12 Highly-Anticipated Movies That Are Never Getting Made

12 hot Hollywood projects that can't seem to get off the ground.

We all know how disappointing it is when we get super-excited about a film, only for production to stall, relations break down between the crew and studio, and the film to languish in a Schrödinger's cat-esque state of being neither alive or dead. That the studios don't even have the good graces to accept defeat and let salivating fans know the outcome half the time is equally frustrating, and the news will only flush down the pipe some time later when someone associated with the production can be bothered to switch their computer on. Here are 12 films that are suffering from just such issues, and so we expect they'll never see the light of day. Now watch as production resumes on half these projects tomorrow...

1. Y: The Last Man

Y: The Last Man is a relatively popular comic book series, having spanned over five years and 60 issues, and with its dark, dystopic plot which follows the one remaining man on Earth - after every other male is killed by what appears to be a plague of some kind - seems like the sort of material that would be ripe for the Hollywood treatment. Before the comic had even finished its run, New Line Cinema acquired the rights for a film adaptation, appointing D.J. Caruso (Disturbia, Eagle Eye) as director, and David S. Goyer (who helped wrangle the story for Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy) as producer. Initially planned to be filmed in 2008, Caruso later claimed that the 60 comics could not be reasonably condensed into one film, and so they would instead be split into a prospective trilogy of films. Frequent lead in Caruso's films Shia LaBeouf was earmarked for the role - despite the actor initially claiming that it was too similar to his Transformers character - yet when Caruso and New Line could not agree on a trajectory for the series (for the studio favoured a standalone film over a proposed trilogy), the director decided to make the abominable I Am Number Four instead. After Caruso walked, the notion of a TV series was bandied around, and the last update we had on the project was in March 2012, where it was reported that writers Matthew Federman and Stephen Scaia were being signed to adapt the comic series.
 
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Frequently sleep-deprived film addict and video game obsessive who spends more time than is healthy in darkened London screening rooms. Follow his twitter on @ShaunMunroFilm or e-mail him at shaneo632 [at] gmail.com.