It’s a nice fantasy to think that rather than the bilge water being churned out by Hollywood every year, there are these fantastic unmade movies that would be so much better. “How can they produce Crummy Movie Part 2 and leave Great Unmade Movie Starring Tom Hanks languishing in development” is the whining that is most often heard. The current whiners are the folks over at Premiere who have come up with a list of 20 movies that are in developmental hell but need to get made.
The list includes adaptations of popular books like “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “A Heatbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” recycled “Saturday Night Live” skits, video game adaptations, biopics, and comic book movies among others. Big name directors like Peter Jackson, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee are mentioned and Tom Hanks and Tom Cruise seem to be attached to every other project. The most interesting descriptions are an Aardman Animation stop motion film about the turtle and the hare race, in documentary form and a movie about nutball Phil Spector starring Tom Cruise and directed by Cameron Crowe.
The problem, of course, is that the directors, actors, and studios can only make so many movies a year. It’s nice to think that a great movie starring Tom Hanks and directed by Spike Lee will replace the latest piece of junk but it will just replace a movie with similar money, pedigree, and star power. Of the 20 movies listed, probably half wouldn’t be any good and the overall quality of movies wouldn’t increase. Do we really need a movie about that Dieter character Mike Myers did 10 years ago? How about Wonder Woman starring Sandra Bullock; that’s going to something better than what we are getting? Stop the whining and enjoy what we got, it’s not going to get any better with a Ben Affleck starring as a gay ballplayer.
http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Developmental-Hell-List-Rights-Wrongs-5454.html
