8 Cancelled Movies We Secretly Still Want To See

The Unmade Movie: George Lucas couldn’t think of a new MacGuffin for a fourth Indiana Jones after The Last Crusade, so he and Spielberg decided to call it quits on the series. And then it hit him: aliens.

It took him the better part of two decades to convince the director and Harrison Ford this was an idea worth pursuing, but in that time he went through various story treatments. The one with the most promise came in 1995, The Saucer Men From Mars, which included Area 51, a rocket sled, a nuked fridge, deadly ants and plenty of returning characters.

Why It’s Such A Shame: That’s incredibly similar to Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, right? So why is it a shame we weren’t kept away from that misery for longer? Well, because despite sharing basic elements, I don’t think The Saucer Men From Mars would have been as bad.

The big issue with Crystal Skull was the amount of time that had passed, meaning that nostalgia was the driving force and Ford was looking far too rickety to be the big hero. Making the film less than a decade after the originals means things would have fresher, less likely to get lost in reverence for Raiders (here Indy ends up with a different woman), and the style not be as formulaic, with the B-Movie sci-fi trappings (something that are only casually alluded to in the finished film) more dominant.