I haven’t done a “What If…” article for a long time and recently I was reminded of a project that was meant to star Jean-Claude Van Damme and Wesley Snipes that never happened.
I’m sure this is old news but it was called Sandblast and sounded pretty awesome.
The details are in IMDB as follows:
Around May of 1996, while he was working on Maximum Risk, Warner Bros. offered Jean Claude Van Damme the role of the main villain in their upcoming movie, an action thriller titled Sandblast. Described as both Die Hard (1988) and Cliffhanger (1993) in a desert sandstorm, the original spec script for it was written by Steven Maeda in 1993 who sold it to Warner Bros. and producer Joel Silver that same year for $750,000. When the project first started in 1995, Eddie Murphy was originally going to play the lead role due to him wanting to do a more serious action movie role, but eventually he left to star in Metro (1997), and in 1996 Wesley Snipes signed in to star in Sandblast for a paycheck of $10 million.
The plot of the film would have been about an ex-landmine expert and army specialist who joins up with team of commandos who are sent into the Iraq desert sometime after the Gulf War to find lost nuclear warheads, and they have to do this while dealing with deadly terrain, a huge sandstorm and a team of traitorous Green Berets who are also looking for the warheads, and Van Damme would play the leader of Berets. However, he refused to play the villain and he also didn’t like that his character would get killed in the end by Snipes’ character, and despite the studio already securing the budget, for the crew and some of the other cast for the film, it was ultimately cancelled due to this and some other problems during pre-production.
So, this movie would have pitted JCVD against Wesley Snipes? That could have been awesome! I love seeing Van Damme as a bad guy and this story sounds interesting too. What if in another place and another time they made this movie? I would have loved that. Would you have watched Sandblast?