Eliot Ness hunts a killer, Nicolas Cage plays the Man of Steel and Marilyn Monroe is The Girl in Pink Tights in films that were never released. A writer, a producer and a film expert tell the movies’ hidden histories
Warner Bros’s previously announced Batgirl film is the latest big-budget project that will never see the light of day, despite being in post-production, with shooting already completed. Hollywood is brutal – for every film released there are numerous others that never make it to the big screen. These are projects in which the studios invest millions – only for them to be spurned at the script stage, trapped in that infamous “development hell”, or even halted mid-production. Part of the appeal of abandoned films is that we can build them up in our heads to be whatever we want. But perhaps the most interesting element of these ghost films is the way many continue to haunt cinema: affecting the choices actors and directors go on to make, changing the types of stories that get funding and even, in some cases, weakening long-established studios. Here, experts give us the inside stories on three films with surprising legacies – despite never having been made …
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