10 Movies That Spent Decades In Development Hell

Much like the previously-mentioned Freddy vs Jason, Alien vs Predator was a long time coming. In both satisfying fan appetite for the crossover and rebooting two popular franchises that they had no other ideas for, 20th Century Fox seemed to be killing two highly-profitable birds with one stone.

Until it turned out that AvP wasn't very good, the sequel was even worse, and both the Xenomorphs and Yautja were both rebooted the the following decade anyway.

Originating in the 1989 comic book of the same name and explicitly hinted at in the following year's Predator 2, the crossover movie was initially given the green-light as early as 1991 but didn't really gain much traction with the studio until ten years later when everyone had generally accepted that both franchises were dead in the water.

It would be incredibly difficult for any filmmaker to come anywhere close to matching Ridley Scott, James Cameron or John McTiernan's work on the respective franchises, but video game movie specialist Paul W.S. Anderson was hardly the name to inspire confidence in the fan base, given his track record for making shoddy genre movies and the fact that the entire project had been watered down before a single frame had been shot due to the studio's insistence on a PG-13 rating.

Even after spending decades in development, this is the best they could come up with? Cameron certainly had a point when he said that a crossover movie would 'kill the validity of the franchise'. As for Ridley Scott? When asked if he had even bothered to watch Alien vs. Predator, he laughed.