Since Georges Melies' 1902 'Trip to the Moon' cinema has been in love with science fiction. The romance has been rocky though, with many potential classics lost to spiralling budgets or studio whim. David Hughes the author of a new book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, shares his favourites with us

1: Vincent Ward's Alien 3

Having rejected a script by sci-fi author William Gibson, the producers of the Alien franchise planned to follow James Cameron’s “Vietnam in space” Aliens with an ambitious, arty third instalment by Vincent Ward, the visionary New Zealand-born director of The Navigator and, more recently, The River Queen. A planet made of wood, and spaceships modelled on clipper ships, were just two of the strange ideas in Ward’s approach. Sadly, it never got off the ground, though Fox ultimately went with another maverick director, David Fincher.

His much-derided Alien3 is, by the way, ripe for re-appraisal; sadly, a director’s cut of the film – an unofficial version of which is included in the Alien Quadrilogy DVD set – will probably remain the Greatest Sci-Fi Movie Never Seen

2: Superman -vs- Batman

Having abandoned plans to make Tim Burton’s Superman Lives with Nicolas Cage as Clark Kent/Superman, Warner Bros. decided to take an alternative approach to their long-gestating revival of the Superman movie franchise: Batman vs Superman, a script by Se7en screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker in which Gotham’s caped crusader would face off against Metropolis’ Man of Steel.

With pre-production in full swing under Troy director Wolfgang Petersen, the studio switched gears again, when a brand new script by Lost creator J.J. Abrams plonked onto their desks. Eventually, they abandoned this idea to back Brett Ratner, and later Bryan Singer, to make the disappointing Superman Returns.

3: Steven Spielberg's Night Skies

Contractually obliged to produce a sequel to the smash hit Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg came up with the idea of a family attacked in their farm by malevolent extraterrestrials, a kind of “Straw Dogs with aliens”. One of the invaders, he decided would befriend the farmer’s young son, and during the shooting of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg and Mrs Harrison Ford – screenwriter Melissa Mathison – isolated this idea and turned it into the basis of what would be his biggest film, E.T. the Extraterrestrial. Spielberg didn’t abandon the family-in-peril idea, however: he simply altered the evil aliens into ghosts and produced another smash hit: Poltergeist.

4: John Carter of Mars

Tarzan author Edgar Rice Burroughs’ other famous creation, John Carter, was an American civil war veteran who uses a form of astral travel to visit a Mars crawling with monsters. Twenty years after its 1912 debut in the pages of a pulp magazine, John Carter of Mars almost became the first feature-length animated film.

Despite Bob Clampett’s stunning early animation tests, described as akin to a moving oil painting, Disney abandoned the plans and made Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs instead. It would be another eighty years before the project was revived as a live action feature for Pixar, now due for release in 2012 – the one hundredth anniversary of the story’s first publication.

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