8 Movies That Escaped Development Hell (And Weren't Worth The Wait)

Poor John Carter. All he wanted to do was live on Mars and entertain the masses with his big blockbuster dreams, but the box office was not kind to him in any conceivable way. The John Carter movie is one of the biggest flops of this generation, which is surely punishment enough - or so you'd think, until you learn it was a distant passion project that has been banded around since the 1930s before finally releasing in 2012.

That's over 80 years of development that culminated in over $200 million of losses for production company Disney. Ouch.

As for its time down below, John Carpenter is based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel A Princess of Mars. This was scoped by Looney Toons' director Robert Clampett in 1931 to be turned into an animated feature, meaning it could have been America's first cartoon movie in place of Disney's Snow White had everything come to fruition. In a rather prophetic sign however, test audiences didn't respond well and the idea was scrapped.

Since then, it passed hands between 50s stop-motion concepts to 80s Star Wars rip offs before finally settling curiously with a director that had never been proven in live-action fare, Andrew Stanton. John Carter isn't a bad movie at all, but it is one born from the genre-defining work of a writer that has since been ripped off mercilessly in every science-fiction work since, meaning critics found it derivative despite being 8 decades in the making.

Again, ouch.