Ashcan dreamers: 10 films made only to preserve their copyrights

Movies get made for a million reasons: Artistic ambition; the allure of a perfect story intersecting with a receptive brain; the urge for two passionate creators to collaborate on something great. And, of course, for money. The pursuit of blockbuster dreams, films that fill thousands of theaters, the adulation of knowing you’ve made something so entertaining, so irresistible, that millions of people will give multiple hours of their time, and big handfuls of their cash, just to experience it. Whether aimed at the arthouse or the multiplex, movie-making is fundamentally about desire; it’s just too damn hard to make the dang things if you don’t desperately want the end result.

Usually.

Because there have, in the course of cinematic history, been those movies whose genesis has not been rooted in desires either artistic or financial. Films that were made, not to satisfy the wants of either the creative dreamer or the fiscal mastermind, but the obligations of contract law and copyright courts. Movies made, basically, because someone had to—maybe because it was the only way to hold on to film rights for another, grander project, or because some court battle had created a weird legal requirement that producers begrudgingly had to fulfil. These were movies that, essentially, no one wanted—and they have a nickname, pulled (fittingly, given how many superhero properties have fallen prey to the phenomenon over the years) from the annals of comic book history: Ashcan copies.

In the Wild West of early comics publishing, an ashcan comic was basically a fake comic book, a flashy cover with little or nothing in between it that was printed, patented, and then dumped in the trash so that companies could make a claim on a name or image they liked for some future use. (There being only so many synonyms for “Amazing,” “Thrilling,” and “Astounding” to go around back in the day.) In modern parlance, though, the term has mutated a bit. It’s now come to refer to the damned souls we’re about to talk about here: Movies that functionally exist only as placeholders. Including not just one, but two, centered on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.

1. The Hobbit (1967)

In the 1960s, the film rights to Tolkien’s work were in the hands of a guy named William Snyder, an American working primarily in distributing European movies to U.S. audiences, with a little sideline in animation. Snyder, who’d picked up the rights to Tolkien’s books “for peanuts” after noticing The Hobbit would make a great cartoon property for his frequent collaborator Gene Deitch, had always intended to make an animated version of Tolkien’s earlier book eventually. But in the mid ’60s—powered in part by the release of paperback editions of The Lord Of The Rings in the U.S., which shot Tolkien from well-liked fantasy author to international bestseller—those rights suddenly got very valuable, very fast, and the producer found himself sitting on a potential goldmine. The problem: His contract said he needed to make a “full-color film” out of his purchase by the end of June, and so that’s exactly what he did: Snyder abruptly gave Deitch (who’d spent the last year of his life trying to fit The Hobbit into a feature-length script) just 30 days to finish the “film,” forcing the animator to scrap his work, scribble out a synopsis, and throw together a 12-minute “movie” that covered a very truncated version of the famous story. Thirty days not being enough time to actually animate anything, the resulting short (co-drawn by Czech illustrator Adolf Born, who provided its papercraft look) is mostly a series of colorful, if cartoonish, pictures by Deitch and Born that the camera dutifully pans over, while narration describes the tale. It’s actually pretty charming—including the odd decision to rename its menacing dragon “Slag”—but also a clear product of horrific and harried compromise. Until the 21st century (when Snyder’s descendants allowed it out onto the internet), The Hobbit screened exactly once, in a Manhattan projection room, to an audience of people Snyder had paid to watch it and who then signed statements attesting that they had, in fact, watched a “full-color film” of The Hobbit. Obligations ostensibly fulfilled, Snyder reportedly sold the rights back to the Tolkien estate for $100,000, massively profiting off the whole weird adventure, while providing an asterisk for anyone fielding trivia questions about the first filmed version of Tolkien’s work.

2. Fantastic Four (1994)

If you want the full story of the making of the Roger Corman-produced, never-released Fantastic Four movie from the mid-1990s, look no further than our own oral history of its abruptly truncated production. The film’s status as an ashcan copy, meanwhile, is a matter of some historical uncertainty: most narratives of its making suggest, or even outright state, that producer Bernd Eichinger was simply looking to extend film rights he’d picked up on the cheap from Stan Lee back in 1986, and the decision to shelve the resulting (and completed) film before it could be released certainly supports that idea. (As does the fact that Eichinger maintained a tight enough association with the Fantastic Four brand to be credited as a producer on both of its mid-2000s film installments.) Released only in bootleg form, Oley Sassone’s film actually has a decent reputation as a goofy, low-budget cult movie, with Alex Hyde-White, Rebecca Staab, Jay Underwood, and Michael Bailey Smith as its versions of Mr. Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, Human Torch, and The Thing. (The latter of whom even had an animatronic, expressive head to go with his rubber suit, which must have taken up a decent chunk of the film’s meager million-dollar budget.) The biggest tragedy of Fantastic Four might be that it was probably an ashcan copy that nobody knew was destined for the heap; all of its stars were expecting to get at least a cheap-o version of the Hollywood premiere experience out of it, if nothing else—only to have the movie yanked from the schedule, never to be (officially) seen again.

3. My Name Is Modesty (2004)

The “Quentin Tarantino Presents…” brand that popped up on posters and box art in the 2000s was mostly a way for the well-known auteur to spread the love, shining some of his fast-talking, highly violent light on films that might otherwise have fallen through the cracks. (Notably, Eli Roth’s Hostel rode Tarantino’s name to torture porn box office success in 2005.) Sometimes, though, it feels like Tarantino let his name get slapped on a DVD box simply as a favor, as with this 2004 attempt to translate the long-running Modesty Blaise spy comics to the screen (and hold on to the rights to the series for Tarantino’s long-time partners at Miramax). Reportedly filmed in 18 days in Bucharest, the film was a rare directorial effort from Scott Spiegel, an actor, writer, and director with a powerful knack for making friends with many of the hottest directors of his generation, including the Coens, Tarantino—who crashed on Spiegel’s couch in his pre-Reservoir Dogs days—and Sam Raimi, who he made short films with in the pre-Evil Dead era. Modesty suggests Spiegel wasn’t quite in his buddies’ league, though, being the equivalent of a bottle episode action movie, as the title character (Alexandra Staden) distracts a violent thief (a pre-Game Of Thrones Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) with tales of her upbringing and training in badassery. Meanwhile—and at the risk of engaging in speculation—it’s possible Spiegel was recruited to hold down the rights for Tarantino himself; the Pulp Fiction creator has long flirted with the idea of adapting the comic strip for the screen.

4. Porky’s Pimpin’ Pee-Wee (2009)

So powerful is the lure of an established name that even the Porky’s brand—celebrated by aficionados of VHS box covers promoting bathroom-based perversion everywhere—hasn’t been immune to squabbles for the rights. Twenty-four years after Porky’s Revenge!, a tiny studio called Mola Entertainment spent $500,000 and 15 days out of the lives of multiple human beings in order to create Pimpin’ Pee-Wee, a film notable only for a) having one of the least phonetically pleasant titles in all of cinema history and b) personally screwing over Howard Stern. See, Stern had been trying to make his own Porky’s remake for years—ah, how sweet to dream—but Mola’s movie, rushed out just ahead of the company losing the rights, gave the studio enough of a claim on the franchise to make the whole situation very legally sticky. (In fact, there’s a whole other company involved in the squabble, too, all fighting it out for the beating artistic heart of the Porky’s soul.) As for the film itself, it looks like a particularly gross form of the 2000s-era sex comedy, with the kid from Picket Fences (Adam Wylie, the titular Pee-Wee) all grown up and running a brothel out of his house in the hopes of getting laid, which seems like a problem that shouldn’t take a feature’s length of time to resolve. Imagine being the lawyer who had to sue someone else over this; imagine what lies you’d tell your parents about what you do for a living, instead.

5. Atlas Shrugged Part I (2011)

Who is John Aglialoro? Easy: He’s the Ayn Rand devotee who spent fully 20 years trying to get somebody to give him the money to make a movie version of Rand’s objectivist doorstopper Atlas Shrugged, only to race to pay for the thing with his own money (and using his own co-written script) in the waning hours of his option. People with an over-inflated sense of the public interest in high-stakes railroad drama had been trying to get a movie or TV version of Rand’s 1957 novel made since the 1970s—a process often impeded by Rand herself, who usually wanted final approval of the script. In 1992 (after the author’s death), Atlas Society member Aglialoro picked up the rights and began shopping them around, including an effort to get a four-hour TV miniseries made for TNT in 1999 that got killed by a massive corporate merger. (There’s some kind of moral or irony there, but we don’t feel like sifting through a 1,200-page book to sort it out.) None of them worked, and Aglialoro’s efforts steadily burnt through creatives, cash, and, most importantly, time, until he woke up one day in May 2010, realized his 18-year option expired in a month, and set to writing a script with low-budget horror producer Brian Patrick O’Toole. The resulting film ended up going into production on June 13, just two days before the option would have expired, with Taylor Schilling and Grant Bowler in its leading roles. Plans to fund a Part II and Part III with the profits from Part I were mildly stymied when it didn’t make any; nevertheless, Aglialoro pressed on anyway, producing two more movies with even lower budgets (and brand new casts for each installment) to finish out Rand’s long-winded tale.

6. Hellraiser: Revelations (2011) &
7. Hellraiser: Judgment (2018)

Ever since it picked up the rights to the franchise for its very first release, Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth, former Weinstein fiefdom Dimension Films had been engaged in a long-form game of kick-the-can to keep the Clive Barker-originated horror franchise in its control. For years, the studio dreamed of creating a full-fledged remake of Barker’s groundbreaking (and shockingly successful) 1987 original, sometimes even luring Barker himself back into the fold for brief periods of development. Each time said project fell apart or stalled, though—before ultimately finding fruition with the 2022 movie—the studio found itself in need of a cheaper, quicker alternative to get out quickly to keep the rights from lapsing. To solve this problem, Dimension turned twice to Gary J. Tunnicliffe, a veteran makeup artist who’d been with the films since Hell On Earth, and who’d developed his own fairly idiosyncratic vision of the franchise’s pain-and-pleasure-filled Hell over the years. In between working his day job on gigs like Scream 4, Tunnicliffe wrote a script for Revelations (which was directed by Victor Garcia) and then, seven years of fruitless rebooting later, Judgment, which he both directed and starred in as an infernal bureaucrat for the “Stygian Inquisition.” These ninth and tenth Hellraiser films are most notable for being so slapdash that series star Doug Bradley—a man who’d been perfectly content to get the overzealous acupuncture treatment for Hellraisers 1 through 8—couldn’t be bothered to come back for them, forcing new actors into the Pinhead part. We’re not sure which of the following additional condemnations is more damning, though: That Judgment was reportedly so personally embarrassing to Harvey Weinstein that it only ever saw release because he was no longer in a position to block it from coming out, or that Revelations provoked the following, absolutely brilliant quote from a weary Barker on Twitter: “If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.”

8. The Bourne Legacy (2012)

This one comes straight from the Damon’s mouth: In a 2012 interview not long after the release of the fourth Bourne movie—in which Jeremy Renner took over from him to skulk around the murkier portions of Robert Ludlum’s super-spy-heavy universe—Matt Damon told ScreenRant, “The studio had made a deal with the [Ludlum] estate to make another film and so they weren’t in breach of their contract, they had to get a Jason Bourne movie out for 2012. And that’s when Tony [Gilroy] came up with the idea of how to do one with Jeremy.” Gilroy, who’d previously co-written the three Damon Bourne movies, also stepped up to direct the film, taking over from Paul Greengrass for a less frenetic version of the franchise’s iconic action directing. Most people who bothered to see Legacy couldn’t muster up much negative to say about it, as it tracked the story of Bourne-like operative Alex Cross as he got into some extremely Jason Bourne-ass scrapes. The biggest condemnation might have come from the studio itself, which listlessly green-lit both Renner and Gilroy to make a sequel… and then chucked those plans out the window the exact minute Damon and Greengrass announced they were down to return to the franchise for 2016’s Jason Bourne.

9. Man Of Steel (2013)

Easily the highest budgeted entry on this list, Zack Snyder’s franchise-launcher Man Of Steel also has one of the most complex legal backstories, rooted as it is in the near-century of conflict between Superman’s creators and the comic company he’s synonymous with. The full battle between the descendants of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and D.C. Comics is way too complicated to get into here, but the relevant portions for Steel arrive in 2009, when a court ruled that Siegel’s family had regained the rights to Superman’s origins. And while they weren’t owed any additional back royalties for any of the movies that had been made in preceding decades, they would have possible claim to future ones—and a right to sue for lost earnings if D.C. and Warner Bros. opted to respond to the ruling by refusing to make another movie whose takings they’d have to share. As it happens, Warner Bros. has already been poking around at reviving the franchise after 2006’s Superman Returns, but the new deadline—start development on a new Supes movie by 2011, or else face legal wrath—kicked the project that would eventually be Man Of Steel into full development. With a story co-written by Christopher Nolan (working with his Dark Knight collaborator David S. Goyer) and Snyder at the helm, Man Of Steel divided critics, but still made more money than every other movie on this list put together when it eventually arrived in June of 2013. (Two months after another court had overturned the previous ruling, stripped the rights from the Siegel family, and handed them right back to D.C.; thus does the never-ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way continue to never end.)

Honorable Mentions: Winter Dragon (2015)
Dick Tracy Special (2010) and Dick Tracy Special—Tracy Zooms In (2023)

Film isn’t the only medium where the ashcan copy exists: TV’s had its fair share of legally mandated productions too, although most of them never make it out of the pilot or TV movie stage. Often these get burnt off at odd hours, like the Wheel Of Time “adaptation” Winter Dragon, which aired exactly once, in an infomercial timeslot, in the wee hours of the morning on FXX in 2015. Produced by Red Eagle Entertainment, the 22-minute production loosely adopts the prologue chapter of Robert Jordan’s first fantasy epic, which conveniently forgoes big battles or special effects for a budget-friendly conversation between two friends-turned-mortal-rivals. (It presumably worked, too; Red Eagle held on long enough to be credited in the production of Amazon’s far more lavish Wheel Of Time series after the mega-giant bought up the rights a few years later.) Our personal favorites, though, are the two Dick Tracy specials that ran on Turner Classic Movies in 2010 and 2023, presumably as personal favors to Warren Beatty, who appears in both as his version of the comic strip character. The latter, especially, is a work of mad genius, with Beatty-as-Tracy trading banter with Leonard Maltin, criticizing the trailer for his own 1990 Tracy movie, and doing awkward insult comedy with Beatty-as-Beatty. No one has ever come out and said that these two half-hour specials were deliberately designed to help Beatty retain the rights to the characters for his own deeply optimistic dreams, but the alternative—that TCM just thought, hell, why not have an 86-year-old man dress up in a bright yellow trench coat to match wits with Leonard Maltin in honor of a 33-year-old movie—is simply too weird to contemplate.

10. The Lord Of The Rings: The War Of The Rohirrim (2024)

And finally, we return to Tolkien, for what’s ultimately become a failed instance of the ashcan copy tactic. (Contractually failed, that is; we’re still pretty excited for this one, which arrives in theaters on December 13.) 60 years after William Snyder’s creative approach to rights maintenance—and coming up on 10 since the last Hobbit movie, The Battle Of Five Armies, stormed its way into theaters—Warner Bros. Discovery was in the position of needing to convince rights owner The Saul Zaentz Company (which had owned the film rights to Tolkien’s work since the 1970s, and licensed them to WBD subsidiary New Line for all of the Peter Jackson Middle-earth movies) that it was still using those rights in a meaningful way. Hence the plan to fast-track an anime adaptation of one of Tolkien’s voluminous appendices into theaters, with director Kenji Kamiyama tapped to direct. Thing is, it didn’t work: Per Variety, the two companies still got into a big fight about whether Warner Bros. was doing enough with the rights, or whether they’d reverted to Zaentz, all of which was rendered moot when the company went ahead and sold the whole thing to all-consuming video gaming mega-giant Embracer Group in August of 2022. Embracer then happily licensed the movie rights back to Warner, so it can go on making those Andy Serkis Gollum movies we don’t purport to understand, so, hey, there’s that issue solved. All of which leaves War Of The Rohirrim, which stars a returning Miranda Otto as its narrator, in addition to Brian Cox, Gaia Wise, and Luke Pasqualino, with no reason for existing—except, possibly, the desire to tell a beautifully rendered story set in a world beloved by millions of fans. Crazy idea, but it just might work.