Joss Whedon

Director Joss Whedon is on top of the world now that The Avengers is firmly ensconced as the third highest grossing film of all-time – which makes it fun to speculate on what projects the filmmaker might tackle next. While we’re sure there’s a veritable mountain of scripts and projects that would love to have Whedon onboard, Tumblr blog Whedonesqued has stumbled across a Variety article from way back in 1998 that outlines some of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator’s projects that never came to be. We’d kinda like to see Whedon take a crack at some of them now that he’s free to do whatever he wants…

Obviously, vampires were big on the Whedon project list back in 1998. The article highlights a second Buffy film that was in development but never came to pass back in the early ‘90s, but also mentions an animated musical take on Dracula (we can only imagine the scene with Harker and the Brides in that version…) and a family comedy entitled Grampire.

Dracula was to be based on a Whedon script – his first original project under his then new deal at Fox. For whatever reason, it fell apart – although we’d really like to see how Whedon intended to take the classic horror novel’s sexual subtext and make it kid-friendly. If anyone could have pulled it off, it was probably Joss Whedon.

Grampire, on the other hand, sounds pretty silly. It was supposed to be about two kids who suspect their grandfather is really a blood-sucker. Apparently the idea came about during Buffy writing – and Whedon was set to team up with his writing staff to create the script.

At least a few of the ideas didn’t involve vampires but still kept Whedon pinned down in horror territory. Alienated was supposed to be a comedy about a person kidnapped by aliens who “turns the tables on his captors,” while Cheap Shots was a midseason pilot he was developing along with Buffy writer Ty King about a group of people making low-budget horror movies. That was also a comedy, but it’s interesting to see how Whedon was being pigeonholed as a genre talent at this point in his career.

None of these projects ever came to be – which is mostly a good thing in retrospect. Instead of making something like Grampire, Whedon eventually found time to give us the fantastic (and far too short) Firefly. Had he made Grampire or Dracula, Whedon might not have ever made that classic series or wound up making The Avengers.

If Whedon were going to make anything on this list, our vote would be the Buffy the Vampire Slayer sequel, albeit one with the TV cast and not the actors from the original film. In a perfect world, though, we’d get more Firefly. What say you, readers? If you could pick Joss Whedon’s next project from this list, what would you most want to see?