The Only 6 Films Netflix Did Not Announce in their 2021 Slate
A selection of fictional streaming projects currently rudderless in development hell, that if aren’t being made now, they certainly never will be.
Horn Park
Steamy period drama concerning the labyrinthine romantic dilemmas of Kent’s Eltham Palace estate. It’s the night of the grand debutant ball, with the suave Duke of Eastbourne sizing up the curiously unbetrothed Ms Pillowsworth for a carefully well-paced 120 minutes of relentless, indelicate shagging.
Drawing upon a sea of jealously-kept analytics, Netflix tailored the most optimised scripted content according to peak lonely behaviours of locked down audiences, with the algorithm flawlessly recreating the rakish Regency period, with the exception of the dashing young error code, the Duke of >>> sum(x*y in zip (xvec, yvec)).
Hell Ferry: The Return of Captain Psychopomp
Captain Charon (Chris Pratt) is the jaded ferry marshal who operates the vessel transporting newly-dead souls across the Styx to the afterlife. When a middle-aged New York jazz enthusiast, believing his time is not yet up, hijacks the ship, it’s down to Captain Charon to take back control the best way he knows how; leading an elite force of undead counter-operatives trained to the nines in the latest ectoplasmic ballistic weaponry.
Hell Ferry’s money-no-object art direction required a from-scratch reconstruction of a haunted SeaCat in Shepperton studios, whilst metropolitan drinkers might be surprised to learn many of the interiors were shot in the faded, permanently-moored faux art deco surrounds of a central London Wetherspoons.
Pay and Display
In a nightmarish dystopian techno-thriller shot entirely in present day Birmingham, an overpopulated, resource-exhausted planet Earth has ran out of terrain on which to park automobiles.
Inter-weaving through a never-ending procession of brutalist car parks, marauding rebel caravans stay permanently moving or are detected by a network of totemic parking metres owned by a tyrannical CEO of a corporo-dictatorship, hologrammed-in by Ozzie Osbourne. Does an obsessive young IT student (Will Poulter) at the now-fully motorised GymShark University™ hold the codes to hacking the grid?
onDigital: The Collapse of the World’s First Digital Terrestrial Network
Landmark documentary from the acclaimed auteur filmmaker who’s work foresaw MiniDisc’s aborted hegemony, uncovered the appalling abuses of copyright in fidget spinner manufacturing, and blew apart the national scandal of VHS tapes that claimed falsely to clean VCR heads.
The film charts the heady rise of a satellite-less channel package that dared to flip off Sky, the drug-fuelled rebrand to ITV Digital and the catastrophic over-payment for televised Football League matches, with interview access to key players such as former Crystal Palace FC chairman Simon Jordan, ITV Monkey operator Nigel Plaskitt and Carlton Communications’s David Cameron.
Untitled ‘Hook’ Universe Project
Capitalising on the misremembered affection for TriStar Picture’s riff on J.M. Barrie’s magical slacker Peter Pan, Netflix refused to grow up by seizing the swashbuckling franchise’s rights that have been available in Hollywood for years to literally anyone who’ll take them.
A by-word for development hell for exactly three decades, the latest script Netflix have seen is reported to explore ‘sustainability icon’ Rufio’s backstory; battling planning permission from Captain Hook to turn his enchanted bamboo soft play area into a luxury golf course and brasserie for high-ranking pirates.
Celluloide Paradiso
In an unmistakably bold statement that announced their most ambitious slate ever, Netflix got Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Ang Lee together in a room, threw them a blank cheque and locked the door. Their solitary mission being; deliver the greatest cinematic opus of the 21st century; the until now mythical quattro maestri untitled project.
Celluloide Paradiso delivers in sheer scale and size; a four-hour, four-director cut, a technological and logistical triumph, that at its heart is a simple story that has surprised audiences and Netflix executives alike; the tale of a Sicilian orphan boy who puts on a puppet show for his imaginary pet duck.
