M is for: “Mind Hunter”
Long before “House Of Cards,” Fincher’s first foray into television was set to be “Mind Hunter.” The director teamed with Charlize Theron for the project, an adaptation of the book “Mind Hunter: Inside The FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit,” which was set up at HBO with “Dexter” writer Scott Buck penning the pilot. The project didn’t move forward there, but we’ve heard rumors lately that it’s not dead and could end up landing at Netflix at some point.
N is for: Captain Nemo & The Nautlius
“20,000 Leagues Under The Sea” is Fincher’s great white whale of the last few years, his adaptation of Jules Vernes‘ sci-fi classic set to land him at the unlikely destination of Disney. “Contagion” writer Scott Z. Burns wrote a script that focused on “technology and commerce and humanity,” set during the Civil War, and set to be shot in 3D, and it got as far as location scouting down in Australia, but casting proved to be a sticking point. Brad Pitt flirted with the project before departing, while Daniel Craig and Matt Damon both turning the project down afterwards. Fincher then wanted Channing Tatum, while Disney wanted Chris Hemsworth, no agreement could be reached, and Fincher left the project last year. The director recently told Little White Lies that it was partly the casting and partly Disney’s corporate culture that saw the film fall apart: “You get over $200 million —all motion picture companies have corporate culture and corporate anxieties. Once we got past the list of people we could cast as the different characters in the film, once we got one or two names which made them very comfortable, making a movie at that price, it became this bizarre endeavor to find which three names you could rub together to make platinum… It became very hard to appease the anxieties of Disney’s corporate culture with the list of names that allowed everyone to sleep at night. I just wanted to make sure I had the skill-sets I could turn the movie over to. Not worrying about whether they’re big in Japan.” Reports surfaced a little while back that Disney may still be developing the project, but no new director has been announced yet.
O is for: Orson Welles
A long-time passion project of Fincher’s in the early part of his career was “Mank,” a script penned by none other than the director’s father Howard Fincher (who worked as a journalist at Life magazine). The screenplay was a biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz, one of the best known and best paid screenwriters in the early years of Hollywood who famously feuded with Orson Welles over credit for “Citizen Kane,” and who descended into alcoholism afterwards. Fincher was set to make it his follow-up to “The Game,” with Kevin Spacey attached as Mankiewicz and with a $12 million budget, but as he told Empire, backers pulled out when he insisted on making the film in black-and-white. Interestingly, Fincher also told Empire that his father’s other script was based on the story of famed artist couple the Keanes, who will have their story told in Tim Burton‘s upcoming “Big Eyes.”
P is for: “Passengers” and “Pathfinder”
This isn’t the endlessly-gestating Keanu Reeves-starring intergalactic romance, but an earlier script with a similar name from “Alien3” concept designer Greg Pruss, which was on the director’s desk for a while. The concept was very much Fincher-esque: a New Yorker discovers that alien-like creatures have been hijacking humans, including himself, and using them for sex, violence and drug-fuelled joyrides. The script drew attention in part because the stage directions were written in the first person, but development never seemed to move forward. Another post-“Fight Club” project around the same time that Fincher was very briefly attached to was actioner “Pathfinder,” penned by “Moonstruck” writer John Patrick Shanley, about a CIA agent trying to stop his former cellmate in a Serbian jail from blowing up some stolen plutonium. It didn’t get much further, and Fincher moved on to “Panic Room.”
Q is for: “[S]quids”
Yeah, we cheated it a bit here. “Squids” was a project written by David Ayer after he broke through with “Training Day” and “U-571,” based on the scribe’s time on board a U.S. Navy submarine. Fincher bought the rights in 2000, and considered directing after “Panic Room,” but it never materialized. Don’t bank on a resurrection here: Ayer, in a recent interview, said that the script “sucked.”
R is for: “Rendezvous With Rama,” “The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud” and “Red Sparrow”
Perhaps the best known of Fincher’s projects-that-got-away is “Rendezvous With Rama,” an adaptation of the sci-fi classic by “2001” author Arthur C. Clarke. Detailing the arrival of an enormous alien ship in the solar system, and the human crew who set out to explore it, it’s a long-time passion project of Morgan Freeman, who hired Fincher to direct after they worked together on “Seven.” Development has been going on for over a decade, but the filmmakers couldn’t find a script they were happy with (it’s not the most dramatic story, in truth), and in 2011, Fincher was pessimistic about the project, saying “it’s great, but it’s just a really expensive movie, and talk about the bones being picked by so many other stories.” More recently, Fincher re-teamed with “Seven” writer Andrew Kevin Walker for a planned remake of one of his favorite films, 1973’s past-lives-themed thriller “The Reincarnation Of Peter Proud.” The film was planned to be the director’s follow-up to “The Social Network,” but little’s been heard of it since. And only a few months ago, Fincher started circling an adaptation of spy novel “Red Sparrow.” Penned by “American Hustle” writer Eric Singer (who came close to working with Fincher on “The Sky Is Falling,” see above), and once linked to Darren Aronofsky, it’s a present-day thriller about a Russian intelligence officer who falls for the CIA agent she’s meant to be targeting. ‘Dragon Tattoo’ collaborator Rooney Mara was linked to the female lead, and it could be the director’s next film, but as he’s tied up with “Utopia” for all of 2015, don’t expect the project on screens until 2017 at the earliest.