10 Unfilmable Properties That Should've Stayed That Way

4. Dune

It's incredible that the movie version of Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel Dune made it to the screen at all. A sprawling epic, it is as full of ideas as it is enigmatic, confusing and bewildering. Little wonder that it wallowed around in development hell for as long as it did before David Lynch picked up the directorial reins. It was a move the director has made clear since he wished he'd never made. Constantly finding himself squaring up against endless studio interference, Lynch ended up disowning the final product. Having been denied final cut, what emerged after months of chopping up in the editing suite is a mess of a movie; tonally imbalanced, incomprehensible in its narrative and far less spectacular looking than people had hoped for. Whether or not the book is at all filmable remains to be seen, although movie buffs have long wondered what Lynch's final cut might have been like, or indeed how it might have turned out if the master of cinematic alchemy, Alejandro Jodorowsky had managed to film his own adaptation.