3 Cancelled Sci-Fi Movies We Deserved To See

May 17, 2026, 5:00pm

Movies are a little bit miraculous, if you really think about it. No, we’re not talking about the technology that goes into making a movie or the massive amounts of coordination it takes to bring a story to the screen. We’re talking about the fact that some movies even manage to get made at all because, for every movie that opens in theaters, there are countless others that never make it out of development. No matter how exciting or high profile an announced project might be, there are simply many that end up cancelled, relegated to a footnote in Hollywood history and to the realm of “what might have been” for fans.

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While this sort of thing is fairly equal opportunity among movie genres, when it comes to sci-fi there are some cancelled films we still wish we’d been able to see. These are films that either continued or completed stories we were already invested in or, in one notable case, would have given us some truly insane visuals and performances that we still desperately want to see. Here are three cancelled sci-fi movies we deserved to see come to life.

3) The Divergent Series: Ascendant

Tris pressing her hands against a barrier in Divergent

The 2010s were an incredible time for dystopian science fiction, both on the page and on the screen and this was especially true for movies that were adaptations of popular dystopian sci-fi books, like Veronica Roth’s Divergent novels. The first film in the Divergent series of films—appropriately titled Divergent—opened in theaters in 2014, and while it wasn’t a hit with critics, it did well at the box office, quickly getting a sequel adapting the second book, Insurgent, and then a third film, Allegiant, that adapted the first half of the final book in Roth’s trilogy. However, Allegiant performed poorly at the box office which in turn led to the cancellation of the second half of the adaptation, Ascendant. There were, at one point, plans to reconfigure the project into a television film for Starz, but that too was cancelled. The franchise ended without resolution to the story and while fans of the story had the book itself to read for some closure, we still wish we could have seen how the movie would have tied things up.

2) Alejandro Jodoworsky’s Dune

While we live in a world with a great adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune thanks to Denis Villeneuve, that doesn’t mean we weren’t deprived of a truly epic version that never made it out of development hell. Back in 1974, Alejandro Jodorowsky had incredible plans for his Dune adaptation. The film would have had H.R. Giger and Moebius designing the film’s look, Dan O’Bannon doing special effects, and in what might be one of the wildest things ever, Pink Floyd and Magma would have done the score. The cast was set to be every bit is incredible, with Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, David Carradine, and Salvador Dali all involved. It would have either been an absolute disaster or an epic, magnificent achievement, but we never got to see it. Ultimately, the project spent so much money merely in pre-production and financial backing vanished causing the project to crumble. David Lynch would later take on Dune, releasing the 1984 film, which he was ultimately displeased with and distanced himself from. Even with Villeneuve pulling off the adaptation decades later, we still wonder what Jodorowsky’s version would have looked like.

1) Alien 5

While there are a handful of Alien movies that never made it to screen, the one we’re still sore about is Neill Blomkamp’s Alien 5. The film was first announced in 2015 and would have been set chronologically after the second film, 1986’s Aliens, completely ignoring Alien 3 and Resurrection. Alien 5 would have been set 30 years after Aliens and seen older versions of Ripley and Hicks. It’s a movie that fans were pretty excited about—Blomkamp had just had a blockbuster hit with District 9 in 2009. However, Alien 5 was cancelled in favor of Alien director Ridley Scott’s prequel Prometheus and its sequel Alien: Covenant. Covenant ended up underperforming at the box office and it would be seven years before we got another Alien movie after that—2024’s Alien: Romulus and while Romulus was fantastic, we still really would have liked to have seen what Alien 5 would have had in store.