They Can’t All Be Winners, Kid: Seven once-hopeful film franchises that never took off

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

This one, this one smarts. An adaptation of the Douglas Adams classic would always prove to be a hard sell to mainstream audiences outside of the UK, but a lot of the pieces seemed to be there. For one, the books had never been more popular, it was given a decent release date in the middle of spring, Hammer and Tongs co-founder Garth Jennings was hired to direct, and the cast was impeccable on paper. Sam Rockwell as Zaphod? Awesome. Martin Freeman as Arthur Dent? Perfect! Alan Rickman as Marvin? Hold us, please, we’re going to faint. Mos Def as Ford? Well, we can roll with it! Didn’t you see The Woodsman? He was fine in that! Sadly, the parts quite couldn’t congeal into a stable final product, and it flopped hard and the cast went on to bigger and better things. It’d always been a risky proposition from the start, and we don’t think anybody truly expected that multi-picture deal to work out.