Every Cancelled John Carpenter Film We NEVER Got To See

In 1977, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Peter Benchley's Jaws blew critics away, broke all box office records, and gave viewers across the world a collective phobia of going into the water.

Riding the waves of Jaws' monstrous success, Benchley put together a similar novel called The Beast, which centres around a man-killing squid. Almost immediately after The Beast was published, Carpenter was attached to the film adaptation.

However, the project quickly stalled, primarily due to practical and industrial limitations. Realistically depicting a 40ft mollusc interacting with boats, harbours, and human characters posed enormous technical challenges, especially since digital effects were in their infancy at the time. The required combination of large-scale animatronics and optical effects for the colossal cephalopod threatened to push the budget well beyond what studios were willing to risk on an aquatic blockbuster not named Jaws. Carpenter recognised he was on a sinking ship and thus, parted ways. 

The Beast was later adapted as a two-part mini-series in 1996, but was poorly received and paled in comparison to what Carpenter could've crafted if his vision hadn't been compromised.