Unreleased Bill Murray film resurfaces online

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The weird 1984 sci-fi film, Nothing Lasts Forever, which was canned before release, has resurfaced in full on YouTube

Whilst Bill Murray was revelling in the success of Ghostbusters in the summer of 1984, he was also involved in another film, though this was one that didn’t quite match the success of Ghostbusters. In fact, it was canned before being released.

The sci-fi comedy Nothing Lasts Forever was directed by Tom Schiller, at the time renowned for his short films on Saturday Night Live, and starred both Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd in supporting roles as well as Gremlins’ Zach Galligan. Schiller described it as “the weird move I’d always wanted to make” and sees an aspiring artist joining a group of radicals who plan to drive a bus to the moon. The film was intended for a September release, so as to capitalise on the success of both Ghostbusters and Gremlins, but MGM postponed the release date and then canned it altogether.

Nothing Lasts Forever has never been released officially in theatres, and nor has it been released on home media. But the cast and crew often put on screenings of the film, usually at Murray's insistence; now the whole thing has resurfaced online. The film has been available on YouTube for 3 years but is only now being rediscovered. It’s a spectacularly odd film, as one might expect from that era of Murray films, featuring musical numbers, jumps into colour, and clips from old movies thrown in for good measure.

Schiller has said that he never received a straight answer as to why the film was canned, although he believes it was because the film wasn’t “commercial” enough or that the number of old movie clips caused copyright problems for the studio.

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