10 Movies That Spent Decades In Development Hell

Next year's Spider-Man: Far From Home will mark the web-slinger's tenth big-screen appearance since 2002, which is a far cry from what the situation was in the 1980's and 90's, when the character had spent so long mired in development hell that many were wondering whether Spidey would even make it to the big screen at all.

Cannon films initially picked up the rights in 1985, but nobody seemed to be able to get the project off the ground after countless false starts, a situation not helped by Cannon's precarious financial position. By 1993, James Cameron had written his infamous scriptment, hoping to get the movie made under Carolco Pictures.

This inadvertently opened up a can of legal worms and led to years of messy legal battles between producer Menahem Golan, 20th Century Fox, MGM, 21st Century Films, Marvel and Carolco, which eventually drew to a close in 1996 after the latter three companies went bankrupt.

By 1999, Columbia Pictures were actively developing Spider-Man once again after trading MGM their rights to James Bond, and fifteen years after it was first announced a live-action Spider-Man movie was finally in production, with noted fan Sam Raimi at the helm.

After almost two decades stuck in the mud, Raimi's superhero blockbuster managed to live up to the sky-high expectations, earning $821.7m at the box office in the wake of universally-positive reviews, launching the comic book movie to new heights in the process and making the seventeen year wait from announcement to release more than worth the wait.