Ridley Scott nearly made an ultra-violent Western: Drew Goddard was adapting Zahler’s novel

20th Century Fox announced Wraiths of the Broken Land in 2016, not long after The Martian, with Ridley Scott lined up to direct and Drew Goddard brought in to adapt S. Craig Zahler’s 2013 novel. The movie never happened, but the setup was hard to ignore: a turn-of-the-20th-century border story about men trying to save their sisters after they’re sold into prostitution. What gave it its edge, though, was the tone. This wasn’t just a rescue story. It was a vicious frontier nightmare, pulling together Western, horror, noir, and exploitation-level violence.

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On paper, Scott made a lot of sense for it. He’d already shown he could handle that kind of punishing historical force in Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, and later The Last Duel. Goddard, meanwhile, had already built a reputation as one of Hollywood’s more flexible genre writers.

Zahler’s name also gave the project some bite. His work already carried a reputation for being grim and genuinely shocking, something audiences later saw on screen in Bone Tomahawk. At the same time, Zahler himself suggested the novel might simply be too sprawling to fit into a single film.

So if you liked the idea of Scott taking on a savage revisionist Western, this was one of those lost projects that stuck in the mind.

You can’t stream or download Wraiths of the Broken Land anywhere, though, because it seems to have vanished into development hell, caught between Scott and Goddard’s schedules, worries that the book was too big for one movie, and Disney’s takeover of 20th Century Fox.