No film can ever hold as much intrigue as the cancelled project, that fabled, elusive “what if?” built up in press events and promo images, only to fall apart and become part of cinema’s historical refuse pile. And there is no genre more given to this phenomenon than science fiction. There are sci-fi movies that were discarded by studios decades ago that still manage to cling on to an undead sort of cultural relevance — a fascination among fans that won’t let them truly disappear.
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Today, we’re looking at some of the most overhyped, widely discussed, heavily promoted, but ultimately never-to-be sci-fi films. It’s a collection that undeniably sparks imagination, making us wonder what might have been had studio money lined up in the right way, or rights moved into the proper hands a little sooner, or a big star volunteered to join up.
We’ll never know exactly what these movies would have looked like, but it’s still fun to consider how they could have panned out.
Patty Jenkins’ Rogue Squadron
Because I love Star Wars an unreasonable amount, we’re starting this list off with a Star Wars movie. To be honest, there could have been any number of projects filling this spot, from the original “Episode IX” concept, “Duel of the Fates,” to that Boba Fett movie (which became a show), or that Obi-Wan movie (which became a show), or that Darth Maul movie (which is becoming a show), or the Rian Johnson trilogy that never happened, or that time the “Game of Thrones” guys were going to do Star Wars…
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You get it. Disney has announced and subsequently canceled a lot of Star Wars movies. But none felt as exciting or fully formed as Patty Jenkins’ “Rogue Squadron.” Coming hot off “Wonder Woman” making her a household name, Jenkins looked like a solid candidate to helm a movie about space fighter pilots. The official synopsis from Lucasfilm released in December 2020 read, “The story will introduce a new generation of starfighter pilots as they earn their wings and risk their lives in a boundary-pushing, high-speed thrill-ride, and move the saga into the future era of the galaxy.”
It was a promising concept, especially considering how many incredible novels, comics, and video games have followed Star Wars’ Rogue Squadron over the years. But delay after delay pushed the film into limbo, and then off of Disney’s official release calendar. In 2024, Jenkins claimed that she was still working on the project with Lucasfilm in some capacity. But given that Shawn Levy and Ryan Gosling’s upcoming Star Wars film just got the official title of “Starfighter,” I’d say the odds aren’t looking too good.
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The District 9 sequel that never was
You could make a whole canceled cinematic universe out of the Neill Blomkamp projects that never got made. That’s not meant as a condemnation of the director, who burst onto the scene in 2009 with the groundbreaking sci-fi drama/fictional documentary film “District 9.” The film tells the story of an alien group that arrives on Earth in a damaged spacecraft, only to be funneled into a kind of alien ghetto in South Africa. It’s a can’t-miss-it stand-in for actual apartheid, but the obvious metaphor doesn’t stop the film from being deeply resonant. “District 9” also earned high praise for its unique narrative style and striking aesthetics, and it seemed inevitable that a sequel would follow.
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Blomkamp discussed the possibility of a second “District 9” film very soon after the first movie was released, but despite fan fervor, it never materialized. After more than a decade of referencing the project in interviews and saying how much he still wanted to do it, Blomkamp finally declared the film was in development in 2021, officially calling it “District 10.” Over the next couple years, though, it faded once again. In August 2023, Blomkamp told The Hollywood Reporter that the project had been shelved yet again.
“I don’t know if it’s getting made or not,” the director said. “I don’t know if I even want to make that right now, but at some point down the line, it’ll probably get made.”
Neill Blomkamp’s Alien 5
Going from Blomkamp project to Blomkamp project, the next item on our list is the director’s planned “Alien” sequel that just never got off the ground. The project was announced in 2015 when the director leaked some concept art related to the project. He claimed to be in discussions with Sigourney Weaver about returning as Ellen Ripley, and the art gave a pretty good idea of what the movie would have been about.
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In essence, the film would have ignored the events of “Alien 3” and “Alien: Resurrection” to offer a new sequel to the first two films. That meant the return of Michael Biehn’s Dwayne Hicks, who dies somewhat unceremoniously at the beginning of “Alien 3.” There would have been corporate corruption, secret science facilities, and some big action sequences, pulling a bit more from James Cameron’s military sci-fi jaunt in the franchise than the original horror vibes of the first film.
In the end, Ridley Scott himself returned to the series and made 2017’s “Alien: Covenant,” continuing the story he started in “Prometheus.” Blomkamp fans can still track down the “Alien 5” concept art for a taste of what might have been.
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The Halo movie
There is perhaps no film of the 21st century that received more press, speculation, and build-up, only to be delayed, put in limbo, canceled, turned into a streaming series, and then canceled again, than the Halo movie. Okay, when you put in that many specifics, there aren’t really any other contenders, but I think you get my point.
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You could not be on a video game message board in the mid-2000s without hearing about the Halo movie — how Peter Jackson was going to produce it, how Alex Garland was already penning a script, how it was going to break the longstanding video game movie curse. Guillermo del Toro was reportedly in talks to direct, and then, in his third appearance on this list, Neill Blomkamp. In later iterations, Steven Spielberg’s name was bandied about. Even years after the initial pitch evaporated, new incarnations of the “Halo” movie remained the subject of seemingly constant rumors.
Unlike the other movies on this list, “Halo” did ultimately happen in some form, it just wasn’t the big-screen tour de force that fans may have been expecting. Instead, the project morphed into a high-budget streaming original on Paramount+, which ran for two years before getting the chop. Despite a decent amount of fan outcry about Master Chief’s characterization and storyline changes to the games, the show is pretty solid. It may have been cut off before fully reaching its potential, but if you’re a fan of the franchise who can cordon off room for a different take on things, or you’re just someone who enjoys pulpy military sci-fi, the “Halo” show is worth a watch.
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Quentin Tarantino’s Star Trek movie
The Star Trek movie that Quentin Tarantino never made is both the most fascinating “what if?” on this list and the most obviously unmakeable. The acclaimed director first discussed his interest in the project in 2017, pitching an angle that would essentially adapt the “Original Series” episode “A Piece of the Action,” which is set on a planet that mirrors Depression-era American mob land. That certainly sounds like a natural fit for the guy who made “Pulp Fiction,” but at the same time, it’s such a limiting context for a theatrical “Star Trek” film that it’s not surprising Paramount chose to go in different directions after the Chris Pine Trek films finished up.
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There was also the issue of rating. According to screenwriter Mark L. Smith, who worked with Tarantino on the tentative project, the movie would have been very much in the style of his past work, right down to the violence and language. “I think his vision was just to go hard,” Smith told Collider in 2023. “It was a hard R. It was going to be some ‘Pulp Fiction’ violence. Not a lot of the language, we saved a couple things for just special characters to kind of drop that into the Star Trek world, but it was just really the edginess and the kind of that Tarantino flair, man, that he was bringing to it.”
In the end, according to Smith, it wasn’t a clash of styles that pushed Tarantino away from the idea, but the same thing that’s made him give up on various projects over the years — his honestly pretentious obsession with creating a perfect, 10-film oeuvre. “I remember we were talking, and he goes, ‘If I can just wrap my head around the idea that Star Trek could be my last movie, the last thing I ever do. Is this how I want to end it?'” Smith told Collider. Maybe ol’ Quentin could learn a thing or two from the Ridley Scotts of the world.
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Gore Verbinski’s BioShock
While a less publicized video game adaptation than the “Halo” movie, the rumored “BioShock” film of the late 2000s also got a lot of attention before being shut down. The video game remains one of the most influential and critically acclaimed of the 21st century, pushing the boundaries at the time (2007) of environmental storytelling and overall narrative ambition in the medium. (It also gave us the longstanding plague of the video game audio log, but that’s beside the point.)
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What’s more relevant is that in 2008, the film was already official, with a deal between games publisher Take-Two Interactive and Universal Pictures. “Pirates of the Caribbean” alum Gore Verbinski would direct — a solid choice given that “BioShock” takes place in an underwater city — and the script was being written by “Gladiator” and “Skyfall” scribe John Logan.
That strong creative team is part of why the dissolution of the project was so disappointing. Verbinski dipped out, and studio interest grew lukewarm, according to reports. In 2013, game director Ken Levine declared the film officially dead. And yet, more than a decade later, there is hope for fans, with news over the last couple years of Netflix possibly taking another stab at the idea of a “BioShock” movie.
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Jodorowsky’s Dune
It’s only right to end this list with the most talked-about canceled science fiction film of all time: Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Dune” adaptation. Much has already been written on the topic over the 50 years since the project started and stopped. There’s a whole documentary about it, tons of concept art, interviews, and retrospectives on the influence of the unmade film.
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Still, it’s worth mentioning again on a list like this one. The project was so ambitious and incredibly larger-than-life, with names like Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, and Orson Welles attached to star. The special effects would have been a titanic undertaking for the time, and the script, to hear “Dune” author Frank Herbert tell it, wouldn’t have fit in a trilogy of films, let alone one.
Instead of Jodorowsky’s “Dune,” we got the 1984 David Lynch adaptation, and a few decades later, the massively successful Denis Villeneuve films. So it all worked out for fans of the book, but not quite on the timeline, or in the bombastic, fantastical style, that had originally been planned.
