10 Promising Movies Cancelled For Bizarre Reasons

4. Steven Spielberg's Experience Directing Schindler's List Derailed A Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Sequel

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Buena Vista Pictures

Robert Zemeckis' 1988 groundbreaking live-action/animated comedy Who Framed Roger Rabbit? delighted adults and children alike with its unique blend of cartoonish visuals and knowingly risqué jokes.

Unsurprisingly, given the film's breakout success, studio executives at Disney were hungry for a follow-up and set Zemeckis and executive producer Steven Spielberg to work on the project.

The proposed film, titled Roger Rabbit: The Toon Platoon, was set to be a World War 2-based prequel which explored how the film's eponymous star met his future wife Jessica Rabbit.

However, after working on his 1993 Holocaust-based masterpiece Schindler's List, Spielberg decided that he was unable to produce a film that satirised Nazis and left the project.

Although then-CEO of the Walt Disney Company Michael Eisner commissioned a script rewrite in 1997, the rising popularity of Pixar's brand of CGI animation proved to the final nail in the project's coffin.

Whilst test footage was created featuring a mix of live-action, traditional animation and CGI, Disney were left unimpressed with the results and a fully CGI animated film was deemed to be too expensive.

Despite Zemeckis' much-publicised continued interest in the project, he conceded during the press tour for his 2018 film Welcome to Marwen that the project is unlikely to ever be realised.

 
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Student, part-time freelance writer, holder of many questionable opinions and impassioned hater of Lord Of The Rings (disagree? Find me on Twitter, @JoshSandy)