Some people call it development hell, some call it development purgatory – but that is where most films go to die or live in an undead state indefinitely. Either the film gets stuck in its planning phase or gets tossed around from one production house to another, undergoing cast, crew, and story changes over the years with no end in sight.

The experimental satire The Other Side of the Wind, directed, co-written, co-produced, and co-edited by Orson Welles released in 2018, more than three decades after the filmmaker’s death. The film was stuck in development hell for 48 years, a record! The landmark Hindi film Mughal-e-Azam survived being abandoned during the Partition of India, a cast change, and loss of funds, to eventually release in 1960, after languishing in development hell for 14 long years.

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Deadpool, Frozen, and Mad Max: Fury Road are just a few of the mega-successful films that made it out alive and thriving from development purgatory. Here are a few others we would really like to see doing the same.

The Community Movie

     Sony Pictures Television

It’s been seven years since the last episode of Community aired. Creator Dan Harmon has kept fans hung up on the “six seasons and a movie” mantra ever since. The subversive sitcom about seven community college-going misfits never got its due adulation and viewership till Netflix gave it a second wind. Harmon has stated that he is finally working on a script, but we are still far away from the #andamovie prophecy the show ended with getting fulfilled.

Rules of Magic – The Practical Magic Prequel

     Warner Bros. Pictures

In 2019, HBO Max greenlit the pilot production of the Practical Magic prequel, Rules of Magic. It is supposed to be set in the 1960s, based on the novels Rules of Magic and Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman, the latter of which was adapted into the cult Halloween classic of the same name in 1998, starring Sandra Bullock (Sally Owens) and Nicole Kidman (Gillian Owens). This series will revolve around the two aunts of the Owen sisters (originally played by Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest).

RELATED: Community: Will Fans Ever See ‘Six Seasons and a Movie?’

Jessica Jones creator Melissa Rosenberg is apparently still on-board to write and executive produce the show. Shooting was supposed to begin in the spring of 2020; however, it got delayed due to the pandemic. We can only hope that the Owen sisters swing into our lives by Halloween 2023.

Beetlejuice 2

     Warner Bros. 

In 1990, two years after the release of Beetlejuice, director Tim Burton concocted plans for a sequel where Beetlejuice goes to the beach, but the theme is German Expressionism. That would have been a cool experiment (Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder were both on-board), but then Keaton and Burton got busy with Batman Returns (1992), and the sequel got shelved. Over the years, the main cast and crew would drop hints about a possible resurrection, and then the trail would go cold again.

RELATED: Beetlejuice 2: What We Hope to See in the Long-Awaited Sequel

In February 2022, it was reported that Warner Bros., along with Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B, was moving forward with Beetlejuice 2, and Keaton and Ryder are going to reprise their roles (as long as Burton returns to direct). However, it is unlikely that Beetlejuice will be going to Hawaii as was the original plan.

At the Mountain of Madness

     Astounding Stories

H.P. Lovecraft’s sci-fi classic has been considered unadaptable for the longest time. Guillermo del Toro and screenwriter Matthew Robbins wrote and pitched a screenplay for At the Mountains of Madness to Warner Bros. in 2006. The project was not greenlit because there was no love story or happy ending. In 2010, James Cameron came on board as a producer, along with Tom Cruise, who was slated to star in the adaptation. But it again fell through because Universal Studios demanded del Toro make a PG-13 version, but he was adamant Lovecraft’s vision would not work in that format.

After almost abandoning the project in 2013, del Toro promised he would try one more time to get it made. A new lease of life has been unleashed with del Toro’s multi-year deal with Netflix. In December 2021, del Toro announced that he would “rewrite the script and make it a smaller, weirder and more esoteric version in respect to the scenes that he has left out before.”

The Adventures Of Tintin 2

     Paramount Pictures

2011’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn was based on Hergé’s comic book series of the same name. It had some of the best and the biggest names attached to it – Steven Spielberg directed it, Peter Jackson co-produced it along with Kathleen Kennedy, and the script was written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, and Joe Cornish. The film featured the voices of Jamie Bell (as Tintin), alongside Andy Serkis (as Captain Haddock), Daniel Craig (as Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine), Nick Frost, and Simon Pegg (as Thomson and Thompson).

Initially, Peter Jackson had announced that he would direct the sequel once he was done with the Hobbit trilogy. He had also mentioned that he would pick the story of the sequel from his favourite Tintin stories, which were The Seven Crystal Balls, Prisoners of the Sun, The Black Island, and The Calculus Affair. He had even mentioned how Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon would be great for the third or fourth sequels.

However, that was in 2011. The last we heard anything emphatic about the project was from Spielberg in 2018, when he declared that “Tintin is not dead!"