5 Long-Delayed Western Movies Still Trapped in Development Hell

Hollywood has never exactly been light on Westerns. The essential titles alone could keep a genre fan busy for years, and anyone still craving dusty trails, tense standoffs, and frontier justice can find plenty more across streaming services and home video. With the Western woven so deeply into film history, it might seem as if any new project in the genre would be an easy sell. Yet plenty of proposed Westerns have discovered the opposite, stalling out long before they ever reached a set.

Over the years, even some of cinema’s most prominent filmmakers have tried and failed to get Westerns moving, running into the kinds of setbacks that can bury a movie indefinitely. These five notable examples have spent years trapped in development hell. As of this writing, none appear any closer to theaters than they were when first announced — and in some cases, that announcement came decades ago.

No single obstacle explains why these projects fell apart. In some cases, directors and stars drifted toward other commitments. In others, financing proved too difficult to secure. Whatever the reason, each of these unrealized Westerns ended up stranded before it could add another chapter to one of Hollywood’s most enduring genres.

Ridley Scott’s biggest films have covered an enormous range of territory. Across roughly five decades directing major studio movies, he has tackled sci-fi horror with “Alien,” historical epics such as “Gladiator” and “The Last Duel,” neo-noir with “Black Rain,” and even crime comedy through “Matchstick Men.” Few filmmakers stay as busy or as restless; Scott has sometimes released two movies in a single year. But his long list of unrealized projects makes clear that not every idea he boards makes it to the screen. One type of film he has repeatedly seemed eager to attempt is a Western.

In 2021, Scott again made clear his enthusiasm for stepping into the genre, and soon after, “Freewalkers” looked like the project that might finally get him there. At one point, the plan was to begin filming as early as March 2024. That shoot never materialized. Because the story required a snowy setting, the delay made it impossible to capture the needed weather conditions. Scott then shifted his attention to “The Dog Stars,” starring Jacob Elordi, while his next directing effort is currently set to take him to the open seas instead of the frontier with a new adaptation of “Treasure Island.”

Scott remains as active as ever, juggling one major project after another. For now, though, that packed slate has left “Freewalkers” — and the long-promised idea of a Ridley Scott Western — feeling as distant as ever.

Among Hollywood’s many remake targets, “High Noon” has always seemed like a particularly tricky one. The 1952 Western is a landmark not only because of its craftsmanship, but because it functioned as an allegory for life under the Hollywood blacklist and the paranoia of the Red Scare. It captured the anxieties of a specific moment in American history, which raises an obvious question: how do you remake “High Noon” without that original context? Still, the title has endured through follow-ups and remakes, including 1980’s “High Noon, Part II: The Return of Will Kane” and a TBS version starring Tom Skerritt.

In the mid-2010s, Hollywood made another attempt to return “High Noon” to theaters. In 2016, the financially troubled distributor Relativity Media announced plans for a modern remake that would reportedly address U.S.-Mexico border relations. Given Relativity’s long-running financial difficulties, it is not surprising that this version never advanced much beyond the initial press release. No meaningful updates followed, and even basic details about the project remained scarce.

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.

“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.