Hollywood spends fortunes making movies. So why would studios, directors, sometimes even stars go to such extraordinary lengths to stop us ever seeing them?
From superhero blockbusters written off before release to films their own stars fought to suppress, these are the extraordinary stories of movies that Hollywood tried to make disappear.
Some remain hidden decades later. Others escaped, became cult classics or proved their critics spectacularly wrong.
The Fantastic Four (unreleased)
It’s one of the more bizarre motivations for making a movie, but in 1992 German producer Bernd Eichinger shot a low-budget version of The Fantastic Four to keep hold of the film rights. His company Constantin Film had obtained the option from Marvel in 1986 for a fee of around $250,000, but this was due to expire at the end of 1992. Eichinger hastily put together a project, collaborating with B-movie legend Roger Corman, and gathering a budget of between $750,000 and $1 million (reports vary). Principal photography commenced just three days before the rights elapsed, with music video director Oley Sassone at the helm.
Marvel’s Stan Lee told Los Angeles Magazine in 2005 that the cast and crew were under the impression that this was like any other project and that the movie was going to be released, but that it was “never supposed to be shown to anybody”. However, in the same article, Corman disputed Lee’s version of events, saying that the film had a relatively large advertising budget and, “We had a contract to release it, and I had to be bought out of that contract.”
Eichinger confirmed that, saying the reason the movie wasn’t released was that Marvel executive (and future Marvel Studios founder) Avi Arad called him in 1993 and proposed a deal, as he “really didn’t like the idea that a small movie was coming out and maybe ruining the franchise”. Arad told reporters at a 2002 press-junket for Spider-Man that he had bought the film “for a couple of million dollars in cash and burned it”.
The film has never been released to the public, but has been widely bootlegged and shared online, becoming something of a cult favourite because of its hilariously camp and cheap and cheerful feel.
For many, this '90s curio is more enjoyable than at least some of the big budget efforts that have been produced since as, in the aftermath, The Fantastic Four became a bit of a cursed property – from Tim Story’s risible 2005 and 2007 efforts to Josh Trank’s dour and disastrous 2015 reboot, with 2025’s more likeable and largely successful The Fantastic Four: First Steps somewhat restoring the quartet’s reputation.
Song of the South (1946)
The winner of the 1947 Academy Award for Best Original Song, for earworm Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, Song of the South is a live-action animation hybrid that was a success for Disney back in 1946 (and on its rerelease in 1956), although it was, and remains, enormously controversial.
Based on Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus stories, the film is set on a 19th century Georgian plantation and follows a young white boy, Johnny (Bobby Driscoll), as he visits his grandmother and befriends elderly Black plantation worker Uncle Remus (played by James Baskett), who tells him adventurous animal tales.
Harris’s books are set after the American Civil War and the abolition of slavery and so presumably is this story, but the film does not make this explicit – despite a Hays Office request for it to do so (the office had previously intervened to request the removal of the expression “darkie” from the script). This nauseating ambiguity meant it could easily be interpreted as a sanitised, worse, jolly depiction of slavery.
Coupled with its offensive stereotypes, this led to pickets, boycotts and criticism from the National Negro Congress and NAACP. Meanwhile, the film’s star, Baskett, was unable to attend the premiere, as it took place in the racially segregated city of Atlanta.
Although Baskett was criticised for accepting a demeaning part, he was praised by others for his performance (he would win an honorary Oscar in recognition of his achievement in the role, shortly before he died in 1948). Song of the South has been released on home video in other territories, but has never been available domestically in the United States, including on Disney+, with no current plans to change that.
In 2010, Disney’s then CEO Bob Iger called the film “antiquated” and “fairly offensive”, while critic Roger Ebert wrote in 2000 that it should remain unavailable to the public, arguing, “Any new Disney film immediately becomes part of the consciousness of almost every child in America, and I would not want to be a Black child going to school in the weeks after Song of the South was first seen by my classmates.”
Batgirl (unreleased)
The DC Extended Universe has suffered a number of disasters over the years but the fate of its Batgirl film is probably the biggest scandal of them all. Joss Whedon was originally hired to work on the project in 2017, before exiting the following year, admitting to The Hollywood Reporter that he “didn’t have a story”. Later that year, Birds of Prey scribe Christina Hodson was commissioned to write the Batgirl screenplay after finishing up The Flash, with DC Films president Walter Hamada leaning toward an exclusive release on streaming service HBO Max.
In 2021, Moroccan-Belgian filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah (Bad Boys for Life) were confirmed as the directors, with In the Heights’ Leslie Grace beating Haley Lu Richardson to the, then-coveted, role of Batgirl / Barbara Gordon. Previously seen in Justice League, JK Simmons was confirmed to be reprising his role as Commissioner James Gordon – Batgirl’s father – soon after, while Jacob Scipio and Brendan Fraser signed on as mob boss Anthony Bressi and villain Firefly, with Michael Keaton’s Batman also returning.
Batgirl began shooting in Glasgow in late 2021 and wrapped in March 2022, with Warners considering switching to a theatrical release around this time following its merger to form Warner Bros Discovery. That meant increasing its budget from around $70 million, by upping its post-production and marketing spend.
However, in August that year the New York Post revealed that the project would in fact be completely shelved after the budget ballooned due to COVID-19 protocols (reports vary, but hover around the $90 million mark), and test screenings went poorly, with a source describing the project as “irredeemable”, and a tax write-off preferred, as part of the studio’s post-merger restructuring.
Since then, several of its stars have spoken out. Speaking to Variety in 2023, leading lady Grace revealed she was completely blindsided by the decision, finding out alongside the rest of the world. She has described what she has seen of the film, which was never completed, as “incredible”. Simmons labelled the decision “bizarre” in an interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast earlier this year, while Fraser told AP in 2025 that it was a “tragedy” for little girls, lamenting that it is, “more valuable to burn it down and get the insurance on it than to give it a shot in the marketplace”.
The Day the Clown Cried (1972)
Speaking to documentarian Eric Friedler in 2016, a year before his death, American comedian Jerry Lewis was asked how he felt about his unfinished, much-speculated-about film The Day the Clown Cried. “For the lack of a better word, ashamed, embarrassed,” he told him, “Why? Because it was not good work. It was bad work on behalf of the writer, the director, the actor.”
Considered one of the great movie mysteries, The Day the Clown Cried was an ambitious, enormously controversial project set during the Holocaust. Lewis was keen to be taken more seriously (the film was shot in Sweden and he had consulted with Ingmar Bergman no less for advice on local actors). Moreover, he was tackling a subject that, as a Jew, was of huge personal significance; although Lewis did not hide the fact that he was Jewish, he had tended to downplay it on screen.
As well as directing and writing the film (he made substantial changes to Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton’s original script, including changing the name of the protagonist from Karl Schmidt to Helmut Doork), Lewis lost 35 pounds on a grapefruit diet to star as a down-on-his-luck German circus clown, thrown into a concentration camp after drunkenly mocking Hitler.
Producer Nat Wachsberger failed to provide the promised funding, while it transpired that he didn’t actually own the script, as his option had expired before filming commenced. Actor Sven Lindberg told Spy in 1992 that Lewis was “nervous and preoccupied by money troubles”, with Lewis telling The New York Times that he nearly had a heart attack during the shoot, and had “put all the pain on the screen”.
The resulting film was unreleasable. Due to unpaid debts, the studio in Stockholm held onto the negative, while the copyright was owned by the original screenwriters. Lewis later donated material from the film to the Library of Congress, which was made accessible for research purposes in 2024, but it largely remains unseen.
Screenwriter O’Brien, who passed away in 2004, saw a rough cut of the film and told Spy in 1992 that she considered it a “disaster”. French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon felt differently, telling Vanity Fair in 2017 that he found it an “interesting and important film”, as well as being “bitter” and “disturbing”, going on to say that it was “very daring about both the issue, which of course is the Holocaust, but even beyond that as a story of a man who has dedicated his life to making people laugh and is questioning what it is to make people laugh”.
Don's Plum (2001)
The film Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire didn’t want you to see, Don’s Plum is a 2001 indie drama from director RD Robb. Shot in 1995 and 1996, much of the film was reportedly improvised; it follows a group of young men who meet regularly at the titular LA restaurant and bring women they have met along.
It was made with friends when DiCaprio and Maguire were rising stars (Romeo + Juliet came out in 1996, which catapulted DiCaprio into the big leagues, while Maguire won acclaim in Ang Lee’s The Ice Storm a year later). The pair were notorious around the time for being part of Hollywood’s so-called ‘Pussy Posse’ (immortalised in a 1998 New York Magazine profile of DiCaprio), who would chase girls and party, and Don’s Plum was very much a reflection of that.
Two years after the film was completed, its producer David Stutman accused DiCaprio and Maguire of using their influence to stop Miramax from releasing it, while the actors claimed that the film was pitched to them as a short and edited into a feature that they hadn't agreed to.
A settlement was eventually agreed in which Stutman promised not to release the film in the US or Canada. However, in 2014, another producer, Dale Wheatley, started streaming Don’s Plum for free online, alongside a letter asking DiCaprio to withdraw his opposition to allow for a Stateside release, before the film was removed in 2016 for infringement.
So is it actually any good? The verdict, it seems, is mixed, with Variety describing it as an “immature” and “unpleasant ensembler”, while in a more favourable festival review Time Out New York observed that “every moment feels utterly true”.
Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)
Famous for his sumptuous, melodramatic movies like Far from Heaven, Carol and May December, alongside mini-series Mildred Pierce, Todd Haynes first grabbed attention while he was still a student, studying at Bard College.
In 1987, he shot Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a 43-minute short, filmed over 10 days and co-written with Cynthia Schneider, which eccentrically utilised Barbie-style dolls to tell the story of pop singer Karen Carpenter’s rise, struggle with anorexia, and tragic death in 1983. The film would screen at the Toronto Film Festival, and go on to be embraced by devourers of avant-garde cinema.
Due to its unauthorised use of Carpenter's songs, Superstar was hit by a copyright infringement lawsuit from Karen’s brother and musical partner Richard Carpenter, who was also likely to have objected to his portrayal in the film. Richard won and the film was withdrawn from circulation in 1990.
And yet Superstar quite simply didn’t want to go away, with bootlegs keeping it in circulation. These days, it’s easy to find on YouTube, and continues to be fondly remembered and resurrected from time to time, placing at number 45 on Entertainment Weekly’s Top 50 Cult Movies in 2003, and being described by The Guardian in 2016 as “visionary” and “made for the internet well before the internet was made for [it]”.
Idiocracy (2006)
View Green Video on the source websiteBest known as the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill and cult flick Office Space, Mike Judge was a well-regarded industry figure when the support for his satirical sci-fi Idiocracy disappeared. Originally due to be released in 2005, according to Judge, the studio Fox held it back for a year before giving it a limited release, which excluded a number of major cities, including New York, while there were no trailers, ads or press screenings. Unsurprisingly, it bombed, making less than $500k from a $2.4 million budget.
Idiocracy stars Luke Wilson as averagely intelligent army librarian Joe who, alongside Maya Rudolph’s prostitute Rita, wakes up 500 years in the future in a dumbed-down dystopia, where Joe is now the most intelligent person alive. Despite the lack of studio confidence, it’s far from a bad film – in fact when critics finally saw it they mostly responded positively – and the silence around Fox’s reasoning (with Judge himself keeping strangely quiet at the time) gave rise to speculation.
In a 2006 Time article, Dude, Where’s My Film?, Joel Stein claimed that the film’s ads and trailers tested atrociously due to its deliberately ugly vision of the future, while Dan Mitchell in The New York Times thought Fox might have been nervous of offending the advertisers who were portrayed negatively in the movie, something that star Terry Crews also suggested in an interview with GQ in 2018.
Judge broke his own silence on the matter in 2017, when he told The New York Times that negative test screenings were behind the decision and that the studio had believed Idiocracy would develop a cult following and make back its budget on DVD sales, as Office Space had.
Recently described by its co-writer Etan Cohen as an “accidental documentary”, this eerily prescient film has since become a regular reference point for critics of Donald Trump’s presidencies (in response, Judge told Time, “I’m no prophet, I was off by 490 years”). In July 2025, The New York Times polled its readers to mark the US’s 250th birthday, asking them for their definitive movie about America. Idiocracy won.
Glitterati (unreleased)
In 2002, Oscar-winning screenwriter Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction), released his third film The Rules of Attraction, based on Bret Easton Ellis’s novel. A minor box office success which became a cult favourite, this sexually provocative black comedy was notable for upending the squeaky clean reputation of its star James Van Der Beek, who was known at the time for teen drama Dawson’s Creek. In a university campus-set story, Van Der Beek plays drug dealer Sean Bateman (the younger brother of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman).
Kip Pardue features in the film as the promiscuous Victor – the boyfriend of female lead Lauren (Shannyn Sossaman) – who is shown travelling in Europe. While following the actor round the likes of London, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona and Munich, Avary ended up assembling a separate film from the 70 hours of footage, with Glitterati intended as a bridge between The Rules of Attraction and a planned adaptation of Ellis’s novel Glamorama. As he told the BBC in 2003, Avary insisted that Pardue remain in character throughout the entire European shoot.
The movie would turn out to be unreleasable. Although it was apparently screened by Avary in private, Ellis told The AV Club in 2009 that Glitterati is, “basically about 90 minutes of [Pardue] in character actually seducing women throughout Europe,” going on to say: “There are a lot of people who would be very upset. I don’t even know if they got permission from a lot of the people in it, which might be a big problem.” It’s easy to see the issue, with Avary telling the BBC that, during the filming, “Invariably, we'd end up at the hotel room with these girls and I'd be shooting this stuff thinking: This is insane... and ethically questionable.”
Margaret (2011)
View Green Video on the source websiteNamed the 31st best film of the 21st century so far in a 2016 BBC critics poll, Margaret had a tumultuous journey to the screen. The sophomore film from acclaimed writer-director Kenneth Lonergan (following up the Oscar-nominated You Can Count on Me), had a cast led by Anna Paquin and featured the likes of Mark Ruffalo, Jean Reno, J Smith-Cameron, Allison Janney and Matt Damon. Set in New York, Margaret follows teenager Lisa (Paquin), who is involved in a horrendous accident at the outset and spends the movie’s duration trying to deal with it.
The film was funded by Fox Searchlight and film financier Gary Gilbert and cost around $12.6 million to make. It was shot in autumn of 2005 and Lonergan requested extra time to edit it, securing a $1 million loan from one of its stars, Matthew Broderick, to pay for a post-production extension. The filmmaker eventually delivered a two-and-a-half-hour cut (the maximum permissible length according to his contract), but Gilbert was unhappy, describing it as “incoherent”, according to The Hollywood Reporter. He reportedly attempted to seize control, working with the editor of Brokeback Mountain, Dylan Tichenor, to trim it down to two hours.
Searchlight eventually accepted Lonergan’s version in 2008 and tried to invoice Gilbert for nearly $6.2 million, later suing him for reneging on a co-financing agreement. Martin Scorsese (the executive producer of Lonergan’s debut, who he had worked with on Gangs of New York) then entered the frame, at Lonergan’s request. He had screened Lonergan’s edit two years earlier and declared it a “masterpiece”, and helped produce something that ended up being about 12 minutes longer than Lonergan’s original cut, but that the pair hoped everybody would be satisfied with this time. Searchlight agreed to release it, but, according to Lonergan, Gilbert still refused to sign off (although Gilbert himself maintained he did not pass on the Scorsese cut).
Eventually Gilbert and Searchlight came to a settlement in 2011, with Lonergan’s initial 150-minute cut granted a limited release. It attracted little public attention, but plenty of critical adoration – a New York Times Magazine feature dubbed it “Kenneth Lonergan’s Thwarted Masterpiece”. And yet that wasn’t the end of it, with Gilbert and Lonergan continuing to fight it out in court, before eventually coming to a settlement in 2014, just before Scorsese was due to take the stand. A three-hour extended version was completed by the director and released on DVD in 2012.
Snowpiercer (2013)
In the battle of Bong Joon Ho vs Harvey Weinstein, you know who to back. Shot in 2012, Snowpiercer is a sensationally exciting post-apocalyptic action thriller starring Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-ho and John Hurt, set aboard a train carrying the last surviving humans. It’s the English-language debut of the critically adored South Korean director Bong, who had grabbed international attention with Barking Dogs Never Bite, Memories of Murder and The Host, and whose 2019 film Parasite would go on to win a quartet of Oscars, including best picture and director, at the 2020 ceremony.
In late 2012, The Weinstein Company acquired the distribution rights to Snowpiercer, based on its script and completed footage, and were planning a wide release in North America alongside other English-speaking territories. Unfortunately, before that could happen, the now-disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein (known at the time as 'Harvey Scissorhands') wanted to make 25 minutes’ worth of cuts and add a concluding voiceover. Bong described his dealings with Weinstein as a “doomed encounter”, telling Vulture that the producer wanted “more Chris Evans”, and joking that Weinstein said to him, “Wow, you are a genius. Let’s cut out the dialogue.”
Weinstein also requested the removal of a fish-gutting scene and Bong duped him into letting him keep it by claiming that the shot was a tribute to his fisherman father, confessing to Vulture, “It was a f**king lie. My father was not a fisherman.” When test scores for Weinstein’s butchered version came back low, he wanted to cut even more, but Bong’s contract allowed him to test screen his own cut, which luckily resulted in much higher scores.
The film had premiered in South Korea in July 2013 and, with the hold-up attracting attention, in early 2014 a Free Snowpiercer campaign was launched, spearheaded by Denise Heard-Bashur. Eventually, Weinstein allowed the film to be released in its original version in June 2014 but – in a seemingly vindictive move – with a change in distributor and release strategy, resulting in just a handful of screenings and restricting Snowpiercer to arthouse cinemas. Thankfully, glowing reviews led to a wider rollout a month later.
I Love You, Daddy (2017)
Written and directed by Louis CK and filmed in secret before his career came crashing down, black-and-white screwball comedy I Love You, Daddy stars the man himself alongside Chloë Grace Moretz and John Malkovich, and pays icky homage to Woody Allen. It tells the story of successful New York television writer Glen (CK), whose spoilt and sexually provocative teenage daughter China (Moretz) moves in with him, only to get close to a film director in his orbit (Malkovich).
Astonishingly, it later transpired that CK actually tried to recruit Allen for the film, which the veteran filmmaker revealed in his 2020 autobiography, Apropos of Nothing. Allen declined, feeling the role would play “right into the hands of the yahoos”.
I Love You, Daddy premiered at 2017’s Toronto International Film Festival. It was ditched by its distributor The Orchard in November that year – a mere week before release – after sexual misconduct allegations were made against CK in The New York Times by various female comedians, with CK later admitting his guilt. International distributors quickly followed suit by dropping it, while CK was reported to have purchased the rights back from The Orchard himself later that year.
Asked in 2018 what she thinks should happen to the film, Moretz told Variety: “I think the movie that we made shouldn’t be seen, I think it should go away,” with the actress going on to say, “I don’t think that it’s a perspective or a story that needs to be told in this day and age, especially in the wake of everything that’s come to light.”
Coyote vs Acme (2026)
Just like Roadrunner artfully dodging the clutches of the determined Wile E Coyote, Coyote vs Acme narrowly escaped the same fate as Batgirl, after initially being announced as a tax write-off by Warner Bros Discovery. A live-action animation hybrid starring Will Forte, Lana Condor and John Cena, this imaginative and frequently hilarious film follows Wile E Coyote in his efforts to sue the Acme Corporation for its faulty products, with Forte the lawyer ham-fistedly representing him.
In late 2023, Deadline reported that Warner Bros Discovery would not be releasing the film, despite positive test screenings and the movie being fully finished, instead opting to take an apparent $30 million write-down on the $70 million production. As with Batgirl, it was seemingly the result of post-merger cost-cutting by the studio. The decision provoked a huge outcry on social media from film lovers, industry figures and those who had worked on it (Forte colourfully described the decision as “f**king bulls**t” in an interview with MovieWeb), and it was quickly reversed.
After screening it to prospective buyers in 2024 hoping to recoup its full costs and turning down lower offers from Netflix, Amazon and Paramount, in March 2025 the studio completed the sale of the film to Ketchup Entertainment for around $50 million. Coyote vs Acme was finally released in the US in August 2026, and was a critical and commercial success, grossing $111 million worldwide and counting – with the film’s anti-corporate, underdog story benefiting from the real-life parallel.
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