4. The Tourist
The Tourist is a film you might have never heard of. It has been stuck in development Hell since 1980 and the rights are held by Universal, who don't seem to be kind with projects like this. This bizarre story follows Grace Ripley, an alien stuck on earth that finds out about a form to get back to her home planet. However, a group of aliens that hang out on a place known as The Corridor don't want that to happen, and they'll stop at nothing to prevent our heroine from leaving the planet and uncovering the dark secrets behind The Corridor. With a very dark and complex script charged with sex, violence, and action, this would have been a great experiment and probably one of the most discussed movies of the time.
So, what happened? As you could have imagined after reading the first part of this entry, this film was "controversial" to say the least among studio executives. The dark and complex story was accompanied by a non-linear structure that wasn't seen at the time. The script had its share of rewrites before the project was cancelled. Sadly, Universal still has the rights to the film, and every now and then they renew them, even though they don't have plans to actually do the film. This kind of thing really pisses me off; projects like this have great potential to become something extraordinary, yet the studios not only won't let the project move forward, they won't let another studio try to tell the story. For this kind of thing, the word "douchebag" is the only appropriate insult.