Film Film industry companies buy the
film rights to many popular novels, video games, and comic books, but often take years to bring those properties to the screen, having first made considerable changes to their plots, characters, and general tone. When this pre-production process takes too long, a project will often be abandoned or cancelled outright.
Hollywood starts ten times as many projects as it releases. Less than two percent of all books that are
optioned make it to the big screen. As David Hughes, author of the book
Tales from Development Hell (2003), has noted, one reason production is delayed is that, after producers, directors, and actors have been attached to a project, they may request script rewrites. Another cause of delay is that, after people have been attached to a project, they find they have conflicting interpretations of it or visions for it. For example, the director and the studio executives may have different opinions about a film's casting, plot, or budget. Development delays can also result when a lead actor or a key member of the production team withdraws from the project, takes ill, or dies; when there are labor strikes involving the writers, directors, crew, or cast; Production hell refers to a situation in which a film has entered production but has remained in that phase for a long time without progressing to post-production. If a film is in development but never receives the necessary production funds, another studio may execute a
turnaround deal and successfully produce the film. For example,
Columbia Pictures stopped production of
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).
Universal Pictures then picked up the film and made it a success. When a studio completely abandons a film project, the costs are written off as part of the studio's
overhead, thereby reducing taxable income.
Television Television series can experience development hell between seasons, resulting in a long delay from one season to the next. Screenwriter Ken Aguado states that "development hell rarely happens in series television", because writers for a television series "typically only get a few cracks at executing a
pilot, and if he or she doesn't deliver, the project will be quickly abandoned."
Video games Video game development can be stalled for years, occasionally over a decade, often due to a project being moved to different production studios, multiple iterations of the game being created and abandoned, or difficulties with the development of the game software itself, such as loss of funding, overambitious scope, and poor development time management. In the computer industry,
vaporware is the term for a product, typically computer hardware or software, that is announced to the general public but is late or never actually manufactured nor officially cancelled. == See also ==