8 HUGE Movies That Were Cancelled Just Before Shooting

Making a movie is hard work. Whether its securing funding, finding the perfect cast, or simply getting a script actually finalised, getting your film onto screens around the world is something of an uphill battle. Movies get dropped like hot potatoes all the time, thrown around until they're chucked into the bin and forgotten about without ever hitting the deep friers of production - meaning filmmakers and audiences alike are left cold and hungry in the aftermath. It's a sad, sad affair.

Whether its good old fashioned studio interference or ideas too grand to ever be contained on screen, these are movies that collapsed under the weight of their own potential before we even got a sweet sniff of what they could be. You might have the cash, you might have the bodies, and you might have the most banging idea to ever grace the walls of cinema - other than Pacific Rim, of course - but it doesn't mean you'll ever actually end up shooting the footage on the cameras you've sold a kidney to hire for for the next three months.

Of course, we all know that Dune exists. David Lynch's hack at the science fiction epic is a cult movie experience like no other, absolutely batsh*t in its scope and scale - but this is nowhere near where the film started out. In fact, by comparison, Lynch's movie is both tame and short, which is really saying something when we're talking about the over 2 hour space epic that defined 80s scif-fi.

Originally, cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky was the starting point for adapting Frank Herbert's novel, wanting to make something between a religious experience and an acid trip to bless his audiences with. Collecting together names as varied and impressive as Pink Floyd, H. R. Giger, and Salvador Dalí for his cast and crew, Jodorowsky had grand ideas for this work that culminated in a 14 hour script "the size of a phone book" - work far greater than the rough $10 million budget he had to work with.

Whilst this one was less of an immediate cancellation that the other entires on this list, everything was coming together bar the footage - with Jorodowsky needing a further $5 million to continue with his work. The film rights eventually collapsed, with Dino De Laurentis buying the property instead.

It's not all bad though, as the collaborations Jorodowsky set up created some of the lasting pieces of science fiction cinema we have today though, such as Alien and Terminator, and an award-winning documentary was made in honour of the mammoth task he tried to undertake.