10 Unmade Tim Burton Films: From ‘After Hours’ To ‘Superman Lives’ & More

“The Fall Of The House Of Usher“/”Go Baby Go“/”Hawkline Monster”
Jonathan Gems (the son of the late playwright Pam Gems) was Burton’s go-to screenwriter in the 1990s, but only one film ever came out of the collaborations, trading card adaptation “Mars Attacks!” (which itself started out life as another Topps property, “Dinosaurs Attack!” before “Jurassic Park” put paid to that). But there were a number of other films that were in the works that sound kind of fascinating. Aside from “Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian,” Gems also penned a version of Edgar Allan Poe‘s “The Fall Of The House of Usher,” updated and relocated to Burbank, California. Burton considered the project alongside “Catwoman” when he returned to the Warners fold in 1994, but “Mars Attacks” ended up taking priority. The pair also tried to scratch their itch for a beach movie with a script called “Go Baby Go!,” a musical fantasy paying homage to the films of Russ Meyer, which was considered to follow up “Mars Attacks!” Perhaps most intriugingly, there was “The Hawkline Monster.” Based on the novel by Richard Brautigan (which is subtitled “A Gothic Western”) it involves two immortal gunman who are brought to Oregon by a pair of twin sisters to kill a monster in their basement that killed their father. A one-time project for Hal Ashby, who’d commissioned a script from Brautigan himself for Harry Dean Stanton and Jeff Bridges to star in, Burton came on in the late 1990s and got Gems to write a draft. Remarkably, Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood were both in talks to star in the project together in the early 1990s, but Eastwood bailed, with Nicholson and Burton both following. What could have been… Also around this time was a potential remake of Roger Corman‘s “X: The Man With The X-Ray Eyes” (which Gems wasn’t involved in), but that too faltered, although Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has been circling it of late.

“After Hours“/”Mary Reilly”
Of course, like every filmmaker, aside from the projects that never got made at all, there are those that got made under different hands — Disney‘s “Sleeping Beauty” reboot “Maleficent” with Angelina Jolie, which starts shooting shortly, was a one-time Burton project, for instance. And the director may have ended up on a very different path if he’d made the first film he was attached to: “After Hours.” His shorts at Disney got Burton the attention of Griffin Dunne, who was developing the dark comedy to star in, and the young helmer landed the gig. However, when funding for “The Last Temptation of Christ” fell through, the script got the attention of Martin Scorsese, and Burton stepped aside. The director and star would later work together on “The Jar,” his episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” The early 1990s saw him coming close to another project: an adaptation of the novel “Mary Reilly,” a retelling of the story of “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde.” Roman Polanski had originally been attached to direct, but Burton became involved in the 1990s when producer Peter Guber took the project from Warner Bros. to Sony. Christopher Hampton wrote the script, and Burton locked into the project, intending to shoot in January 1994, but when the studio put “Ed Wood” into turnaround, the director quit “Mary Reilly” in anger. The film made it into theaters in 1995, with Stephen Frears at the helm and Julia Roberts as the title character, but the poisonous reviews suggest that Burton may have dodged a bullet.