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Every Unmade John Carpenter Project That Would Have Been Amazing
John Carpenter is one of the most influential genre filmmakers of the past few decades, having created cult classics and cinematic landmarks such as Halloween, The Thing, and Escape From New York, among countless others. Despite his impressive amount of creations, though, the director and composer has a lengthy list of unmade and unrealized projects that either never saw the light of day or were picked up by someone else. Unfortunately for Carpenter fans, a decent chunk of these would arguably have made for riveting cinema if they ever reached completion.
Few filmmakers have had a tumultuous of a career as John Carpenter, who enjoyed success early in his career but met commercial failure throughout his working years. He didn't fare much better on the critical side at first, either, but since their time of release, his films have been reevaluated by audiences of all backgrounds and have become classic pieces of genre filmmaking in their own right. However, Carpenter's bad luck at the box office partly led to his accumulation of uncompleted projects.
Carpenter has largely stepped away from filmmaking in the twenty-first century and spends most of his time playing video games and watching basketball, so it's unlikely fans will ever get to see him finally realize all of his ideas. Still, though, the man is iconic enough and was prolific enough to develop cult followings for even his unfilmed screenplays. Here are all of his uncompleted creative ventures that would be a dream come true if they had made it to the big screen.
Meltdown
One of John Carpenter's earliest projects was this slasher-like thriller that the director described as "Halloween in a nuclear power plant." The script, which is still available to read online, features a mysterious hazmat suit-clad figure hunting people down while a reactor meltdown threatens the crew of the plant. Carpenter stated that he penned the project in 1977, and it was originally entitled The Prometheus Crisis. The screenplay is tense, intertwining Cold War political commentary and the scientifically existential threat of a nuclear disaster with more traditional slasher fare. At one point, writer and director John Dahl replaced the killer with terrorists and Dolph Lundgren was attached to turn the story into an action movie, but studio legal troubles stopped the production from ever happening.
Firestarter
Firestarter helped Drew Barrymore gain star recognition upon its release in 1984, but the film is barely remembered beyond being one of the actress's first major roles. Carpenter was originally slated to direct the movie, but he lost the job after the box office bomb that was The Thing. The new script, written by Stanley Mann, was apparently more faithful to Stephen King's novel, but King himself stated that he was unsatisfied with the final result. Carpenter would go on to direct another Stephen King adaptation, Christine, to an unsurprisingly better critical legacy.
The Ninja
An adaptation of Eric Van Lustbader's martial arts revenge tale revolving around Japanese mysticism sounds like a fascinating fit for Carpenter, who has proven his unique prowess at the action genre. Originally, Irvin Kirshner of The Empire Strikes Back fame was going to direct the film, but talks with producers at 20th Century Fox fell flat. Carpenter didn't fare much better, with Fox telling him that his screenplay was impossible to film. The director left out of creative frustration, but thankfully went on to create his own take on martial arts adventure films with Big Trouble in Little China.
Santa Claus: The Movie
A family-friendly Santa film directed by the oft-proclaimed Master of Horror? That's what almost happened, except that Carpenter wanted to completely re-write the script, compose a score, cast Brian Dennehy in the lead role, and be allowed significant creative input on the final cut. Producers Ilya Salkind and Pierre Spengler of Superman moved on to hire Jeannot Szwarc to direct, but the final product was ultimately a huge bomb at the box office. One can only wonder what Carpenter's version would have been like.
