10 Movie Passion Projects That Will Never Get Made

5. So Many Michael Cimino Projects

Whatever happened to Michael Cimino? The superstar filmmaker wrote, produced and directed the iconic, award-winning Vietnam drama The Deer Hunter, before making one of the biggest box office failures in movie history €“ Heaven's Gate remains short-hand for a bloated Hollywood movie with production troubles, but it's actually a pretty good movie. Butt-numbing, but good. After that debacle, though, he struggled to get anything made. In fact he's only made four films since Heaven's Gate was released in 1980, and not many of those have been worth watching. That's despite Cimino being involved with seemingly countless projects, putting lots of work in, and then not making them. He claims to have written over fifty screenplays since then, with multiple Dostoyevsky adaptations, a musical inspired by Porgy And Bess, and the Janis Joplin biopic Pearl, which was based on a book he wrote. His passion project was a version of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead which mercifully strayed far from the book, which remains unmade.