away over time.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!