Read this: How Ben Stiller’s abandoned disaster movie spoof was resurrected

Yes, yes, another story about a movie that’s not being made—but in this case, it’s not a production shutdown or delay due to a pandemic! In this case, it’s a movie that’s been not being made since it was written in the early ’90s. And it’s still not being made, but this weekend, it will be introduced to audiences all the same, and for a good cause.
On Saturday, July 25 at 8 p.m. ET, Ben Stiller, David Cross, and Robert Cohen’s The Towering Disaster—a spoof of ’70s disaster epics like The Poseidon Adventure—will finally see the light of day thanks to a digital live reading with a starry cast. Pretty much everything about The Towering Disaster sounds bonkers, and Stiller acknowledges as much in this fun interview with Vanity Fair about the project:
“[F]or whatever reason, it never got made,” Stiller said of the project, which was set up at the now defunct Hollywood Pictures, a former subsidiary of Disney. “It was probably just too insane.”
He’s not necessarily wrong. The screenplay sets its action inside a high-rise hotel built in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on top of an active undersea volcano. As one might expect from its 1970s forebears, calamity is quick to ensue. Stiller plays a radical preacher in the script, a role that on paper sounds similar to the part Gene Hackman played in The Poseidon Adventure. (“I don’t know what you’re talking about; it’s a purely original character,” Stiller joked when the comparison was made.)