5 Long-Delayed Western Movies Still Stuck in Development Hell

Hollywood has never exactly been short on Westerns. The essential Western movies alone could keep a devoted viewer busy for years, and anyone hungry for dusty showdowns, frontier justice, and outlaw legends can find plenty on streaming services and home video. Given how deeply the genre runs through film history, it might seem as if any new Western would be an easy sell. In reality, the trail is littered with ambitious Western projects that never made it beyond early development.

Over the years, some of the most celebrated filmmakers in the business have tried to mount Western movies, only to run into the kinds of delays, shifting priorities, and production obstacles that can derail even the most promising idea. These five notable unmade Westerns have spent years trapped in development hell. As of this writing, none appears any closer to reaching theaters than when it was first announced, and in some cases that announcement came decades ago.

No single problem explains why these films never rode into production. In certain cases, the directors or stars simply moved on. In others, financing proved difficult, schedules collapsed, or the practical demands of filming became too much. Whatever the reason, these unrealized Western movies were left stranded, unable to add their names to one of cinema’s most enduring genres.

Ridley Scott’s biggest movies have covered an astonishing range of genres. Across roughly five decades directing major feature films, Scott has moved from sci-fi horror with “Alien” to historical epics such as “Gladiator” and “The Last Duel,” from neo-noir like “Black Rain” to crime comedy with “Matchstick Men.” A famously prolific filmmaker who has sometimes directed two movies in the same year, Scott has explored nearly every cinematic landscape imaginable. Yet his long list of unmade films shows that not every project attached to his name makes it to the screen. One area he has clearly wanted to tackle is the Western.

In 2021, Scott again made clear that he remained eager to enter the genre. Soon after, “Freewalkers” appeared to be the project that might finally get him there. The film was once expected to begin shooting as early as March 2024, but those plans fell apart. Its story depended on a snowy setting, and after production was delayed, the necessary winter conditions could no longer be guaranteed. Scott then shifted his attention to directing the Jacob Elordi-led “The Dog Stars.” As of this writing, his next planned filmmaking venture is set to send him toward the open sea rather than the Old West, with a new adaptation of “Treasure Island.”

With all these plates spinning in the air, Scott’s clearly as busy as ever. That reality, unfortunately, means “Freewalkers” and the concept of a Ridley Scott Western are as elusive as ever.

Of all the properties for Hollywood to be obsessed with remaking, “High Noon” seems like an odd one. This masterpiece Western was originally released in 1952 as an allegory for existing under the Hollywood Blacklist and other Red Scare paranoia. It wasn’t just evocative of a different era, it offered a vivid window into it. How on Earth could you make “High Noon” divorced from that original context? Still, “High Noon” has lived on largely through TV movies like 1980’s “High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane” and a TBS remake headline by Tom Skerritt.

In the mid-2010s, an attempt was made to bring this ballad back to the big screen. Beleaguered distributor Relativity Media announced plans in 2016 to remake “High Noon” and bring it to the modern world, with plans to have it deal with U.S/Mexico border relations. Given Relativity’s constant streams of financial problems over the years, it shouldn’t be a shock that this iteration of “High Noon” never got much further than a press release announcement. No additional details emerged, even in terms of very basic concepts.

Some classic Western movies are perfect for a remake. Meanwhile, a “High Noon” remake not coming to fruition feels like a blessing. The original still works perfectly, there’s no need for an update.

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“Django Unchained” had a pretty definitive ending, but that doesn’t mean Jamie Foxx wouldn’t reprise the titular role elsewhere. 17 months after “Unchained” hit theaters, Foxx played the character in the final “A Million Ways to Die in the West” scene just before its end credits rolled. However, one “Django Unchained” fact you may not know is that there were attempts to get Foxx back into the Django part by way of adapting the “Django/Zorro” comic book published by Dynamite Entertainment and Vertigo Comics. For studio executives, the idea of colliding these two 19^th century heroes sounded like a recipe for financial success, albeit with significantly less thematic heft than the original “Django Unchained.”

When Quentin Tarantino (who co-wrote the original “Django/Zorro” comic) and Jerrod Carmichael were writing the project, there was chatter about getting Antonio Banderas to put on the Zorro mask again rather than recasting the role. Despite having pie-in-the-sky casting plans and a talented writer like Carmichael penning the script, “Django/Zorro” ended up going nowhere. Given that Carmichael was hired in 2019, just a year before the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down, it wouldn’t be surprising if the chaos that gripped the film industry in the early 2020s led to its demise.

Even though Brian Helgeland was hired to take another crack at “Django/Zorro” in April 2026, the ceaseless dead ends greeting this production make it unlikely to surface anytime soon.

Westerns require a certain tactility and grit. That’s why filmmakers like John Sayles, Kelly Reichardt, Robert Altman, and Jane Campion have proven so perfect for the genre. Their movies — Westerns or otherwise — are full of richly lived-in tableaus. Ron Howard, on the other hand, sounds like an odd fit for this domain. Save for his grimy uneven 2025 thriller “Eden,” this man’s works are rarely grim. Titles like “A Beautiful Mind” don’t exactly radiate worlds with bumpy, jagged surfaces you can practically reach out and touch.

Perhaps Howard was yearning to explore such visceral terrain with his proposed late ’90s Western “The Pretenders.” This production would’ve seen Howard uniting with two of the hottest leading men of the decade, Brad Pitt and Matthew McConaughey. The duo would’ve played cousins in 1873 going on a treacherous road trip to San Francisco. Pairing up these two actors with Ron Howard in the late ’90s could’ve been a recipe for a box office smash. However, Howard and McConaughey traded Western epics for a vastly different collaboration, the comedy “EdTV.”

“The Pretenders” went back on the shelf and Ron Howard hasn’t come close to the genre since. That’s probably for the best, since his filmmaking instincts just don’t seem like they’d be at home there.

New Hollywood legend Hal Ashby delivered several legendary films during his time on Earth (he passed away just shy of the age of 60 in 1988). Among his movies were intimate, down-to-Earth works like “Harold and Maude” and “The Last Detail,” which dared to follow the everyday conversations and connections between jagged characters Hollywood often ignored. However, before his passing, Ashby seemed committed to exploring Western territory. One especially intriguing concept for an Ashby Western was his proposed adaptation of Richard Brautigan’s 1974 novel “The Hawkline Monster.”

The project followed an indigenous teenage girl seeking two cowboys to kill a beast inhabiting nearby ice caves. Brautigan’s text and its subversion of classic Western tropes would’ve fit right in with Ashby’s similarly unpredictable tendencies. Nick Dawson’s book “Being Hal Ashby: The Life of a Hollywood Rebel” alleges that Jack Nicholson (a veteran of earlier Ashby film “The Last Detail”) and Harry Dean Stanton were eyeballed for the two lead roles. Putting those two in an unorthodox Western could’ve led to something extraordinary.

Alas, Ashby’s 1988 passing ensured that his vision of “The Hawkline Monster” never came to fruition. While other filmmakers, like Yorgos Lanthimos, have tried their hand at reviving the adaptation, this particular Western won’t be heading to a theater near you anytime soon. If Ashby couldn’t crack it, nobody can.