Disney has put out some incredible movies over the years. The company has been very good at putting out consistent hits, and even their most terrible movies are still enjoyable. That doesn't mean that they have a 100% success rate, though. There are a ton of movies that Disney either totally passed on or let die in production rather than release. Many companies do that, but few film companies have been as good at preserving their history as Disney, so we have a good record of all of their movies. Over the course of the last century, though, there have been movies that Disney thought were just too weird to release.
While some of the movies on this list were eventually repurposed into different movies or shows, other movies on this list never saw the light of day. Here are 20 of the weirdest canceled Disney movies and why we never got a chance to see them.
20 Chanticleer
Chanticleer was a movie based on the play of the same name that was made before World War 1. It was set on this farm in the late 1800s (like the play was), and it was all about this rooster with an attitude problem; a rooster who let his job as the farm alarm clock go to his head.
See, the other barnyard animals thought that it was the rooster who brought the sun up every morning. There's a peasant who wants the rooster to notice her and a Spanish fighting cock named Senior Poco Loco who hang with the rooster. It's a crazy movie that we didn't actually get to see thanks to World War 2 and The Sword in the Stone, which Disney liked better.
The film got proposed again in the '80s, but the idea was never picked up. There are even completed songs for this movie, too.
19 Hans Christian Andersen
This movie was meant to be a biography of sorts, but we never got to see it. As much as Disney seems to love Hans Christian Andersen stories, adapting his life to the animated screen would be a task. We don't know a ton about the movie itself: finding information on this movie was a task and a half, but we do know a lot about Andersen's life and stories.
Considering the huge amount of movies coming out in the near future that are about authors going through major crises while writing their magnum opus (the upcoming A.A. Milne and J.R.R. Tolkien biopics are good examples), a movie about Hans Christian Andersen's life with his famous fairytales as a backdrop, might be more well received now than it would have been when the film was first pitched.
18 The Gremlins
This version isn't the cult '80s movie that we all grew up with, but something totally different. Rather, it's a movie that never went anywhere and is based on the book written by Roald Dahl. Back in the 1940s, Disney was working on at least two screenplays for this particular project, but it got dropped. The only survivor of this was the tie-in novel that was supposed to go with the theatrical release. Believe it or not, the book is actually still out there! Even more unbelievably, you might have a copy of one of them! 50,000 books were published in the US by Random House, and 30,000 of them were sold in Australia. Due to a paper shortage, however, the book stopped being copied. So if you have one of these babies hanging around, I'd go and get it appraised.
Hopefully, this idea isn't still owned by Disney, because there's honestly a lot of potential for a great movie with the original book.
17 Cuban Carnival
Cuban Carnival would have been released in 1946, to follow up on movies like Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros. Some segments of the movie survived, like "Blame It On The Samba," which was based on a part of the movie called "Brazilian Rhapsody." There was also a part of the movie called "The Laughing Gauchito," which was about the character from The Three Caballeros. Basically, the character becomes a star because of his ability to shatter glass with his laugh, but the stardom is fleeting when he grows up and his voice gets deeper. There's also a few other segments of the movie that survived, but the movie itself went nowhere. Considering how badly a lot of cartoons from this era aged over the years, that might not be a bad thing.
16 Destino
Destino was an animated short released in 2003, and from what little I could find of it, the short is beautiful. However, the story of Destino actually begins in 1945. It was written by both Walt Disney and Salvador Dali himself, which explains the gorgeous imagery and animation; the whole thing was done in his artistic style.
Unfortunately, the world didn't get to see Destino until the new millennium because of budget issues. Disney had a lot of financial troubles in the '40s thanks to the Second World War. Even a world-renowned painter couldn't save the project. It was simply too expensive to make, and was put on hiatus indefinitely until 1999 when Roy Disney was working on Fantasia 2000 and found the project.
At least we got to see some version of this, but it would have been amazing to see an animated feature done by a bonafide painter.
15 Hiawatha
Remember Little Hiawatha? It was a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem—and a pretty famous one—so Disney naturally decided to put their own stamp on it. Their thing was that they wanted to make a full-length film about Hiawatha as an adult. For those who don't know who Hiawatha is, he was a Native American chief who helped unite the Native American tribes in New York, and his work actually inspired our own Founding Fathers and became a big piece of our own Constitution. It would have been a pretty interesting film, but they scrapped it in order to focus on movies like Peter Pan. Actually, considering the way Disney treats Native Americans in Peter Pan, maybe it's good that they left this project alone, because this movie would not have aged very well.
14 The Roger Rabbit Sequel
We all loved Roger Rabbit growing up, but unfortunately, we will never see this sequel. Roger Zemeckis has been trying for a really long time, and he talked about it with The Telegraph. The script, according to him, is great, but Disney just isn't about it. According to the interview, the sequel was more of a continuation of the story, and Eddie Valiant was going to be played by Bob Hoskins, only digitally. That can't happen anymore, though, since Hoskins died in 2014, though.
The whole thing was supposed to be about film noir and period films in the 1950s, so it had the potential to be pretty great, especially for people who are fans of that era. However, “the current corporate Disney culture has no interest in Roger, and they certainly don’t like Jessica at all.” As Jessica would say, she's "not bad, she's just drawn that way."
13 Louis The Bear
King Louie was played by Louis Prima in The Jungle Book, and he did such a good job with the character that Disney wanted to give him a film where he could really shine. They planned this whole film about this bear who escaped from a zoo with the help of some mice friends. It was going to be so great...and then cancer happened. Prima got diagnosed with a brain tumor and Walt Disney himself died.
We'll honestly never know what could have been with this one. It could have been truly great, or it could have been just okay. The whole concept of mice helping people escape bad situations ended up becoming the premise of The Rescuers, a fantastic movie in its own right, but still, Prima had an awesome voice for animated characters and not being able to see this because of his untimely death is a tragedy.
12 Army Ants
Back in 1988, Disney took a crack at making a movie about army ants called Army Ants. The movie was supposed to tell the story of a pacifist worker ant stuck in a militaristic ant society. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because you've seen this movie before. We actually don't know too much about it, but considering the ant movies that eventually got made, this movie getting canned was probably a blessing. Keep in mind, Pixar eventually made the greatest movie about ants ever made, A Bug's Life, about a decade later. Soon after that, a less memorable movie about ants, Antz, got made.
We've basically got more than enough ant movies to last a lifetime. Let's think of other animals and insects that haven't been used, shall we?
11 Toots And The Upside Down House
Toots and the Upside Down House was supposed to be directed by Henry Selick. You might not recognize his name right away, but he directed such classics as James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas, so needless to say, he's a great director.
Toots and the Upside Down House was supposed to be another stop-motion animation, so it was right in his wheelhouse, too. Unfortunately, this is a project that ended up getting killed by Miramax, which was owned by Disney at the time the movie was a thing. They pulled the plug on the project early on, so we have no idea how this would have looked as a final project. As for Miramax, they've passed on some projects that would have literally made them billions of dollars. So passing on this might just be an average day for them rather than a major blunder.
10 Reynard
If you're unaware of the story of Reynard, now is the time to learn! It's an old folktale about a rascal of a fox that's pretty well known — but kind of fell out of favor. After all, most fairy tales have villains, but most of them are pretty harmless in the grand scheme of things. Reynard actually killed people.
Walt Disney was trying to make a movie about this character for something like 40 years because he liked the story so much. He wanted to make it work despite the fact that Disney really wasn't in the market for this sort of tale. He even tried combining this story with Chanticleer! While Walt's dream of making this movie never went anywhere, the concept of a sly fox as a protagonist eventually became a thing in the form of Robin Hood.
9 Where The Wild Things Are (1983)
Back in 1983, John Lasseter directed a 30-second film test of an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, since Disney had the rights to it then. That never went anywhere and the rights to the book eventually went to Universal in 2001. A Disneyfied version of this book might have actually done pretty well if we take the test Lasseter made into consideration. It's honestly a pretty great short film on its own, or at least the makings of one. However, I honestly can't think of a better film adaptation of this book than the one made by Spike Jonze in 2009. That one wasn't even a cartoon but it managed to get the tone of the book perfectly and make people of all generations cry. As much as I like Disney, I don't think a Disneyfied version of this would have done as well.
8 Sonja Henie Fantasy
This movie never made it to fruition, but it was a proposed short film for Fantasia that never made the cut. It's based on the real-life skater Sonja Henie, who lived a truly fascinating life. She was basically the Simone Biles of 1928: a teen superstar in her field that took the world by storm. She was a child star before that was really a thing. She won 10 consecutive World Championships and three consecutive Olympic gold medals. When she died in 1969, she was worth $47 million dollars. She was also a controversial figure: in the 1936 Olympics, she skated right up to Adolf Hitler and saluted him (with the full arm raise and everything), then responded to the uproar by asking what a Nazi even was... She was quite the figure and would have made for an interesting Disney film.
7 Uncle Stiltskin
This cartoon came from the minds of the husband and wife team that made Teacher's Pet. Bill and Cheri Steinkellner sold Uncle Stiltskin to Disney in 2003. For those who don't know, this cartoon is about a guy named Uncle Stiltskin, who tries to get a kid by spinning straw into gold. The problem with this scheme is that it doesn't work: he ends up getting this feral orphan girl who spent her life being raised by wolves. We don't know what happened to this concept, either: it was being worked on around the same time as Tangled and The Princess and the Frog, so there's a good chance this got lost in the development stages. It's a weird one, but personally, I'd love to see it one day.
6 Newt
Back in 2008, around the same time the movie WALL-E came out and Up was on the horizon, Disney/Pixar announced a movie called Newt. According to Pixar Wikia, this story was kind of a bleak one: the film is about “what happens when the last remaining male and female blue-footed newts on the planet are forced together by science to save the species.” The animation is Pixar quality, so we know it would have looked awesome, and we probably would have cried at some point as well. Though there are many theories as to why the film was scratched, they all had nothing to do with the movie. Unfortunately for Pixar, the movie Rio was also coming out at the same time. Rio happens to be about the last remaining blue Spix Macaws on the planet who have to come together to save their species. We've gotten remarkably similar movies out at the same time before, but this would have just been too similar.
5 Fraidy Cat
Move over Garfield, there's a new chubby housecat in town. Mental Floss describes the movie as "In Fraidy Cat, a chubby housecat with frayed nerves is torn off his comfy couch and dropped smack dab in the middle of a Hitchcockian thriller when he is accused of a crime he didn’t commit.” Even from this brief description, this movie sets itself apart as one worth watching. Even the people within the company thought the movie looked awesome. Unfortunately, the executives lost confidence in the project: they thought it wouldn't be commercially appealing, so they pulled it.
Longtime Disney animators Ron Clements and John Musker left the company over the loss of Fraidy Cat. They eventually came back, but the fact they left in protest shows that the world might have been robbed.
4 A Few Good Ghosts
This story was about a ghost and three kids who make it their mission to get a pair of crazy star-crossed lovers together. That's when the project was called A Few Good Ghosts, but eventually, they became characters from folk art. This would have been a little weird, but it would have been awesome, which is why it's super disappointing that we never got to see it.
Dolly Parton and Lily Tomlin were slated to be in it. The story even involved Abe Lincoln, except he would have been made out of an old scrub brush and would have had ears made of spoons. Unfortunately, after some changes in management back in 2003, this story got scrapped in favor of another movie. That movie was Chicken Little. Yes, that Chicken Little. We got robbed, guys.
3 The Prince And The Pig
This movie is essentially Disney's version of Despicable Me, meaning that Disney must be kicking themselves for not taking advantage of this idea before Steve Carell, Illumination, and Pharrell got their hands on it. The movie told the story of a little boy and his pet pig and their journey to steal the moon, which is the goal of the protagonist in Despicable Me. Disney came up with this idea all the way back in 2003, so they paid author Rian Johnson a six-figure sum so they could make the movie. After they did that, they then got cold feet on the idea and totally scrapped it despite paying Johnson all that money. 2003 wasn't Disney's best year, especially considering what they put out versus what they scrapped that year.
2 Musicana
We had Fantasia, but Disney wanted to do more with that kind of film style, so they came up with Musicana. It was supposed to be a more cultured, worldly, sort of follow-up to Fantasia, and honestly, while it would have been cool, it might have flown over the head of the average kid.
This movie would have brought together classic myths and classical music and mashed it up with modern jazz and art. Think Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald as frogs while an ice god fights a sun goddess. I think this would have been one of those cult classics decades after its premiere, but no one would have been attracted to it right away. We'll never get to see this movie though: Musicana got canned to pave the way financially for Mickey's Christmas Carol.
1 Yellow Submarine
Disney thought it would be a good idea to straight up remake The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine." I mean, I like the Beatles, and I love "Yellow Submarine," but nobody would have needed a Disneyfied version of this movie. Sorry. With Robert Zemeckis at the helm, it might have actually been somewhat watchable, but we honestly didn't need this remake. Currently, we're kind of all burnt out on remakes, and this would have just been another forgettable one to add to the pile. Fortunately, the plug got pulled on this one thanks to budget concerns after the spectacular failure of Mars Needs Moms.
You never thought you'd be thankful that the movie Mars Needs Moms exists, but without it, we'd have a Disneyfied Yellow Submarine.