Why These Actors' Final Movies Will Never Be Released

It would be great if every actor could choose an incredible movie to end their career on, but it almost never works out that way. Though some actors do retire, the vast majority work until they die or their health deteriorates to the point that they can no longer perform. Unfortunately, this means that there are a lot of actors who ended their careers with a really bad movie — they probably didn't know it would be their final film, and their last role being an unimpressive one was just bad luck. Even when that doesn't happen, most actors' last roles are fairly run-of-the-mill movies or TV shows, nothing that constitutes some grand last hurrah for their career. 

Of course, there are also many examples of actors who died while a movie they were working on was in production. While that's sad for everyone involved, what's even worse is when a film that should've been an actor's swansong gets stuck in development limbo and never comes out, making the last spot on their filmographies a credit that comes with an asterisk. It's these rare examples that we're going to cover here. These are movies that were completed or had at least officially entered production, with the actor in question having done some actual work on them — movies that actors had signed on for that never got off the ground aren't included.

Marlon Brando has a complicated legacy, to say the least. On one hand, his status as one of the greatest screen actors of all time is pretty well cemented due to his roles in "A Streetcar Named Desire," "The Godfather," "On the Waterfront," and "Last Tango in Paris" alone, to say nothing of his various other acclaimed works. He'd have a few more glimmers of brilliance after that, but most of his work in the 1980s and beyond was marred by panned performances in bad films and reports of increasingly difficult and/or erratic behavior on set. Unfortunately, that period was much longer than — and often overshadows — his period of greatness. 

For what it's worth, Brando did manage to end his film career on a decent note. His final released movie was the 2001 heist film "The Score," which not only got decent reviews overall but even saw Brando's acting get some positive callouts from critics for the first time in years. That being said, he almost went out voicing a bug. Brando had signed on for a small role in an animated film called "Big Bug Man," starring Brendan Frasier. The filmmakers had wanted Brando to voice the lead character's male boss, but Brando insisted on playing a character named Mrs. Sour instead — even choosing to come in wearing make-up, a wig, and a dress for the recordings.

"Big Bug Man" would go on to join the ranks of expensive movies that were finished but never released after it was delayed beyond its planned 2006 release, and it has since all but dropped off the face of the Earth, with almost no concrete information as to why. It marked one of only two times that Brando ever did voice work in his career, with the other being him doing a single line of dialogue as Don Vito Corleone for the 2006 video game adaptation of "The Godfather." With so much time having passed, it's safe to assume that "Big Bug Man" will never see the light of day.

The last 12 months of River Phoenix's life involved a lot of darkness and tragedy. But, despite what was going on off screen, the late actor was still working right up to the end of his life, filming the movies "Silent Tongue," "The Thing Called Love," and "Dark Blood" between spring 1992 and his October 1993 death. "The Thing Called Love" was released a few months before he died, making it the last of his films to come out during his lifetime. "Silent Tongue" wouldn't be released until 1994, marking the actual final completed film of Phoenix's to be released. 

As for "Dark Blood," Phoenix passed away during production on the thriller, having only filmed some of his scenes. His part was too large to carry on without him, or to make do with stand-ins or computer effects as was done with Brandon Lee for "The Crow." The movie was abandoned and long assumed to be permanently canceled. That is, until 2011, when director George Sluizer admitted that he had not only rescued the existing "Dark Blood" footage from being destroyed at the time, but was still in possession of it. Even more astounding is that Sluizer claimed he had been able to take the existing footage and edit it into a release-able film. 

The family of River Phoenix was adamantly opposed to this plan and wanted nothing to do with it. Nevertheless, Sluizer screened his "finished" version of "Dark Blood" at various film festivals in 2012 and 2013, and it even got a DVD release in Germany. But the fact of the matter is that the film isn't a complete movie by any real definition, as Sluizer simply describes what would've happened in the missing scenes at the points in the movie where they would've occurred on top of either unrelated footage or still images.

Leslie Nielsen had an extremely long career that stretched all the way back to 1950 and largely consisted of dramatic roles. But it was when he took a hard turn into comedy with 1980's "Airplane!" — a movie that parodied the disaster film genre — that the actor truly became a household name. That kicked off a career renaissance for the ages, with Nielsen subsequently starring in the short-lived spoof series "Police Squad!" which was then adapted into the "Naked Gun" film franchise. This truly cemented the new direction of his career, with Nielsen playing the dryly funny straight man to the more ridiculous and over-the-top comedy that would typically happen around him.

Nielsen was extremely prolific on film and in television throughout the 1990s and 2000s, with this new phase of his career perfectly coinciding with the rise in frequency of genre spoof films during that same era. 2007 saw Nielsen play his final television roles, including hosting the Discovery Channel series "Doctor*Ology," a comedy documentary about various specializations within the medical field. After doing two final parody movies in 2009 — "Stan Helsing" and "Spanish Movie" — Nielsen's final completed film role would be a small part in a 2011 comedy called "Stonerville." 

However, what you might not know is that Nielsen had a different final movie in the works: The animated feature "The Waterman Movie," based on a series of online cartoons called "The Waterman" by actor, animator, and filmmaker Bryan Waterman. Waterman had created a new Leslie Nielsen-esque character for the movie, and managed to get in touch with Nielsen's reps and eventually Nielsen himself to play the character. Nielsen agreed to do the film for free and had already recorded all of his lines before he died. Unfortunately, funding for the film ran out after only a couple of minutes of animation were finished. With so much still left to do any Waterman unable to fund the project himself, this is another final film we'll never see.