9 Movies That Were Cancelled At The Last Minute

Kaleidoscope wouldn’t have had a snowball’s chance of being made in the 1960s, were it not for Alfred Hitchcock being attached to it. Unfortunately, while Hitchcock was able get the project off the ground, his prestige wasn’t enough to save it from being cancelled at the last minute.

Hitchcock had approached Universal with his idea, where a handsome body builder was a serial killer who stalked, dated, and then murdered young women. They were tetchy about the idea, but after Hitchcock agreed to a limited budget of just $1 million, he was allowed to move ahead.

David Hemmings, Robert Redford and Michael Caine were in Hitchcock’s thinking for the lead, but he was set to opt for a cheaper unknown instead. They just needed to be handsome, with the appearance of a hero for Hitchcock’s vision to work.

Once longtime Hitchcock collaborator Benn Levy wrote the script though, everything went wrong.

Universal balked at the gratuitous sex and violence in the movie, which lacked the mystery intrigue of earlier Hitchcock films like Psycho. Already uncomfortable with a murderer as the protagonist, the script pushed them over the edge and the movie was cancelled.