6 Best Unfinished Movies That Are Still Worth Watching, Ranked

September 11, 2025 | by ltcinsuranceshopper

There’s so much that goes into making a movie, and therefore plenty of reasons why a movie can ultimately not get entirely finished. This sometimes results in movies being canceled and never released, as was controversially the case with Batgirl and (temporarily) the case with Coyote vs. Acme, and that’s to say nothing of movies that were planned but never came to fruition in the sense of not having many – or any – scenes filmed (like most famously with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s very ambitious-sounding Dune). But there also exist films that don’t get finished for a whole host of reasons, often because an important actor or the film’s director passes away before completion, but the film still gets released anyway. Sometimes, these movies only exist in clearly fragmented forms, while at other times, another director or producer might step in to finish it, as best as possible, to the wishes of the original creative mind behind the movie.

The following films can all be considered unfinished in one way or another, be it literally so or unfinished in the sense that the director could not continue working on the film up until the point of its release. Some of these are inconsistent oddities, while a couple are genuinely great, and find interesting ways to work around – or even comment on – the unfinished nature of the film that ended up viewable. There will only be a handful below, since unfinished movies getting official (or even unofficial) releases seem pretty rare, and so rarer still are the ones that are genuinely worth checking out, but these all have at least something to offer.

6

‘Game of Death’ (1978)

Billy Lo smiling while on an attack pose in Game of Death — Bruce Lee in Game of Death

Though he only starred in a handful of martial arts movies during his tragically short career, Bruce Lee was nonetheless a cinematic icon, and his films – all the completed ones now over 50 years old – still hold up well. He passed away during production of Game of Death, and really hadn’t filmed too much for it. There were a handful of well-choreographed fight scenes with Bruce Lee clad in that iconic yellow tracksuit, and not a whole lot else. It took a few years, but Game of Death was reworked a bit messily and released in 1978, with the actual Bruce Lee fight scenes seen during the movie’s climax.

Game of Death is basically a cobbled-together version of an unfinished movie, but you can still watch some of the stuff Bruce Lee was in.

And they’re the only parts worth watching; the stuff intended for the original movie, which had the working title of The Game of Death. So, Game of Death is basically a cobbled-together version of an unfinished movie, but you can still watch some of the stuff Bruce Lee was in, and those fights are up there among the best he ever took part in on-screen. Otherwise, Game of Death probably counts as a less-than-great martial arts movie, because the earlier portion of the film’s runtime is a bit rough (it’s worth just fast-forwarding and skipping to the last 20-ish minutes).

5

‘My Best Friend’s Birthday’ (1987)

Game of Death ended up influencing the look of the Bride in one segment of Kill Bill: Vol. 1, which is one of Quentin Tarantino’s best movies. Technically, his directorial debut was Reservoir Dogs, but his first film was almost My Best Friend’s Birthday, and Tarantino’s probably thankful that most people don’t know about this one. Also, while it was intended to be feature-length (approximately 70 minutes long), a fire destroyed about half the footage, so all that remains is 36 minutes. As such, if you want to count it as a film, then it’s technically a short film.

And it’s a short film because it’s an unfinished feature film, and it’s not great, but might be worth checking out if you’re a big Tarantino fan and want to see one of the earliest surviving things he worked on. Some of his style is there, albeit very unrefined, but you’ve got pop culture references, profanity, and some dark humor, plus Tarantino himself being in the starring role as well as serving as its director. Also, Roger Avary was credited with doing the cinematography, which is interesting, since he and Tarantino later collaborated together on writing Pulp Fiction, with Avery doing uncredited rewrites on Tarantino’s screenplay for True Romance, too.

4

‘Passenger’ (1963)

Since Polish filmmaker Andrzej Munk passed away in a car crash during the production of Passenger, what ended up getting released was unfinished, yet still very compelling. Passenger runs for a bit over an hour, and serves as a unique look at the Holocaust and World War II more generally, being about someone who was a former concentration camp SS officer reflecting on what she did because of her job, with those recollections intensifying since she has a chance meeting with someone who was once a prisoner there.

It’s grim subject matter to begin with, and Passenger becomes more difficult, in a sense, because it was released in quite a fractured state and with clear signs (that are from hidden) that not all the footage that needed to be shot was shot. Yet what remains is still striking, and the tragedy of the film’s production does regrettably line up with the tragic story being told, and the effect of that is undeniably haunting. And being a story about memory, while also feeling quite jumpy and fractured… that arguably turns a bug into a feature; something that might well make parts of the film feel even stronger, or at least an example of working with one’s limitations very effectively.

3

‘The Magnificent Ambersons’ (1942)

As most people who know at least a little about the history of cinema will be aware, Orson Welles directed Citizen Kane, which came out in 1941. It was successful at the time in terms of earning many Oscar nominations, though controversial, and its reputation grew further in the years (and decades) that followed its release. But even with the success at the time, you’d have thought, or hoped, Orson Welles would be allowed to do what he wanted with his next film, since he was in control over Citizen Kane, perhaps even obsessively so, and what resulted was an incredibly striking and powerful auteur-driven film.

But the story of The Magnificent Ambersons is an unfortunately saddening one, as the original cut of the film, which ran for 131 minutes, was edited down by over 40 minutes, and the footage that was trimmed was lost. So, what remains of The Magnificent Ambersons is essentially unfinished, or at least not finished by the standards of its director, Orson Welles. It’s hard to not think about what could’ve been, had it been released as intended or if it had later gotten a proper director’s cut, but still, the 88-minute version of The Magnificent Ambersons still offers some eye-catching cinematography and compelling family drama. It’s a good movie, as it exists, but if things had been different, maybe it could’ve been a truly great one.

2

‘The Other Side of the Wind’ (2018)

A silhouette of a woman walking in The Other Side of the Wind - 2018 — A silhouette of a woman walking in The Other Side of the Wind – 2018

Speaking of Orson Welles movies, here’s an even more dramatic example of a film of his with an unusual production. The Other Side of the Wind ended up getting officially released 33 years after the filmmaker passed away, and most of it was shot throughout the 1970s, though not edited together properly until much later. And even if it’s technically complete now, it still doesn’t feel complete in the traditional sense, since this is an unusual and often confounding film about filmmaking, legacy, and maybe even reality itself?

Like, Orson Welles was going for a lot here, and was seemingly using The Other Side of the Wind as a way to look back on his filmmaker career. It’s good that it was still finished and released, but within Welles’s lifetime, it was unfinished, and so that’s why it’s being included here. It could well have ended up being extremely similar to how it is now, if it had been completed before 1985, but without access to some parallel dimension where things turned out differently, it’s hard to say.

1

‘On the Silver Globe’ (1988)

On the Silver Globe might well be one of the strangest and darkest sci-fi movies ever made, and possibly also one of the best? Well, if you know what you’re in for, then there’s a lot to take in and appreciate here, but if you go in blind, it’s possible to get overwhelmed. It’s about starting a new civilization on an Earth-like planet, essentially, with lots of time passing and then astronauts going back to the planet to see where the new civilization is at, and then things get weird and confronting.

Before then, admittedly, things are also a bit weird and confronting, but On the Silver Globe really takes off at a point and starts to feel like a truly gonzo epic. Most of the film was finished, but not all scenes were able to be shot, and so the film’s pretty transparent about what was supposed to happen at certain points, and then the troubled production is memorably worked into the film’s bold ending. If you want to see something different, and perhaps the very best unfinished movie of all time (and something that might well have been even better had it been 100% completed, rather than about 80% completed), then On the Silver Globe is worth exploring and getting lost in.