HALO- Alex Garland (The Beach, 28 Days Later, Sunshine) was commissioned to pen a script for the mega-selling Xbox game, and Fox and Universal studios had agreed to team up, bringing in Peter Jackson to produce with Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth) to direct.

THE DREYFUS AFFAIR

An adaptation of Peter Lefcourt's satire about two all-American baseball heroes who fall in love. Bizarrely, Garth Brooks was attached to play one of the leads, provided the role was rewritten as straight. Cameras were close to rolling in the late 1990s with Ben Affleck and Don Cheadle cast as the sports stars who go well beyond first base. Since shelved.

MEGALOPOLIS

Francis Ford Coppola has been developing this ultra-ambitious epic, about the battle between art and commerce, history and the future, told through the architectural restructuring of New York City, for many years now. The closest he came to filming was in 2000 when Nicolas Cage (his nephew), Russell Crowe, Robert de Niro, Paul Newman and Kevin Spacey were all said to be attached.

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS

Dave Eggers' misery-memoir of his unexpected guardianship of his eight-year-old brother after both of their parents died of cancer became the subject of a bidding war between New Line Cinema and Miramax. It never happened.

A CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES

One of the most enduring unrealised projects of all time, an adaptation of John Kennedy Toole's posthumously published, Pulitzer Prize-winning rogues' gallery of grotesques has been in the offing since the early 1980s.