Still 'Almost': The Hollywood Projects That Have Been Coming Soon Since You Were a Different Person

There is a special category of Hollywood film that exists somewhere between a rumor and a promise. It has a title. Sometimes it has a poster. Occasionally, it has a director — though not always the same one it started with. It has been "in development" for so long that the original target audience has aged out of the demographic entirely and their kids are now the target audience.

Welcome to development hell. Population: your childhood hopes.

Here at NoWebsiteYet, we feel a deep personal kinship with these projects. We, too, are something that is coming. Just not yet. So consider this our love letter — and our cautionary tale — to the films that mastered the art of the perpetual almost.

The Godfather of All Delays: Renfield and the Dracula Extended Universe That Wasn't

Let's start with a classic. Universal Pictures has been trying to build a shared monster universe since roughly the invention of cinema. They had a plan. They had Tom Cruise. They had a movie called The Mummy that was supposed to launch everything. What they got instead was a critical disaster, a franchise implosion, and a very expensive lesson in not announcing a universe before you've made a single movie anyone liked.

The so-called "Dark Universe" was announced in 2017 with a logo, a press event, and a cast photo that looked like a very serious Halloween party. By 2018, it was functionally dead. Universal has since quietly pivoted to just making individual monster movies without the connective tissue. Which, ironically, worked better. The Invisible Man (2020) was genuinely terrifying and nobody had to sit through a Nick Fury cameo.

Time in development hell: Conceptually, Universal has been attempting this since the 1930s. The modern attempt lasted about fourteen months before collapsing under the weight of its own ambition. That's not a franchise. That's a Kickstarter that ran out of steam.

The One That Actually Made It (And We're Still Processing That)

For decades, Deadpool languished at Fox while Ryan Reynolds reportedly kept the script in a drawer and willed it into existence through sheer parasocial energy. The character had already been badly mishandled in X-Men Origins: Wolverine — a cinematic crime for which the franchise later retroactively apologized, in the movie, using time travel. The Deadpool solo film was in some form of development from roughly 2000 until it finally released in 2016.

Sixteen years. The film made over $363 million domestically. Sometimes the wait is worth it. We choose to believe this about ourselves, too.

The Crown Jewel of Cinematic Limbo: Nightmare Alley and Guillermo del Toro's Career as a Waiting Room

Guillermo del Toro is one of the most beloved directors working today, and also one of the most prolific announcers of projects he cannot make yet. At any given moment, del Toro has approximately eleven films in various stages of development, several of which have been announced, re-announced, cast, recast, and occasionally mourned. His passion project At the Mountains of Madness, a Lovecraft adaptation he has been trying to get made since at least 2010, remains in limbo as of this writing. He has described it as his dream project so many times that the dream itself has become the content.

This is not a criticism. Del Toro's passion is genuine and his output, when it arrives, is extraordinary. It's just that Hollywood's development process treats creative ambition like a DMV line — technically moving, but never quite arriving.

The Sequel That Took 30 Years and Still Somehow Felt Rushed

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny finally arrived in 2023, a full 15 years after Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and 42 years after Raiders of the Lost Ark. Harrison Ford was 80 years old. They de-aged him digitally for the opening sequence. The movie was... fine. It existed. People had opinions about it.

The point is not whether the film was good. The point is that the gap between announcement and delivery had become so vast that expectations had calcified into something almost geological. When a project takes that long, it stops being a movie and starts being a cultural obligation. You're not watching a film. You're completing a relationship.

Why Does This Keep Happening?

The mechanics of development hell are surprisingly mundane for something that produces such dramatic results. Projects stall for a few consistent reasons:

Rights issues are the silent killer. A property gets optioned, the option lapses, someone else picks it up, they can't agree on creative direction, the option lapses again, a streaming service gets involved, they merge with another company, and suddenly it's been 12 years and nobody remembers who owns Cowboy Bebop.

Director turnover is the second great villain. A film gets a director, the director leaves to do something else, the new director has a different vision, the studio doesn't like the new vision, they hire a third director who is fired after two weeks under mysterious circumstances, and the film is now "exploring options."

The budget problem is especially relevant for ambitious projects. Studios will greenlight a concept but balk at what it actually costs to execute. The project then spends years being "scaled" — a word that means "made worse and cheaper until it's unrecognizable."

And sometimes, honestly, nobody really wanted to make it. The announcement was the point. The buzz was the product. The actual film was optional.

The Ones Still Waiting

As of right now, Wicked Part 2 is technically scheduled. Avatar 3 is apparently coming in 2025, which is what they said about Avatar 2 for a decade. A live-action How to Train Your Dragon is in production, because apparently the animated one was too good to leave alone. The Flash sequel is almost certainly not happening, but nobody has officially said so yet.

And somewhere in a development document that hasn't been updated since 2019, there is a film with a great title, a fascinating premise, and a director who has since moved to television. It will be announced again soon. It will be coming soon.

Just not yet.

The Honest Truth About Waiting

Development hell is not purely a failure state. Sometimes the delay is the project finding itself. Sometimes the technology catches up to the vision (Avatar, for all its faults, genuinely needed those years). Sometimes the cultural moment arrives only after a long gestation and the film lands exactly when it was supposed to.

But sometimes a movie has just been "in development" since 2004 and nobody has the heart to call it.

We at NoWebsiteYet understand the assignment. We are also something in development. We are also coming soon. We have a concept, a vibe, and a deep commitment to eventually having content.

The difference is, we're honest about it.

Check back soon. Or don't. We'll probably still be here, almost ready.