Based on the caliber of movies that are regularly released to theaters and streaming, it’s quite clear that producers will put out anything they think will turn a profit. Obviously, nobody sets out to make a bad movie, but at a certain point, quality no longer factors into the equation. You take what you’ve got, and you hope for the best. (See: Every movie on this list and this list and also this list.)
Given that fact, you can imagine how rare it is that movie is put into production and then just not released. Something has to go very, very wrong in order for that to happen. And not just the everyday, run of the mill bad that produced films like Gigli or Battlefield Earth or North. After all, those movies are horrible — and they were released in theaters, and on home video. You can watch any of them right now if you want to (and deeply hate yourself).
So it is highly unusual for a movie to just never come out — but it does happen. In this list, we have collected 20 examples of films that were started, developed, and sometimes filmed and even edited, but for a variety of reasons were shipped off to that warehouse from the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, never to be seen again. While we’ll probably never watch any of these movies, we can dream about what might have been; the supermen who might have lived and the Bambis that might have been killed.
Movies That Were Abandoned During Production and Never Finished
These movies were started but never completed or released for a variety of reasons.
READ MORE: 20 Actors Who Quit Movies In the Middle of Production
Huge Hits That Initially Flopped in Theaters
These movies prove that sometimes word-of-mouth hype or a couple decades of reclamation can turn a flop into a runaway hit.