Quentin Tarantino and J.J. Abrams Nearly Teamed Up For a Surprising Movie Adaptation

Quentin Tarantino and J.J. Abrams are facing off at the box office right now, and considering Star Wars: The Force Awakens has already made over a billion dollars, I have a feeling it might end up taking down The Hateful Eight in the long run. But while the two directors — who are friendly with each other in person — are currently engaged in a box office battle, I just learned that once, a long time ago, they could have worked on the same movie together.

Uproxx points me to a recent episode of the Nerdist podcast in which Tarantino reveals that back in the '90s, Richard Donner was trying to get a live-action version of Speed Racer going, and the script for the film came Tarantino's way. QT says he “really, really liked it. The script was better than the movie they ended up doing. It really did capture the comic book. He cracked it.” And as you might guess from the headline of this article, that screenplay was written by none other than J.J. Abrams. This was pre-Felicity, pre-Alias, pre-LOST, back in the days when Abrams wasn't nearly the well-respected filmmaker he is today. But Tarantino loved the script and almost ended up directing it.

Other filmmakers were attached over the years, and it almost went forward with Earth Girls Are Easy director Julien Temple directing it with Johnny Depp in the lead role. Budget concerns caused the project to be reworked with Gravity director Alfonso Cuaron eventually coming on board to direct a cheaper version of the film, but that ended up falling through also.

I really like the Wachowskis' Speed Racer, but it's crazy to think that we could have gotten a version written by J.J. Abrams and directed by Quentin Tarantino. If you're trying to fathom what that might have looked like, you can read what appears to be a real version of Abrams' script right here.