Development Hell

Development Hell is Hollywood industry jargon for the process of working on a movie or television screenplay (or sometimes just a concept or idea) repeatedly until it satisfies all stakeholders. The screenwriter may have successfully sold his screenplay to a certain set of studio executives, but then the executives change, and these new people raise objections to all the scripts they oversee, and rewrites are necessary. A director and actors become "attached" to the movie project, and this forces further rewrites to leverage their talents or to accommodate their whims, and then if they leave the project, this causes further rewrites. Repeat. Hence the "hell" in "development hell".