10 Movie Passion Projects That Will Never Get Made

9. Robert Rodriguez's Barbarella

There are very few films that Robert Rodriguez dreams up and doesn't end up producing. Machete started off as a fake trailer in his Grindhouse double-feature with Quentin Tarantino, and he's currently working on the third entry in that trilogy. There are four Spy Kids films. This is the man who thought Shark Boy And Lava Girl was a project worth making. Which is why it's so surprising that this one didn't get off the ground. For a brief period in the mid-noughties Rose McGowan was his muse, immediately following the time she played a stripper with a machine gun for a leg in Planet Terror, his half of Grindhouse. So she was his first pick to star in a remake of Barberella, the cult French sci-fi sex comedy starring Jane Fonda based on the comic of the same name. Universal eventually passed, on the basis of the high budget and lack of confidence in McGowan as a leading woman. He shopped it around to other studios, but nothing has come of it.