Movies That Were Canceled Because The Star Quit

It's not unusual for actors to leave movies during various stages of production. Sometimes, an actor has even started shooting scenes only to decide they want to walk away from the project for one reason or another, which has led to some crazy last-minute actor replacements in movies. There is typically a whole lot of money tied into a film, and a lot of people depending on its success, so abandoning the project altogether is often the last resort. That being said, it does happen from time to time.

This feature looks at examples where an actor quitting a movie they were either attached to or at least heavily considering led to it collapsing. When a big name star departs a project that was being built around them, sometimes there's no other option but to can it. While some of these movies did end up being revived in some way later on, most of them were shut down entirely and remain unfinished or unmade.

After "Pulp Fiction" saved John Travolta's failing career, the actor had a renaissance for the ages, giving him the kind of success in the second half of the '90s that most actors barely see in their entire filmographies. In fact, he was having such good fortune that, in 1996, he even felt emboldened to walk away from a potential $17 million paycheck – and risk a huge lawsuit in the process. The movie in question was "The Double," to be directed by controversial filmmaker Roman Polanski based on the 1846 Dostoyevsky novel of the same name.

Creative differences between Travolta and Polanski flared up from the very first table read. "Our views on the film were completely different: I wanted to do a dramatic comedy, he wanted a cartoon," Travolta told Paris-Match (via E! News), adding that Polanski added a nude scene to the script without his knowledge. "At the first reading, Roman didn't like my acting. He told me I was bad and showed me what I should do."

The last straw for Travolta was that Polanski decided to add a nude scene "for no reason," the actor said. This caused Travolta to quit the movie, which led to production companies Mandalay Entertainment and Liteoffer suing him. Travolta countersued, saying that the company failed to honor a deal for him to star in "Donnie Brasco," which came out in 1997. "The Double," meanwhile, was never made. The suit was eventually settled out of court.

"Arrive Alive" seemed to have everything going for it when it was first announced in 1989: A script from the duo who penned the subversive holiday hit "Scrooged," the director of "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation," and top lead talents in Willem Dafoe and Joan Cusack. It was to be a noir/rom-com hybrid starring Dafoe as a detective and Cusack as his exotic dancer female foil. But, to make the obvious joke, "Arrive Alive" did anything but that.

Paramount apparently ordered the movie on the attached talent and the basic premise alone, and wasn't fully prepared for how dark and not-especially-silly the script actually was. It was so dark, in fact, that Bill Murray — who the writing team of Michael O'Donoghue and Mitch Glazer initially offered the lead to in the hopes of working with the actor again — turned it down after seeing how violent it was going to be.

When the studio saw the dailies from the first few weeks of filming, it demanded that slapstick comedy elements were added to the movie to liven things up. Murray would've pulled that off just fine. Dafoe, however, wasn't confident in his slapstick comedy abilities and quit the movie. Only 18 days into shooting, "Arrive Alive" was shut down — and when a replacement for Dafoe couldn't be found, it never resumed shooting.

Tony Jaa had been kicking around for a few years in small roles and as a stunt performer before 2003's "Ong-Bak: Muay Thai Warrior" put him on the map. In addition to helping introduce both the art of Muay Thai as well as Thai cinema to the world, the biggest impact of "Ong-Bak" was arguably the fact that it announced the arrival of film's newest action star. However, it would be over a decade before Jaa made his Hollywood debut, which he did when he joined the ever-growing cast of the "Fast & Furious" franchise for 2015's "Furious 7." Going to Hollywood was "a childhood dream," the actor told reporters (via Asia One).

It was in making the leap to the uber-popular action franchise and realizing his dream that Jaa reportedly got another movie canceled. At the time, Jaa had already been working on a movie called "A Man Will Rise" with Thailand-based production company Sahamongkol Film. The company claimed that Jaa breached his contract by leaving the film with only 20% of it completed, demanding that the actor give back the money already paid to him for "A Man Will Rise." The film never got finished, while Jaa went on to star in several underrated martial arts movies in the years that followed.

One of Will Ferrell's breakout characters on "Saturday Night Live" was his version of president George W. Bush, a portrayal that became the basis of his Broadway show "You're Welcome America," which ran for just over a month in 2009. Given his long-term success playing an exaggerated version of a former president, it might not be a surprise that Ferrell considered doing it again with Ronald Reagan in 2016. However, things were a little bit different for "Reagan," a movie Ferrell was announced to be producing as well as starring in.

Ferrell was set to play the U.S. president for the bulk of the 1980s. It was revealed that the movie would have seen Ferrell as Reagan in the later years of his presidency, and seemingly poking fun at the Alzheimer's-induced dementia that Reagan was beginning to suffer around the time. This quite understandably sparked a big backlash from not only The Alzheimer's Association, but also Reagan's children, Michael Reagan and Patti Davis.

Davis took it the furthest when she penned an open letter via The Daily Beast severely condemning the planned movie for making light of such a devastating disease. "Perhaps you have managed to retain some ignorance about Alzheimer's and other versions of dementia," Davis said, addressing Ferrell directly. "Perhaps if you knew more, you would not find the subject humorous." Unsurprisingly, Ferrell dropped out of "Reagan" just two days after the ill-advised film was announced and it never got made.

Cycling website Podium Café refers to "The Yellow Jersey" as "the cycling film Hollywood loved but could never make." If you've never heard of it, you're probably not a cycling enthusiast — and since nobody has ever managed to make a film version of Ralph Hurne's 1973 novel of the same name, "The Yellow Jersey" hasn't been able to give the sport the popularity boost that often comes with being at the center of a major motion picture.

The film rights to the novel were first acquired the year it was released, but it wouldn't be until 1983 that any measurable work on a film version had really gotten underway. At that point, the movie finally had an attached star for the first time: Dustin Hoffman. "The book is about the last moment of your youth and I think that's the way I feel now about myself," Hoffman said at the time. "Actors say 'If I'm going to die, let it be on stage.' This guy says 'If I'm going to die, let it be while trying to make this curve.' I think I can relate to that.”

Three years and over a million dollars spent on research and preproduction later, and not a single frame of film had been shot. When director Michael Cimino (who already had diminished clout after the massive failure of "Heaven's Gate") left the project, producers suggested multiple replacements, none of which Hoffman liked. Hoffman eventually got fed up with the troubled production and walked away, sending the project into development hell.

When the reality of Bruce Willis' final years of acting and the circumstances of his tragic retirement became clear, most people stopped giving the actor a hard time for pumping out so many forgettable direct-to-video flicks in the 2010s and early-2020s. Given the reason he wanted to make so many movies, it was obviously in his best interests to tough it out and actually finish any film that he started. So, for there to have been a film during that period that Willis actually decided he needed to walk away from, that's definitely saying something. That movie was called "Wake," and had entered production in 2015 with not only Willis but also Ben Kingsley, Piper Perabo, and Ellen Burstyn attached to star.

The action thriller had only been in production for 10 days when financing issues led to a quick halt on filming. That halt was only supposed to last about a month, but then the proposed start date to resume filming came and went without any positive news. Eventually, Willis got tired of waiting for the movie to find its money and he moved on to other projects, as did director John Pogue. Without Willis attached, "Wake" was less likely than ever to get the financing it needed to resume production — and, not surprisingly, it never did.

If the director of "10 Things I Hate About You" made another film called "10 Things I Hate About Life," you'd probably assume it was a sequel. Your assumption would be incorrect. In fact, other than sharing the rom-com genre, there seems to very little that tied "You" to "Life" other than helmer Gil Junger and producer Andrew Lazar. "10 Things I Hate About Life" actually promised to be as dark as its title suggested: It was going to be about two people who meet while trying to take their own lives and subsequently embark on a romance. It definitely would have been interesting to see a rom-com built on such a downer of a premise, but alas, it doesn't look like we ever will.

Things got underway in 2012, but the double dose of production company drama and the pregnancy of star Evan Rachel Wood put filming of the movie on a lengthy hiatus. By 2014, news began to circulate that Wood refused to return to the production, with the actor claiming that she'd yet to be paid for the work she'd already done. This was in response to producers suing Wood for $30 million for breach of contract for not showing up, a move that her legal team called "preposterous." As a result of Wood's departure and all the legal wrangling, the movie fell apart.

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John Wayne did a few comedies in his time, but he wasn't willing to poke fun at the film genre that made him famous and kept him working over the decades, and that led to a film being scrapped. When Peter Bogdanovich was first getting started as a filmmaker, he teamed with novelist Larry McMurtry to write a script about the final days of the American West. The movie, to be titled "Streets of Laredo," would have taken playful jabs at the various tropes of the genre, which is the part that John Wayne took umbrage with.

"John Wayne wasn't going to lend himself to a total critique of the genre he had been working in for forty years," Don Graham, a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, told Texas Monthly. "He wasn't going to make 'Blazing Saddles.'" When Wayne bowed out of the film (which was also set to star James Stewart and Henry Fonda), it all fell apart – it had been written with Wayne in mind, after all.

McMurtry would later dust off some of the ideas he had for "Streets of Laredo" for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Lonesome Dove," which was adapted into a hit miniseries starring Robert Duvall, Tommy Lee Jones, Danny Glover, Diane Lane, and Angelica Houston in 1989. The book eventually had a follow-up called — you guessed it — "Streets of Laredo."

Winona Ryder's career was in a weird spot when the new millennium rolled around. She might have just come off her role in the buzzy "Girl, Interrupted" in 1999, but 2000's "Lost Souls" was savaged by critics (it holds a damning 8% rating on Rotten Tomatoes). 2001 brought her infamous shoplifting conviction, as well as her somewhat mysterious exit from an indie drama called "Lily and the Secret Planting." 

The movie was set to star Ryder as an introvert who develops a relationship with a nursery owner's assistant played by Gael García Bernal. With a proposed budget of only $5 million, it was definitely going to be a scaled down production, and Ryder was very excited about the project. However, she got extremely sick on set in what was only described as a stomach bug.

Only a month after her involvement was announced, news stories of Ryder quitting the film as the result of her recovery from her sickness hit the major outlets. Initially, it was suggested that Kate Winslet had been asked to take over from Ryder, but that never came to fruition, and without a big-name lead attached, "Lily and the Secret Planting" withered and died.

According to Essentially Sports, Arnold Schwarzenegger "pioneered the comic book superhero physique in Hollywood." So why, then, has he barely been involved with comic book adaptations over the years? Well, if things had gone a little differently, his wild role as Mr. Freeze in 1997's "Batman & Robin" wouldn't have been his first attempt to bring a comic book character to the big screen. 

Steven E. de Souza, who penned the screenplays for the Schwarzenegger films "Commando" and "The Running Man," was all lined up to work with the Austrian actor and bodybuilder a third time on a film called "Sgt. Rock" back in the 1980s. It was based on the DC comics WWII soldier character of the same name, and de Souza had Arnie in mind for the title role. The project would have also re-teamed Schwarzenegger with his "Predator" director John McTiernan, but it all fell apart because of location issues.

The film collapsed when Schwarzenegger was informed that he'd have to travel to Europe for the shoot. He had been assured that production would take place in the U.S., so he walked, and "Sgt. Rock" was no more. "The fact that Arnold didn't make the movie and didn't get sued makes me think that somewhere there must have been a binding memo from a lawyer or from within the studio confirming that he was promised a U.S. shoot," de Souza told Den of Geek. "So that's why the movie came to a complete halt."

It eventually hit cineplexes in 2006, but the first version of Darren Aronofsky's "The Fountain" was outright canceled when Brad Pitt quit. Warner Bros. actually went as far as auctioning off some huge sets (including a 10-story Mayan temple) that had already been built for the production in Australia, that's how dead it was. In 2002, just weeks before the shoot was scheduled to get underway, Pitt walked away from the project after the script changes he requested weren't agreed upon. He ended up making "Troy" instead.

Mel Gibson, George Clooney, and Russell Crowe were all linked with the project following Pitt's departure, but nothing materialized. Aronofsky initially admitted defeat, but he couldn't shake his desire to make the movie. A few years later, he approached Warner Bros. about reviving it, with the studio only agreeing if Aronofsky could drastically reduce the original budget. It agreed to his new, cheaper version (the budget dropped from $100 million to just $35 million), and Aronofsky got Hugh Jackman to be his new lead.