Tedium - When Movies Get Canned 🎥

Around 70 hours of footage was filmed for this single Rules of Attraction scene, and that footage was later edited into a feature-length movie.

1. Glitterati

Year filmed: 2001 (no intended release date)

Released after the fact? Not unless you personally know Roger Avary

As you may or may not know about Bret Easton Ellis, he has a cult audience around his writing and the film adaptations of said writing. And while American Psycho is seen as something of a modern cinematic classic, he traditionally has not had a lot of luck getting critical praise for either adaptations of his work or films he actually wrote. (See: The Canyons.)

Unlike some of the more controversial works inspired by his writing, The Rules of Attraction sort of came and went without a lot of fanfare, despite having perhaps one of the most hilariously explicit movie posters ever produced (you’ve been warned).

But while the the film didn’t do a lot, its director, Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary, did produce a lot of footage, much of it based around a segment when Victor (Kip Pardue) took a trip to Europe. Avary filmed enough to make a second film, which was called Glitterati. Avary intended the work to be a bridge between Attraction and another work of Ellis’ he hoped to film, Glamorama. But Avary never got to film that adaptation, and Glitterati never saw release.

What happened? Ellis, in a 2009 interview with The A.V. Club, said that the Europe film was basically unscreenable because they never got the rights from many of the people involved. As he put it:

I think it’ll be a long time before they can show this movie. I think Kip Pardue would be okay with it, maybe. But it’s basically about 90 minutes of him in character actually seducing women throughout Europe. Much of this was shot late at night, and people didn’t care. I just don’t know what you could do with it. You can’t really show this movie in public.

So basically, the hard part of turning partying into a movie is the hangover of getting everyone’s rights.

This tweet recently turned 10.

3. Prankstar

Year of intended release: 2010

Released after the fact? No

In some ways, I feel bad for Tom Green. He invented a schtick that many used as a template then put their own twists on. The Jackass guys, who have seen far more cinematic and small-screen success than Green has, are the obvious example of this, but you can even see the roots of what Green did in the work of the more reserved but equally inventive Nathan Fielder, who is currently having a pop-culture moment in the form of his bizarre HBO show The Rehearsal.

(I guess one positive for Green is that his cinematic nadir, Freddy Got Fingered, has seen something of a critical reassessment in recent years.)

Prankstar, which was announced by Green as being finished in 2010, has seen little interest in actually being released by major studios despite the hushed way Green spoke of it after finishing the film.

“It’s a very unconventional film,” Green told the Miami New Times in 2010. “It’s just insane. The craziest thing I’ve ever done. And it’s top secret. It’ll come out later this year.”

It’s now 2022, and it’s yet to be released. Maybe Warner Bros. Discovery can release it now that they’re not doing Batgirl.

5. Hippie Hippie Shake

Year of intended release: 2010

Released after the fact? No

In 2011, this film on the rise of Oz, a popular ’60s British counterculture magazine, got as close as rough cuts, but never saw a full release, despite having two bankable stars—Sienna Miller and Cillian Murphy—as its leads.

However, the film had a series of production issues, including the fact that its husband-and-wife production team, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason director Beeban Kidron and Billy Elliot screenwriter Lee Hall, left the film at some point during the production process.

What happened? Richard Neville, the author of the memoir on which the film was based, told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2010 that the film didn’t hold together very well, in his view, at least at first.

“We saw the first cut of the film—Jim, I and other Oz people—and there was a lot of disappointment,” Neville said. “We made a lot of suggestions to the producers … the final cut was very much better. It wasn’t a work of genius but it was a watchable film.”

Sienna Miller, who was interviewed about the film by Yahoo! Movies in 2017, said she wasn’t even sure what happened with the movie.

“I don’t think we’ll see it at this point. I never really heard what happened,” Miller said. “I did see a rough cut of it and it was a pretty beautiful film, but there was some legal something or other. I don’t know.”

Something really unfortunate happened to this film. (Immo Wegmann/Unsplash)

7. In God’s Hands

Year of intended release: 2001

Released after the fact? Not possible, due to negative damage

About a decade ago, while I was randomly wandering around D.C., I walked into a Whole Foods, and saw someone pass by me who looked kind of like Maggie Gyllenhaal. I thought nothing of it, until I saw a guy who looked like Peter Sarsgaard walk out right behind her. (I spotted a lot of random celebrities walking around D.C. during this period, including the incredibly tall Conan O’Brien, but they were the first.)

Good on them that they feel like they can wander around 14th Street in D.C., a great neighborhood, like it’s no big thing. But it turns out that an unreleased film is what brought the two actors together, who married in 2009. The movie, In God’s Hands, sadly fell apart through none of the drama of lawsuits or rights issues or anything like that.

Rather, the negatives were rendered unusable, which meant that the work they put in on the film was all for naught. Lodge Kerrigan, the director, was obviously quite disappointed about that.

“It is a very devastating thing to happen, and the most devastating thing for me was how so many individuals turned their back on it, and ran for cover,” Kerrigan fold IndieWire in 2005. “That was really upsetting.”

On the plus side, the movie wasn’t a financial loss thanks to insurance. And while Kerrigan lost an entire film, he had the support of one of the most influential directors in Hollywood at the time, Steven Soderbergh, who helped him line up his next film. And it brought together what might be one of Hollywood’s most durable couples. So all in all, it could have been a lot worse.

9. Empires of the Deep

Year of intended release: 2010

Released after the fact? No, there’s still hope it might come out

Epic films tend to be rife with risks, and even those who can do the format well, like James Cameron, are known to struggle to do it more than once.

But an unknown doing it? Yeah, that’s a problem. But when you have seemingly unlimited pockets and a dream, as Chinese real estate tycoon Jon Jiang did, it might seem doable. Jiang’s efforts, which brought in directors who had done high-budget films in the past but who struggled to actually successfully work with Jiang for more than a few months, led to budget overruns and on-set challenges.

As Gizmodo noted in 2014, there was ample evidence of on-set problems and mistreatment of actors and animals alike, meaning that the film was not only totally unrealistic and unworkable, but a horrible working experience for its crew.

“Wealthy and passionate he might have been, Jon Jiang did not have the connections or the talent to create something on the same level,” a Slashfilm piece from earlier this year recalled. “Unwilling to be defeated, he proceeded to sacrifice the careers of his cast and crew, who hoped for the best even in the midst of a hellish shoot, on that altar.”

You know it’s bad when you started developing a movie before the first Avatar was released, and it’s likely the second Avatar will be out before it ever hits a theater.

There’s always a chance something might happen to derail the release of your movie despite the film otherwise being complete.

The September 11, 2001 attacks led to a number of problems for various movies that were to see release during that period, requiring delays in release and reshoots. (Perhaps the most famous film affected by the attacks was Gangs of New York.)

And just recently, Guy Ritchie’s Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre, a Jason Statham vehicle which was to be released earlier this year, was pulled off the schedule largely because the plot features a lot of Ukrainian gangsters—which didn’t provide the best optics during a war.

No creation is above potential delays or failure, even the good ones. Even ones that include Bill Murray in 1984, or that feature Leonardo DiCaprio. Your negatives could get damaged somehow, screwing your production, or you can simply get caught in the middle of a merger, like Batgirl did.

Anything is possible with a film production. After all, risk is involved, no matter who’s signing the check.

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