Overhyped Superhero Movies That Never Happened

When you really think about it, it's a downright miracle that any movies ever get made at all. To make a film is a long, arduous, tedious process that — from the time the first draft of a script is written to the day a final cut with everything in place hits thousands of movie screens — can take years. Any major movie involves hundreds of hard-working crew members, a (hopefully visionary) director, and talented actors, all of them playing with tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars offered up by a major motion picture studio that thinks the investment is worth it because the script (or the property it's based on) is a prediction of blockbuster status and box office lucre. 

Of course, the bigger a film gets, the more that can go wrong. And since movies based on superheroes, particularly comic book superheroes, are among the biggest movies made today, they harbor the potential for disaster at every turn. In fact, so much has gone wrong for some superhero films — ones that were announced, developed, and had even entered production — that they were never completed. And it's even worse since millions of fans were looking forward to these high-profile movies ... movies that never ended up soaring into theaters. From Marvel fare to DC flicks, here's a look back at some of the most overhyped superhero movies that never happened.

At the same time that a Hulk-inspired contracting frenzy led Marvel to ink a deal with Universal to make a never-produced film about Namor the Sub-Mariner, the two entertainment behemoths announced another movie based on Prime, a relatively obscure comic book character dating back to the early 1990s. "Prime is a complete departure from the standard superhero story," Marvel Studios CEO Avi Arad said (via CBR). "With this film, we are developing what we think will be Marvel's first super hero action-comedy." 

Marvel big shots Kevin Feige and Stan Lee were cited as executive producers, while Arad, alongside Chuck Gordon, was announced to actively produce the film, which would tell an extremely Shazam-like tale of a teenager who, as the result of a government experiment, could instantly turn into an adult who's also a superhero. Screenwriting duo Don Calame and Chris Conroy were responsible for the cheeky, humorous script, even though they had just one feature film credit between them, the 2001 Disney Channel Original Movie Hounded. Seeing as how no progress has been made on this film in nearly two decades, the time for Prime has likely passed.

After the X-Men and the Avengers, it seemed like the next big thing about a large group of Marvel Comics characters with unique abilities was destined to be Inhumans. Marvel itself whetted the public's appetite for the slightly lesser-known team — including Medusa, Black Bolt, Crystal, Karnak, and Maximus — of X-Men-like individuals who develop strange superpowers after receiving a hefty dose of alien DNA. First, the comics giant introduced the characters on ABC's popular Marvel Cinematic Universe series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and they also announced plans to spin them off into an Inhumans movie. At a Marvel media event in 2014, boss Kevin Feige said that Inhumans would mark the 20th MCU entry, comprise a huge part of the studio's "Phase 3" slate of films, and hit theaters on November 2, 2018.

Then it was delayed until summer 2019. And then Marvel indefinitely delayed the project altogether. The reason? When Marvel made a deal with Spider-Man rights-holder Sony to include the arachnid-guy in the MCU, it changed its plans to focus on incorporating that very important character. That also meant no longer bothering with second-tier stuff like Inhumans, which finally turned into a widely panned, quickly canceled ABC television series.

Deadline reported in late 2018 that Fox had hired Julius Avery, director of the horror movie Overlord, to helm a new, big-budget film version of Flash Gordon. A popular comic strip in the early 20th century, it centered on the exploits of muscular American athlete Flash Gordon who heads to space to fight the evil Ming the Merciless. The last time it had appeared on the big screen was as a campy, poorly budgeted movie in 1980 starring Sam J. Jones as Flash and featuring a soundtrack by Queen. 

After Kingsman filmmaker Matthew Vaughn opted to produce but not direct the movie, Fox accepted a story pitch from Avery, a lifelong fan of the Flash Gordon comic strip. That movie ultimately fell apart, but shortly after Disney acquired Fox (in a $71.3 billion deal) in 2019, Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi was announced as the new guy in charge of the long-gestating Flash Gordon revival, which had been rejiggered to be an animated feature. Not more than a few weeks later, however, Flash Gordon appeared on a long list of projects in various states of pre-production that Disney inherited from Fox ... which it had summarily cancelled. Ming isn't the only one who can be merciless, it would seem.

The 21st-century superhero film craze began in earnest in 2002, with director Sam Raimi's Spider-Man, starring Tobey Maguire as the masked, web-shooting crimefighter who could do whatever a spider does. When Raimi's first Spider-venture raked in an American box office take of $403 million, Spider-Man 2 naturally followed in 2004, amassing a tally that amounted to almost as much. And in turn, the sequel was followed by 2007's overstuffed Spider-Man 3, with its emo Peter Parker and too many villains. 

Despite so-so reviews, it still earned more money than both previous Spider-Man movies, meaning Sony was very justified in ordering up Spider-Man 4 and Spider-Man 5. The studio was even willing to pay Maguire a hefty fee to keep coming back. He stood to earn $50 million for the two movies, should they shoot back-to-back. Respected actors John Malkovich and Anne Hathaway were looking to join the franchise as villain Vulture and love interest Felicia Hardy, respectively, and the crew planned to start filming the first of the two sequels in March 2010, with the end results scheduled to reach theaters in May 2011. 

But in January 2010, just before cameras were set to roll, Deadline reported that Raimi had walked away from the franchise, feeling that just over a year wasn't enough time to make a good enough movie. Sony then canceled Spider-Man 4 altogether and opted to just reboot the series with a new cast and crew for the summer of 2012.

Spider-Man debuted in print in 1962, and although the character has always been popular among readers as well as mainstream audiences, a major movie didn't come through for 40 years. However, Cannon Films almost beat Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man to theaters. The studio — known for cheap, violent action fare like American Ninja and Missing in Action — acquired the live-action rights to Spider-Man in 1985 for just $225,000, then spent years trying to get a movie together. Studio bosses and producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus evidently didn't really understand the character, and they commissioned a script about Peter Parker transforming into an eight-legged tarantula — a literal spider-man. "They thought it was like the Wolfman," Joseph Zito, the director assigned to the project, told the Los Angeles Times. 

Cannon considered and rejected ten different treatments and scripts, including one from The Terminator filmmaker James Cameron in which Spider-Man fought electrical villain Electro, and then they ultimately decided on a screenplay by Ted Newsom and John A. Brancato. It was an origin story, in which Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man and fights his former mentor, mad scientist Dr. Octopus. Cannon subsequently budgeted $20 million for the project, a large amount for an '80s movie, especially one being produced by a low-budget house like Cannon. However, a series of flops left the studio so cash-strapped that it was forced to cut the Spider-Man budget to $10 million. Recognizing that he was being set up for hilariously cheesy failure, Zito dropped out, and the production fell apart. 

Fox churned out a couple of Fantastic Four movies for Marvel in the 2000s, with a series starter and then the sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer. As the second film made significantly less than the first, Fox didn't go for the trilogy, but the studio wasn't done with the characters — as studios often tend to do in situations like this, they went ahead and announced a reboot instead. The studio hired Green Lantern co-writer Michael Green, but three years later, with the movie still not in production, Fox brought in Jeremy Slater to write and got Josh Trank (Chronicle) to direct. As for the terrific quartet, the filmmakers cast Miles Teller as stretchable Mr. Fantastic, Michael B. Jordan as the fiery Human Torch, Kate Mara as the sometimes not-there Invisible Woman, and Jamie Bell as the rock-man the Thing.

When shooting finally got underway, it was a disaster, with Trank alleging multiple instances of executive meddling. He told Polygon that his creative input was often ignored, and that Fox brought in new writers for reshoots, which the studio had planned from the outset. Scenes that Trank had wanted to film wound up un-shot, while other, completed moments didn't wind up in the theatrical cut of the movie. The summer 2015 release Fantastic Four didn't please many, and it earned just $56.1 million in North America (against a $120 million budget) and amassed an atrocious 9 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. In the wake of this cinematic debacle, Fox removed a planned Fantastic Four sequel from its 2017 release schedule.

Three things that most everyone can agree are fantastic: cowboys, ninjas, and Vikings. Most filmgoers are also of the consensus that Chris Pratt is awesome, as the likable actor has headlined blockbusters as disparate as Jurassic World, Guardians of the Galaxy, and The Lego Movie. Hollywood producers searching for a surefire hit didn't have to think too hard, then, to combine cowboys, ninjas, Vikings, and Chris Pratt via the movie Cowboy Ninja Viking. 

Based on the graphic novel of the same name by A.J. Lieberman and Riley Rossmo, the film would depict the eye-popping, mind-blowing adventures of Dr. Sebastian Ghislain, a psychotherapist who can transform into three different "Triplets," or specially-skilled secret agent personas — a cowboy, a ninja, and a Viking. Pratt signed on to star as Dr. Ghislain, with Priyanka Chopra in a supporting role. Plus, Game of Thrones director Michelle MacLaren would make her feature film debut with $65 million to play around with. 

This fun, action comedy was scheduled to hit movie theaters on June 28, 2019, but just a week after Chopra's involvement was announced, Universal pulled the movie from its schedule and ended production, delaying the film indefinitely. According to an insider, the film had script issues. Problems were apparently so bad that rumors Universal would cancel the thing had floated around for nearly half a year before the studio finally did call it all off.

In his memoir Private Parts, radio host Howard Stern recounted the story of how in 1981, he was scheduled to interview Adam West, star of 1960s TV's campy Batman series, and so he created an even sillier superhero character named Fartman. His "powers" were primarily and unsurprisingly flatulence-based, such as high-octane farts and the ability to fly by farting his way through the air. By the early 1990s, Stern was regularly doing Fartman bits on his nationally syndicated radio show, and in 1992, he took the character into the physical realm, dressing up as the character for the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards. The costume consisted of standard superhero gear, along with gigantic rubber cheeks that expelled smoky flatulence. 

Was Fartman juvenile, simplistic, and puerile? Absolutely, but the character was so popular that New Line Cinema commissioned a movie called The Adventures of Fartman, and they hired Pretty Woman screenwriter J.F. Lawton to write and direct it. The filmmaker promised a raunchy, R-rated superhero movie, full of the nudity, swearing, and farting that one would expect from a movie called Fartman starring Stern. New Line balked, however, and an executive asked Lawton to tone things down so as to secure a more commercially viable PG-13 rating. When Stern got a whiff of that news, he was so upset that he pulled out of the movie. With no Stern, there could be no Fartman.

Over the course of two decades, the X-Men series was among all of filmdom's most lucrative and expansive franchises. The dozen-plus films raked in more than $6 billion, and studio Fox explored various offshoots and sub-franchises, such as the trilogy of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Wolverine, and Logan starring Hugh Jackman as the Canadian hothead mutant with adamantium claws. The studio toyed with other Origins movies, such as one about the rise of super-villain Magneto, which was reworked into the young mutant chronicle X-Men: First Class, and they also considered a film about Remy LeBeau, aka Gambit, the Louisiana-born mutant who memorably tossed around explosive playing cards. 

The character has made occasional appearances in X-Men media. He was a main character on Fox's 1990s X-Men animated series, and he showed up for a cameo in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. When announcing a solo Gambit film, Fox ignored the actor who played the character that film, Taylor Kitsch, in favor of 21 Jump Street and G.I. Joe star Channing Tatum. A succession of high-profile directors circled the movie, too, including Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean). But somehow, Fox just couldn't get this movie off the ground, and the studio delayed its release from a couple of dates in 2019 to March 2020. After Disney acquired Fox, the House of Mouse quietly canceled the clearly doomed Gambit, and it disappeared from the release schedule altogether.