The famously controlling director of Fight Club and The Killer is responsible for Hollywood’s most tantalising what ifs. Here are just a few
The release last week of the trailer for David Fincher’s new film The Killer, starring Michael Fassbender as an implacable and highly organised assassin who goes rogue, caused much excitement over social media ahead of its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. But there was also palpable relief that the picture actually exists.
It was first announced that Fincher would be adapting a French graphic novel by Alexis ‘Matz’ Nolent in 2007, with his regular collaborator Brad Pitt tipped to star. As the years went by, many assumed that, like many other projects that the brilliant but mercurial director has been associated with, it would simply end up abandoned.
It is, of course, par for the course in Hollywood that many films are announced and then never get made. There is not a director working today who has not spent time and effort on developing a picture only for it to fall apart. Yet the exacting Fincher, who is notorious for a Kubrickian level of on-set control – including endless takes – has been involved with numerous projects that have come tantalisingly close to completion, but then dissipated.
Some would undoubtedly have been masterpieces, others were probably better off abandoned, and one was halfway through filming when the plug was pulled. Here are 10 unrealised David Fincher films and television series that can all be filed into the “what if” category, as we eagerly await the bullet-like arrival of The Killer.