From Kubrick’s Napoleon to Jodorowsky’s Dune, these scripts changed cinema without ever being filmed

Ten Screenplays That Changed Cinema Without Ever Being Filmed

In Hollywood, a script getting made is the exception, not the rule. Most screenplays — including many of the most inventive, ambitious, and carefully constructed scripts ever written — spend years in development before disappearing into the archive of what might have been. Some of the most talked-about unproduced screenplays have had as much influence on cinema as the films that actually got made, shaping the visual and narrative vocabulary of directors who read them, studied them, or were inspired by their existence. The ten scripts below represent a cross-section of this tradition: some are legendary for their ambition, some for the circumstances of their failure, and some for the strange afterlives they found in other forms.

Napoleon by Stanley Kubrick

Kubrick spent years developing his epic biopic on Napoleon Bonaparte, approaching it with a thoroughness that bordered on obsession. He reportedly tracked Napoleon’s daily movements through every day of the emperor’s life, amassing thousands of index cards and extensive costume research. The project was abandoned after MGM withdrew financial support following the commercial failure of Sergei Bondarchuk’s “Waterloo” (1970), a different Napoleon picture that had damaged investor appetite for the subject. Elements of Kubrick’s visual approach and his interest in the period resurfaced in “Barry Lyndon” (1975), but the Napoleon film itself never happened. Years later, filmmaker Ridley Scott made his own version of the story in “Napoleon” (2023), while a television adaptation of Kubrick’s own Napoleon project was reportedly in development with Steven Spielberg. The Kubrick script is held in archives and has been published in limited scholarly contexts, and it remains one of the most discussed unmade films in cinema history.

Dune by Alejandro Jodorowsky

In the mid-1970s, Chilean surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky assembled a production for an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” that would have been, in his own estimation, 14 hours long and capable of changing the consciousness of anyone who saw it. His collaborators included Salvador Dali (as the Emperor), Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, and Pink Floyd (for the score). Artist H.R. Giger and concept artist Chris Foss created visual materials for the project. No studio would finance it. The project collapsed, but its influence was immediate and lasting. The conceptual artwork and storyboards that Jodorowsky and his collaborators produced — assembled into a massive book that was circulated among studios and filmmakers in Hollywood — shaped the visual design of “Star Wars,” “Blade Runner,” “Alien,” and much of subsequent science fiction cinema. The 2013 documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” reconstructs the project and its legacy in detail.

At the Mountains of Madness by Guillermo del Toro

Del Toro has spoken for years about his planned adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s 1936 novella, which he envisioned as a large-scale, R-rated prestige horror film with Tom Cruise attached to star and James Cameron signed to produce. Universal Pictures developed the project to an advanced stage before withdrawing support, reportedly unwilling to commit to an R-rated budget at the scale the film required, and noting that Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” (2012) had covered similar Antarctic science-horror territory. Del Toro’s script, by his own description, was his most personal and his most ambitious. It has not been produced. His “Frankenstein” (2025), which received nine Oscar nominations, is in some ways a continuation of the preoccupations that “Mountains of Madness” was meant to explore.

Alien III by William Gibson and Others

Before “Alien 3” became the film David Fincher eventually directed — and subsequently disowned — cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson wrote a version of the sequel that took a very different direction. Gibson’s script made Corporal Hicks the central character, sidelined Ripley, and leaned into Cold War geopolitical tension alongside the franchise’s body horror traditions. Producers did not move forward with it. The script circulated among fans for decades as a cult text, and it was eventually adapted into an audio drama by Audible and into a comic book series, giving it a distinct afterlife outside of cinema.

Napoleon, Gladiator, and the Pattern of Development

The broader pattern that the list reflects is not that Hollywood fails interesting material — it does, frequently — but that the development process itself, with its risk aversion, its dependence on comparable precedents, and its sensitivity to market timing, is structurally resistant to the most ambitious and unusual ideas. Kubrick’s Napoleon was too expensive and too specific. Jodorowsky’s Dune was too visionary and too long. Del Toro’s Mountains of Madness was too dark and too literary. Gibson’s Alien sequel was too strange and too uncommercial. In each case, what made the script exceptional was precisely what made it unproducible under standard studio conditions. The history of unproduced screenplays is a history of the gap between cinematic imagination and institutional risk tolerance. Aspiring screenwriters can study the mechanics of development and why scripts fail to get produced through resources at the Writers Guild of America. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts library holds materials related to many development histories. For deep reading on specific unmade projects, including Kubrick’s Napoleon, the Criterion Collection has published extensive contextual materials on major filmmakers and their unrealized projects.