(Courtesy Lionsgate) Teens (from left: Fran Kranz, Chris Hemsworth, Anna Hutchison) find some spooky stuff in the basement in the horror thriller "Cabin in the Woods," which was released in 2012.
It should be an easy thing: A filmmaker makes a movie, then a studio releases the movie.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes, issues of studio interference, creative differences, budget disputes or bankruptcy interfere with the pipeline, and a movie can sit on the shelf for years.
In honor of “Tulip Fever,” which The Weinstein Company is finally releasing this Friday, after years of bouncing around the release schedule, here are seven other movies (listed with the years of completion and eventual release) that took a long time getting into theaters.
1. Roar (1981, 2015)
Filmmaker Noel Marshall thought it was a brilliant idea: Make a movie about a biologist (played by Marshall) in Africa who let the big cats he was researching have the run of his home, and do it for real, with lions and tigers loose in a remote house in Southern California. Filming led to injuries for the cast; Tippi Hedren and her daughter, Melanie Griffith, were among those injured filming the movie, which was deemed unreleasable for decades, until Alamo Drafthouse put it in theaters in 2015 as a curiosity. Hedren, in the meantime, turned the house into an animal preserve.
2. Blue Sky (1991, 1994)
This drama, starring Jessica Lange as the manic-depressive wife of a military man (Tommy Lee Jones), was left rotting for three years when Orion Pictures filed for Chapter 11. Director Tony Richardson died in 1991 and never saw the movie’s release. When it was put in theaters in 1994, Lange nabbed an Oscar for her performance.
3. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006, 2013)
This horror movie — starring Amber Heard as an outcast who turns the tables on the popular kids who once bullied her — got a lot of buzz when it played the Toronto and SXSW festivals in 2006 and 2007. But after The Weinstein Company sold the release rights to Senator Entertainment, Senator went bankrupt. Weinstein reacquired the movie for U.S. release, putting it out as a video-on-demand title before a limited theatrical run. Director Jonathan Levine bounced back, making “50/50,” “Warm Bodies,” “The Night Before” and “Snatched.”
4. Margaret (2007, 2011)
Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan was in demand after his 2000 drama “You Can Count on Me,” so his follow-up — a drama about a student (Anna Paquin) who testifies in a wrongful-death suit against a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) — was hotly anticipated. Alas, Lonergan delivered a cut that was nearly 3 hours long, and distributor Fox Searchlight insisted it be under 2½ hours. The dispute went on for four years, with the studio releasing a shorter version in 2011. Lonergan, who went on to win a screenwriting Oscar this year for “Manchester by the Sea,” put his longer cut on DVD in 2012.
5. Cabin in the Woods (2010, 2012)
Director Drew Goddard’s mash-up of horror-movie tropes, which he co-wrote with Joss Whedon, grew a geeky reputation over the two years it was shelved during the ongoing financial problems at MGM. In the down years, one of the movie’s hunky cast members, Chris Hemsworth, became a superstar in Marvel’s “Thor.” Once it was released, it became a cult favorite, with fans searching for monsters from Whedon’s other creations (like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) in every detail.
6. Shanghai (2010, 2015)
The Weinstein Company thought it had a cross-cultural blockbuster when it was making this noir thriller about an American spy (John Cusack) infiltrating Shanghai just after the Pearl Harbor attacks — and encountering a crime boss (Chow Yun-Fat) and his wife (Gong Li), who is secretly fighting for the Chinese resistance against the occupying Japanese. Alas, two weeks before filming, the Chinese government revoked permits to film in Shanghai, and the production had to relocate to Bangkok, Thailand. The movie was released in China in 2010, but wasn’t seen in the United States until 2015, and only in a limited release that drew scathing reviews.
7. Masterminds (2015, 2016)
Utah-based director Jared Hess, the guy behind “Napoleon Dynamite,” got his first director-for-hire gig with this comedy based on a real-life armored-car heist — with a cast that included Zach Galifianakis, Owen Wilson, Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon, Leslie Jones and Jason Sudeikis. Alas, Hess had the misfortune of making a movie with Relativity Media, which filed for Chapter 11 less than a month before the movie’s first release date in 2015. It came out just over a year later.
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