We explore some of Wikipedia’s oddities in our 6,244,127-week series, Wiki Wormhole.
This week’s entry: Sam Raimi’s Unrealized Projects
What it’s about: Sam Raimi has been directing movies for 40 years, from 1977’s It’s Murder! to cult-classic The Evil Dead to 1998’s emotionally wrenching thriller A Simple Plan, to his 2000s series of Spider-Man movies. But Raimi has also spent the last 40 years not directing movies, as while every director has projects that fail to pan out, Raimi has nearly 50 films that died in the planning stages.
Biggest controversy: A few of these are movies he actually did make. The first two entries on the list—The Book Of The Dead, and Relentless, ended up being reworked into Raimi’s second and third films, The Evil Dead and Crimewave. The first began as an adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft short story Within The Woods, but went through enough story changes to merit a new name. The second was a Coen Brothers script Raimi retitled after several rewrites. Likewise, Raimi and his brother Ivan wrote a script for a film called The Curse in the ’90s, which was abandoned when Raimi was tapped to direct Spider-Man, but he revisited the script and filmed it as 2009’s Drag Me To Hell.
Strangest fact: The 1990s could have been the decade of the superhero movie, had Raimi had his say. He and Marvel Comics mastermind Stan Lee pitched a Thor movie to 20th Century Fox in 1990, but “they didn’t understand Raimi’s and Lee’s idea,” and passed. Raimi then lobbied to direct a third and fourth Batman movie after Warner Brothers parted ways with Tim Burton following Batman Returns, but was passed over in favor of Joel Schumacher for Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. One can only wonder where the Bat-franchise would have gone if those two films had avoided Schumacher’s camp sensibility and gone with Raimi specialties like “character development” and “nipple-free costumes.” Then again, would we want to live in a world where we couldn’t quote Arnold Schwarzenegger’s terrible ice puns?
Thing we were happiest to learn: Raimi dodged a few bullets here. He was the original director for the Warcraft movie but dropped out because he hadn’t finished Oz The Great And Powerful. (Duncan Jones took over Warcraft, to critical and commercial scorn.) He was also attached to an adaptation of The Last Of Us (a project that has recently been resurrected as a series). While that game has more story to it than Warcraft, based on every previous video game-to-film adaptation, we feel reasonably safe in saying even Raimi may have been hard pressed to turn a Playstation shoot-’em-up into cinematic gold. But we’ll keep our collective fingers crossed for Craig Mazin (Chernobyl)’s production for HBO.
Thing we were unhappiest to learn: If we’re Tobey Maguire, that Tobey Maguire missed out on a lot of work. Despite a middling fan reaction to 2007’s Spider-Man 3 (and likely thanks to the film’s tremendous box-office success), plans were underway to shoot a fourth and fifth movie back-to-back, with a sixth in development, all with Raimi directing and Maguire slinging webs. At the time, Movieline reported Anne Hathaway had been cast as Black Cat, and John Malkovich would play Vulture. Raimi had also planned on casting Bruce Campbell as Mysterio at some point. But Sony cancelled all three movies after Raimi felt he couldn’t meet the series’ schedule and that the fourth film had a “not so exciting script.” Instead, he planned to reteam with Maguire on a 2014 adaptation of Joe Abercrombie’s novel The Blade Itself, but after initial announcements, that project disappeared. (Maguire has not had an onscreen role since 2014, when he played Bobby Fischer in Pawn Sacrifice, although he has produced several films and voiced the narrator in The Boss Baby.)
Also noteworthy: We almost got a Xena reboot in 2016. NBC was developing a reboot of the syndicated cult hit Raimi created in 1995, and he was brought back to executive produce. But NBC spun its wheels, and it was never clear whether original series star Lucy Lawless was on board (at one point she tweeted that the reboot was just a rumor). In 2017, the new series’ writer-director left over “insurmountable creative differences,” and NBC cancelled its Xena plans.
That wasn’t Raimi’s only flirtation with television that went nowhere. Starz greenlit a Raimi-produced live-action series based on anime Noir in 2011, but it never aired because of “difficulty to get the project creatively to a good place.” In 2010, Deadline reported Raimi producing a series for ABC about a female prosecutor, an adaptation of Brian K. Vaughn’s Smokers for Fox, and a CBS procedural about a Scotland Yard detective who joins the LAPD, none of which made it to air. Raimi and David Cronenberg were reportedly working on a TV adaptation of Wendy Moore’s novel The Knifeman in 2012; in 2015 NBC ordered a Raimi-produced series Miracle Man, about an Afghanistan vet who can perform miracles (no relation to Alan Moore’s comic Miracleman). Neither of those materialized either.
Best link to elsewhere on Wikipedia: Wikipedia’s page on Development Hell has some insight as to why well-known directors like Raimi leave so many failed projects in their wake. According to concept artist Sylvain Despretz, “Development hell doesn’t happen with no-name directors. It happens only with famous directors that a studio doesn’t dare break up with. And that’s how you end up for two years just, you know, polishing a turd. Until, finally, somebody walks away, at great cost.” (Our favorite part of that quote is that the phrase “polishing a turd” seems to also have its own Wikipedia page, although it in fact redirects to “lipstick on a pig.”)
Further Down the Wormhole: The one thing we were hoping to learn from this page and didn’t was whether Raimi would have given us Bruce Campbell as Batman. The actor, who’s collaborated with Raimi on the Evil Dead series, Crimewave, and short-lived TV series Jack Of All Trades, (as well as a recurring role on Xena), didn’t get to play the World’s Greatest Detective, but did play a private investigator on Burn Notice. Which isn’t the next-best-thing by any means, but we’re always happy to see Campbell getting some work.
We’re also always happy to see stories about private investigators, a noble profession that traces its origins to Eugène François Vidocq’s detective agency, Le Bureau des Renseignements Universels pour le commerce et l’Industrie, founded in 1833 in France and largely staffed by ex-convicts. Private investigation became more respectable in the U.S. with the advent of the more succinctly named Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Among other exploits, the Pinkertons prevented an 1861 assassination attempt against Abraham Lincoln with the help of America’s first female detective, Kate Warne. We’ll look at her story—which now that we think about it, would make a great movie for Sam Raimi to direct—next week.
64 Comments
If only Spider-man 3 were on this list.
Have a hard time thinking of another movie that had me early on just to absolutely turn awful before the halfway point. By the end credits, was wishing I’d just gone to bed instead of attending a midnight premiere showing.
i rewatched them all recently and i actually think the beginning of spider-man 3 is the worst part. the first 40 minutes are insanely jam-packed with shit. it doesn’t exactly get better as it goes, but the pacing relaxes slightly in the middle, only to ramp back up at the ending.
Most of the early stuff worked for me. For menthe movie peaked with Sandman’s transformation scene. It was downhill after that.
I’m just wondering who the hell Tobey Maguire would have played in the Abercrombie adaptation. Suppose he could do early, douchey Jezal dan Luthar.
That’s a weird one to me.The Blade Itself isn’t really a story. It’s all prologue to a story. It’s emblematic of the wrong lesson writers took from GRRM of “being able to write long books with where nothing really happens but people will read if it’s filled with lore and it’s dark and gritty.”
It’s the first part of a three part story. I would be surprised if there wasn’t a significant amount of scene setting, especially given where the story goes for the rest of the Trilogy.
I’d rather Abercrombie continue to work the way he does. Writing the complete story before publishing the first book and running the risk of part 1 being exposition heavy than just going for it and ending up writing himself into a corner that it takes years to write himself out of, a la GRRM or Rothfuss.
I think my problem is this, for lack of a better explanation.Blade Itself is 529 pages and roughly gets to the point of “the fellowship” coming together. Fellowship of the Ring is fewer pages and gets further in its story. And I know page counts are different and there’s loads of differences in lots of ways, but Blade Itself feels like half a story to me in that way.
It’s clearly designed to be the first part of a multi-part story, but I wouldn’t say it’s just a prologue or that nothing happens. There is plenty of lore and character development but there’s a fair amount of activity that moves the broader plot forward.
It wasn’t Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself, it was a different novel with the same title by Marcus Sakey. I don’t know if the Wikipedia page has it wrong or if Mike Vago got it wrong, but Abercrombie made fun of it at the time.
He’s good, but Guillermo Del Toro has got not making films down to an art form.
Why do you bring up the name of Guillermo del Toro? Is he specifically related or something?
He famously has an astonishing number of unrealized projects. It’s to the point where if he’s attached to the project you start waiting for the announcement that it’s cancelled. Every time one of his films gets made its a surprise.
Do you not know who that is and why the OP’s joke is on-point?
Jesus f christ. I read something completely different. This lockdown is going to end with my sanity. Sorry Ruel! Sorry Yes I drive! Sorry Citric!WHy don’t I stop and not submit before submitting a comment?
When I read that Raimi had 50 un-made projects I thought “Just 50? That’s an average year for del Toro.”
Doesn’t Martin Scorsese deserve an honorable mention?Although he seems to get some of his life sentences commuted and some of his movies are finally let out of prison.This is an interesting link. I’m sort of amazed any movie with a budget bigger than $36 is ever made when you start to think about the complications of financing, casting, locations, and all of the other potential contracting and scheduling problems.https://allthetropes.fandom.com/wiki/Development_Hell
Also videogames, gotten so bad he completely gave up the idea (last I know of) and is afraid he is cursed, only lent his face to Death Stranding because he seemed to trust more Kojima than himself.
I love the Warcraft movie , and that is a hill I will die on ( res plz) . The only thing about Duncan Jones is that he’s clearly such a fan of the games that maybe a director who didnt treat the lore as a holy text wouldnt have been afraid to chop things out , make a tighter movie and appeal more to aveage moviegoers.
I loved the Warcraft movie as well, to my surprise. Put me in your team.
It seemed to be missing a third act, as if it was assuming it would be one of those two-part films.
It was a messy film, but it was hardly the disaster people (or the trailers) made it out to be. The orc storyline was actually pretty good. The human storyline was not as good.
Honestly, I’ve never met anyone who saw it and hated it. I’ve encountered plenty of people who use it as a punchline for a failed video game adaptation with the caveat that they never saw it. My sister in law (who only likes dry English comedies and documentaries about Mexican politics) raved that it was “pretty easy to sit through.”
Easy to sit through isn’t a bad description. There are plenty of big budget movies that are actually hard to watch (Terminator Gynysys, for instance), but Warcraft was at least entertaining, even if some might quibble with the storytelling.
Terminator Gina-cyst.
Hate is much too exciting an emotion to describe what it evokes.
yeah it was fine. i think it’s basically as ‘good’ at the mortal kombat movie, it’s just that mortal kombat has a more fun concept to work with a wicked soundtrack going for it.
As others may have mentioned, it was a pretty good first two 3rds but then sort of just falls apart in the last half hour or so.Personally, if they were going to put so much into making the Orcs CG and many of the landscapes as well, I’d rather they just went ahead and used the animation company that does all the WoW expansion trailers to make a full length movie.Those trailers are so epic.I really wanted Warcraft to do well so that we might eventually get an Arthas Frozen Throne trilogy.
I think the big mistake was retelling the story of the ORIGINAL Warcraft, a game that even among those who played it isn’t looked at that fondly (Warcraft 2 takes that crown.)That shit should be “opening CG lay out the background” material. People wanted the story of WOW.
As a very long time Warcraft fan, I like it. I still can’t wrap my head around why they didn’t go with a more familiar story though.
Not impressed. You should see the list of MY unrealized projects.
You never know today might be the day I build those shelves in the basement.
Or finally make a woman orgasm….
I know I come up with 40 movies that will never be made on a weekly basis.
We live in a world where camels can get botox and eyelash extensions, why shouldn’t pigs get to wear lipstick? They deserve to feel pretty once in a while.
Correct. The phrase is “You can put lipstick on a pig…” afterall.
Kate Warne is my favourite obscure reference Archer made.
H.P. Lovecraft short story Within The Woods
There is no such thing. “Within the Woods” is a short film by Sam Raimi.
I was wondering about that, since I’d never heard of that story. Even googled it, but only came up with “The Wood”, a deeply underwhelming short poem.
Within the Woods, which explains that it’s not an adaptation, and the only especially Lovecraftian element is the “Book of the Dead” concept.
That threw me, too. I only knew “Within the Woods” as Raimi’s student-film test run for Evil Dead.
“Movieline reported Anne Hathaway had been cast as Black Cat…”And, she ended up playing Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. How about that…
It’s funny seeing how many of the superhero-related ideas here ended up being done in some other form and how very few of the non-superhero-related ideas ever came up again.
That Pinkerton/Lincoln movie was already made in 1951 as “The Tall Target,” starring tough guy Dick Powel and directed by the always reliable Anthony Mann. It’s a terrific little thriller that has the distinction of being the sole example of its own genre: Civil War Noir. Beyond being a great watch, it’s most fascinating for depicting how deeply unpopular Lincoln was not only in the south but with many northerners as well and that there was a serious threat to his life in the days leading up to the inauguration. The more things change…Here’s the TCM intro that also includes yet another one of those peculiar Lincoln/Kennedy coincidences:
Starred just for including a video with Robert Osborne. That was a pleasant reminder of better times.
a CBS procedural about a Scotland Yard detective who joins the LAPD
This makes me think a CBS executive saw Due South (about a Canadian mountie working with the Chicago PD) one day and thought “let’s do that, but… west.”
I didn’t stick with Elementary past an episode or two, but my initial impression was that it was less a Sherlock Holmes adaptation and more CSI: One Of the Detectives Is British For Some Reason
It was not.
Is Last of Us really a “Playstation shoot-em-up”?I mean I guess it’s a third person shooter in name. But that seems to do a disservice to how you can play the game.
Yeah, while I’ve never played the game I’ve read several essays about it and that rang false to me as well.
Glad you said this so I don’t have to.
I knew that line was gonna get pushback.Came here, wasn’t disappointed, etc.
Yeah, that’s a very odd way to describe the game. Like calling Shawshank Redemption a prison movie. Technically accurate, but not even close to the full story.
Game-adjacent media is an easy target for lazy snark.Now and again I still talk to people who think game music is still all bleeps.
I was in the Abercrombie fandom when “The Blade Itself” was announced. It was a different novel titled “The Blade Itself”, not Abercrombie’s. Joe made fun of it at the time.
Raimi dodged a few bullets here. He was the original director for the Warcraft movie but dropped out because he hadn’t finished Oz The Great And Powerful. I don’t know if I would call this a bullet dodged. In it’s current form it is, but with the right direction, Warcraft could have (should have) been great. It had every element needed to create an amazing film. Characters, plot, lore, locations, aesthetic you name it, yet for some unfathomable reason, they choose a story that only the most diehard fans know.
Why they didn’t go with Arthas story, is beyond me.
John Malkovich would play VultureAnd now I’m wishing the series had continued.
As a Bruce Campbell fanboy, I’m actually really happy he didn’t get to play Batman. He could have maybe pulled off a “Brave and the Bold” style Batman, but anything more serious would have been out of his wheelhouse.
Bite your tongue, sir.
As to Raimi coulda made the 1990s into a heavy superhero movie decade–he did try hard to get the rights to The Shadow (I suppose it’s debatable if he’s truly a superhero, but, definitely a prototype) and apparently reworked that into Darkman (and instead lucky us got Mulcahey’s The Shadow)
I am crushed, I didn’t even know he was trying to make The Blade Itself, I mean, Tobey is not who I would have thought of for any role in that movie except maybe Jezal, but it’s one of those series I believe deserves to reach a wider audience. I’ve enjoyed everything Abercrombie has written in that world.
Critics hated it, and it was scorned commercially in the States, but Warcraft made $439 million worldwide. I wish someone would scorn me with $439 million dollars.
“(Duncan Jones took over Warcraft, to critical and commercial scorn.) He was also attached to an adaptation of The Last Of Us (a project that has recently been resurrected as a series). While that game has more story to it than Warcraft[…]”
No. It doesn’t. Warcraft spans multiple millenia, worlds, races and factions. Its original RTS core has 3 games with multiple expansions, it is the second-longest consecutively running MMO, which has 8 expansions. There is not a world in which a single game, or a game with a sequel contains more story. This is not subjective. Warcraft is also multimedia, and has a fairly large traditional library, as well as multiple graphical bibles, and cosmological ones.
This quote is amazingly weird and surprisingly ill-informed. This is basic mathematics. I get that people hated the film (I didn’t particularly enjoy it, and I went with a massive bias), but that does not nullify thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages of story across multiple continents, worlds and even realities.
If you’re trying to say that the film, Warcraft, has less story than The Last of Us, you’re also incorrect. Because the Last of Us doesn’t yet have an entry, making the score 0 to anything but 0.
I didn’t know Raimi created Xena!