HOWZAT

5: Star Trek: Planet of the Titans

The surprise success of the original Star Trek TV series in syndication, several years after its cancellation, led Paramount to consider a feature film outing for the original crew, with Invasion of the Body Snatchers director Philip Kaufman at the helm. In the script, subtitled Planet of the Titans, Kirk and his crew encounter an alien race they believe to be the mythical Titans of Earth legend, and, after travelling a million years into Earth’s past, introduce the concept of fire to primitive man. Although Paramount ultimately shelved the project in 1977, telling Kaufman – without apparent irony – “there’s no future in science fiction,” the success of Star Wars a few weeks later prompted a rethink, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture – dubbed The Slow Motion Picture for its glacial pace – was born.

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6: Childhood's End

Some years after Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey put Arthur C. Clarke on the filmmaking map, Universal Pictures began developing one of Clarke’s earlier stories, 1954’s Childhood’s End, in which mile-wide spaceships appear over the world’s major cities – a trope subsequently nicked by everything from Independence Day to Signs – heralding an evolutionary leap for humankind, in which the world’s children are taken away, by aliens resembling medieval depictions of the Devil, to meet their destiny among the stars. Despite lavish production designs and several scripts, the project languished in development hell until its recent revival by Boys Don’t Cry director Kimberly Peirce, who has written a fresh draft and hopes to take it before the cameras next year.

7: The Stars My Destination

Alfred Bester’s 1956 novel The Stars My Destination, which appears on virtually every list of the best science fiction novels, is a kind of “Count of Monte Cristo in space” described by sci-fi author William Gibson as “the perfect cyberpunk novel.” Despite numerous attempts to film the story – including one with Richard Gere as the book’s vengeful, tattooed anti-hero Gulliver Foyle, and another with Event Horizon director Paul W.S. Anderson at the helm – the project remained in limbo until Variety announced, in March 2006, that Universal had acquired the rights for Lorenzo di Bonaventura, producer of last year’s smash hit Transformers.

8: Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune

“A lot of people have tried to film Dune. They all failed,” stated the opus’s author, Frank Herbert – after David Lynch’s noble effort reached the screen in 1984. A more promising adaptation was proposed in the mid seventies, with Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky overseeing production designs by H.R. Giger, British artist Chris Foss, and French comic book artist Jean ‘Moebius’ Giraud. Among Jodorowsky’s more outlandish ideas was offering the role of Emperor Shaddam IV to Salvador Dali, at a previously unheard-of salary of $100,000 per hour. Perhaps unsurprisingly, financing on the film fizzled. However, the two extant adaptations – Lynch’s, and a successful 2000 miniseries – will be joined, in 2010, by a third, with The Kingdom director Peter Berg at the helm.

9: Ridley Scott's I am Legend

Despite half a billion dollars in box office earnings, last year’s film version of Richard Matheson’s thrilling 1954 vampire novel, starring Will Smith, is only half a good movie (the first half, before the unconvincing computer-generated creatures show up). Far more promising was Ridley Scott’s 2000 adaptation, with Arnold Schwarzenegger roaming a deserted San Francisco hunting the nightmarish creatures which the rest of the population has become. Despite many script drafts, spectacular production designs, ambitious effects tests and a scheduled start date, Arnie’s waning box office clout led Warner Bros. to get cold feet. Star and director both walked – Arnie to Washington as governor of California, Scott to ancient Rome as director of Gladiator.

10: The Outer Limits

Following the success of Species (three sequels and counting) and Stargate (two successful TV spin-offs so far), MGM planned a big-screen revival of its most famous sci-fi brand, the classic TV anthology The Outer Limits. An outbreak of a terrifying ‘sleepy sickness’ puts 99.9% of the world’s population into comas, preparing the planet for a hostile takeover by aliens who’ve studied human behaviour closely enough to know that the best way to spread the disease is through infected currency. With echoes of Outbreak, Signs, and the John Mills version of Quatermass, The Outer Limits could be a future sci-fi blockbuster, if Tom Cruise – whose newly-revived United Artists now holds the rights – decides to follow Minority Report and Wars of the Worlds with a third foray into science fiction territory (his religious views aside).

The full story behind these and many more lost science fiction films can be found in The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made by David Hughes, published 25 July by Titan Books , priced £9.99.

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