Plenty of movies go through rewrites or significant edits, but sometimes, what ends up onscreen is completely different from the original script or pitch.
Here are 22 movies that were originally supposed to be wayyyy different:
1.
Monsters, Inc. director Pete Docter told the Creative Screenwriting podcast, “Well, my idea was that what it was about was about a 30-year-old man who is, like, an accountant or something. He hates his job, and one day he gets a book with some drawings in it that he did when he was a kid from his mom. And he doesn’t think anything of it, and he puts it on the shelf, and that night, monsters show up. And nobody else can see them. He thinks he’s starting to go crazy. They follow him to his job, and on his dates, and all this — and it turns out these monsters are fears that he never dealt with as a kid. And each one of them represents a different kind of fear.”
“As he conquers those fears, the guys who he slowly becomes kind of friends with — they disappear as he conquers those fears. It’s this bittersweet kinda ending where they go away, and so not much of that stayed,” he said.
2.
Per SyFy, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Poltergeist came out within a week of each other, but Steven Spielberg originally envisioned them as one movie called Watch the Skies. The project — which had an eventual name change to Night Skies — was a darker sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It followed a family who were antagonized by aliens trying to break into their house. Spielberg planned to produce the film while John Sayles wrote it, but he changed his mind while directing Raiders of the Lost Ark.
At the TCM Festival, he recalled, “I suddenly thought, ‘Wait a second, what if that little creature [at the end of Close Encounters] never went back to the ship? What if the creature was part of a foreign exchange program? And that was the feeling that I had. What if I turned my story about divorce into a story about children, a family, trying to fill the great need [of family]?” So, he devised a new story and pitched it to screenwriter Melissa Mathison, who was on set visiting Harrison Ford, her boyfriend at the time. She agreed to write E.T., and Spielberg turned it in at Columbia instead of his original pitch. Columbia passed, but Universal wanted it.
However, keeping the original concept of Night Skies, he changed the aliens to ghosts. That idea, combined with director Tobe Hooper’s own research and ideas, evolved into Poltergeist.
3.
Decades before Beetlejuice Beetlejuice hit theaters, there were two other failed Beetlejuice sequels in the works. According to IGN, Warner Bros. had screenwriter Warren Skaaren work on a loosely Phantom of the Opera-inspired sequel called Beetlejuice in Love. The Deetz family was absent from this story, but Beetlejuice set his sights on an opera singer named Leo, who met his death while proposing to his girlfriend, Julia. Beetlejuice exploited Leo’s heartbreak and tried to trick him into returning to the world of the living so he could get married. In the end, Leo was reborn as a baby Julia cared for.
The second failed sequel was the infamous Beetlejuice Goes Hawaiian. Tim Burton was intrigued by the stark contrast between German Expressionism and a beach movie. He hired playwright Jonathan Gems to work on a script. In this story, Beetlejuice was stuck in a dead-end job as a supermarket janitor in the afterlife and lived in an apartment with his wife, Rita. But when the Deetz family traveled to Hawaii to open a new resort, which upset the local spirits, he came back into their lives. Despite being married, Beetlejuice was still romantically interested in Lydia, who had a new surfer boy love interest named Kimo. However, Kimo and his friends protested the resort and kidnapped Mr. Deetz. Eventually, Lydia partnered with Beetlejuice to stop her family’s greed and save the island, but he tricked her into a wedding (like in the original film). His mom stopped the ceremony, and he fulfilled his promise to scare the tourists away.
In the end, Beetlejuice accidentally drank a love potion he got for Lydia and fell in love with Rita. He was also expelled to the Netherworld. Ultimately, the screenwriter left the film to pursue other opportunities, and by 1997, it was dead in the water because Winona Rider was too old to reprise teenage Lydia and would have to be recast.
4.
Frozen producer Peter Del Vecho told Entertainment Weekly, “With all the movies we work on, eventually the film tells you what it needs to be, and if you’re smart enough to listen to that, it leads you to a different direction than perhaps your preconceived notion. So when we started off, Anna and Elsa were not sisters. They weren’t even royal. So Anna was not a princess. Elsa was a self-proclaimed Snow Queen, but she was a villain and pure evil — much more like the Hans Christian Andersen tale. We started out with an evil female villain and an innocent female heroine, and the ending involved a big epic battle with snow monsters that Elsa had created as her army…”
In many of the early drafts, the movie opened with a prophecy that “a ruler with a frozen heart will bring destruction to the kingdom of Arendelle.” Elsa had frozen her own heart after being left at the altar. When Prince Hans started an avalanche to stop her snow monsters, putting Arendelle in danger, Anna went to Elsa for help stopping him. However, that version of Elsa didn’t feel quite right, and they toyed with the idea of the main characters being sisters. After some consideration, the creative team had a “sister summit” to hear about other employees’ experiences with their families.
5.
When J.F. Lawton first began working on the script that would eventually become Pretty Woman, it wasn’t even a rom-com! It was a gritty drama titled 3,000. He told Vanity Fair, “Wall Street had either come out or was coming out, I had heard about it and the whole issue about the financiers who were destroying companies. I kind of thought about the idea that one of these people would meet somebody who was affected by what they were doing.” His initial script had many scenes and characters similar to Pretty Woman, but Vivian didn’t end up with Edward. In the finale scene, she and her best friend, Kit, were on a bus to Disneyland. Kit’s excitement was contrasted with Vivian’s staring “out emptily ahead.” After the original company that was attached to the project went bankrupt, it was “upgraded to Disney.”
The script went thorugh multiple rewrites, transforming it into a rom-com, but Lawton was happy with this. He said, “I was thrilled! That’s the other side of it, is that I’m supposed to be the wounded artist in all of this who painted the da Vinci or whatever, and then they slashed it. I was a guy who was writing ninja movies and trying to get a job. If you’re an architect, and you design a cabin for the woods, and somebody says, ‘We want to make it into a skyscraper’…the fact that Disney came in and wanted to do it as a big-budget movie with a major director was a great thing.”
6.
Ghostbusters director/producer Ivan Reitman told Entertainment Weekly, “Dan [Aykroyd] had written a treatment for something called Ghostbusters for himself and John Belushi. Then Belushi passed away, and the script sort of sat dormant for a couple of years. He sent it to me and said, ‘Look, do you think this would be something you’d like to direct with me and Bill [Murray]?’ I read it, and it was sort of a futuristic thing and it was competing groups of Ghostbusters and out in space.”
Dan added, “It never went to outer space. That’s Ivan’s misinterpretation. It went to inner space. Now, superstring theory — 23 different dimensions, 11 different dimensions, what’s in the 7th or 8th? We live in four. But anyway, it was my family business, the paranormal. My great-grandfather was an Edwardian spiritualist. There’s a book called History of Ghosts. You can get it on Amazon. My dad wrote it. It’s about mediumship and transmediumship and the afterlife and survival of the consciousness after death, so that was the kind of stuff I was reading as a kid.”
He continued, “I originated Ghostbusters based upon reading that material and the real work of J.B. Rhine and [William G.] Roll and the Maimonides Dream Lab — real scientists who were into this. I took that from my family history, my family business, and married it with the ghost comedies of the 1930s — Abbot and Costello, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, and the Bowery Boys. I mean, everyone did ghost movies. I just thought, ‘Let’s do a comedy ghost movie, but let’s base it on the real research.’ From that, I wrote a script, which is much darker than what was seen and was less accessible.” The original version was considered too difficult to make, but Ivan helped streamline it to make it more manageable.
7.
According to Vulture, The Emperor’s New Groove was originally in development as Kingdom of the Sun, an Owen Wilson-led musical about a llama farmer who switched places with a narcissistic prince. The villain was a sorceress who plotted to block out the sun. The soundtrack was penned by Sting, and as the movie went into production, Trudie Styler, his wife, made a documentary about it.
Director Roger Allers told the outlet, “In [the Incan] creation myth of the world, there was a god named Viracocha who brought light to the world by throwing a rope around a distant star and pulling it to the earth. That image to me was really exciting. The most stunning visual in the film would have been the conclusion, where the sun is roped and pulled into this writhing mass of dark images. I was hoping it would be a mix of mythology, humor, romance. I had looked at Prisoner of Zenda as a story about a prince and his distant cousin who are dead ringers. The prince has enemies that want to kidnap him and the look-alike cousin has to stand in for him. It was also reflective of The Prince and the Pauper.”
However, the concept got muddled. Producer Randy Fullmer said, “With Kingdom of the Sun, it seemed so promising at first. There were so many elements, all of which were fun and good. Yzma was terrific. Sting was doing fantastic music. But I think Roger tried to hang onto too many elements. I met a very nice woman on a plane once coming back from New York, where we’d recorded Sting. She was like, ‘Oh, you work at Disney. What are you doing?’ Blah, blah, blah. ‘Oh, my. So, what’s the movie about?’ I feel like I talked until we got to Los Angeles, trying to explain it all. And I realized, Okay, this is not good. There’s too much here.” They tried to whittle it down, but after a screening, the powers-that-be split the team in half to come up with two different versions of the movie. After the second team’s pitch was better received, Roger graciously stepped away from the project.
Then, Disney only had a year to finish the movie because of a McDonald’s Happy Meal deadline. The main elements they kept were Eartha Kitt as Yzma and David Spade as Kuzco. Trudie’s documentary, The Sweatbox, chronicled the entire saga, but because Disney owns it, it’s never been widely released.
8.
Doctor Mordrid — a 1992 superhero movie — is a pretty thinly veiled ripoff of Marvel’s Doctor Strange, but that’s because it was originally intended to be a Doctor Strange adaptation! Per Screen Rant, three decades before the Benedict Cumberbatch-led blockbuster, Full Moon Entertainment acquired the film rights to Doctor Strange. However, right before production was supposed to begin, the studio had a falling out with Marvel. But rather than letting everything go to waste, they quickly retooled the film into an original (though I use that term loosely) concept. A few of the starting similarities that Doctor Mordrid bears to Doctor Strange include his amulet, his Sanctum Sanctorum-esque brownstone, and his Dormammu-like antagonist, Kabal.
9.
Doctor Strange isn’t the only Marvel blockbuster that went through a failed planning stage. According to Screen Rant, in 1990, Universal got the film rights to Iron Man. The studio planned an adaptation led by horror director Stuart Gordon and RoboCop screenwriter Ed Neumeier. It’s rumored that, in this version, Tony Stark would be coming out of retirement. However, it never made it past pre-production.
Six years later, Universal sold the film rights to Fox, who got Stan Lee on board to co-author a script with Jeff Vintar. Their version would be an origin story where Iron Man faced AIM and MODOK. Both Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise expressed interest in playing the hero, but the project fizzled out. Iron Man went through several more failed attempts at New Line, eventually settling on a script where Tony stopped Stark Industries from making weapons, causing his dad to turn into a villain. The Notebook director Nick Cassavetes signed on, but the studio’s film rights expired before anything could be set in stone.
10.
According to Screen Rant, Thor: Ragnarok was initially conceived as a much darker film and would’ve likely revolved around the Infinity Stones (which played a key role in Avengers: Infinity War and Endgame). However, Chris Hemsworth told Vanity Fair that he was “sick” of the old Thor, and hearing filmmaker Kevin Smith criticize the Thor movies on a podcast inspired him to bring his concerns to Kevin Feige. Chris said, “Hearing someone like Smith, who represents the fanboy world, was such a kick in the ass to change gears. We sort of had nothing to lose. People didn’t expect what we did with it this time around.”
He told Kevin, “It has to be funnier; it has to be unpredictable. Tonally, we’ve just got to wipe the table again.” With director Taika Waititi on board, the movie careened into a totally new direction. Instead of a dark film, it became a comedy, leaning into the talents Chris had shown in Ghostbusters and Vacation. Taika agreed with his ideas to “cut his hair” and “destroy the hammer.” Chris said, “There was a sense of, ‘If we’re going to go out, let’s go out swinging.”
11.
Will Ferrell told The Bill Simmons Podcast, “The first version of Anchorman is basically the movie Alive, where the year is 1976, and we are flying to Philadelphia, and all the newsmen from around the country are flying in to have some big convention. Ron convinces the pilot that he knows how to fly the charter jet, and he immediately crash-lands it in the mountains. And it’s just the story of them surviving and trying to get off the mountainside.”
“They clipped a cargo plane, and the cargo plane crashed as well, close to them, and it was carrying only boxes of orangutans and Chinese throwing stars. So throughout the movie, we’re being stalked by orangutans who are killing, one by one, the team off with throwing stars. And Veronica Corningstone keeps saying things like, ‘Guys, I know if we just head down, we’ll hit civilization.’ And we keep telling her, ‘Wrong.’ She doesn’t know what we’re talking about. So that was the first version of the movie,” he said.
12.
The original script for My Stepmother is an Alien was penned by a mysterious screenwriter known only as Jerico [Stone]. He told the LA Times, “My original script was an allegory about child abuse. I wanted to reach kids in a way that wouldn’t make the story just a disease-of-the-week TV movie. And after certain incidents I’d experienced, I realized I could tell the story as a fable, a fairy tale that would make it easier for kids to grasp the child abuse angle.” As a child, he was “beaten up” at school and home, and he spent a lot of time at a train station reading comics with a friend who had similar experiences. He said, “We decided to become comic superheroes and called ourselves the Black Jacks. It gave us strength…[One day] he said we couldn’t do anything to stop his father because he was an alien. And he said he couldn’t see me again — and he never did.”
Several years later, when Jerico was experiencing homelessness in LA, he befriended a child who told him he couldn’t fight back against his abusive dad because his dad was an alien. So, Jerico followed the boy, who got into an abandoned car in a grocery store parking lot. Jerico said, “I rushed up and started kicking the car when the door opened and…It was an alien. It wasn’t a man. It wasn’t a person. It looked so strange, I couldn’t even describe it. I just froze. The next thing I knew, this huge hand leaped out and dug into my stomach, grabbing hold of my spine. The pain was so intense I just collapsed to the ground. The alien creature stood over me and said, very gently, ‘Sorry, Black Jack.’ Then the car started to shimmer, very brightly, and I blacked out from the pain. When I came to, the car — and any traces of it — was gone.”
Shortly after, inspired by a chance encounter with Orson Wells, he started pitching a film about a kid who envisioned his step-mom as an alien. He said, “No one believes him because she’s the greatest mother in public, but in private, she’s totally sadistic to him. It was a very dark story.” However, after Paramount picked it up, they decided it would be better as a comedy and brought in additional writers. Jerico said, “Hollywood is a doomed planet. Watching the film is like seeing someone you loved very much at one time and then seeing them much later and…They’re the same person, but they look so different. So many things have happened to them. It’s not the person you loved 20 years before.”
13.
Per Vulture, the 2010 film Robin Hood originated as Cyrus Voris and Ethan Reif’s screenplay called Nottingham. It was a twist on the classic Robin Hood tale from the POV of the Sheriff of Nottingham, who was actually the good guy. Robin Hood was a jerk, and they were both involved in a love triangle with Marian.
However, once director Ridley Scott’s involvement was publicized, the writers stopped hearing from Universal. They indirectly found out they were being replaced when they learned that the studio had an open writing assignment for Robin Hood. Both Ridley and lead actor Russell Crowe were opposed to making the Sheriff the protagonist, so screenwriter Brian Helgeland was hired to rewrite it into a standard Robin Hood adaptation (though another writer was hired to write a new draft before they again commissioned Brian for a final draft).
14.
According to the Independent, Toy Story was initially envisioned as a feature-length version of the Pixar short Tin Toy. The original protagonist was a mechanical drummer toy who went up against a ventriloquist’s dummy. However, the drummer was replaced by a “space toy” named Lunar Larry (who later became Buzz Lightyear), and the dummy became Woody, the pull-string cowboy doll and the hero of the story. After a mockup of the movie was poorly received by Disney, the writers spent months revising it.
15.
According to Screen Rant, in the original plans for Toy Story 3 — which was initially going to be made by Disney’s Circle 7 Animation, not Pixar — Buzz Lightyear was recalled to Taiwan, where he met other toys that had been recalled. His friends traveled across the world to save him, but he ultimately died.
16.
Con Air director Simon West told Den of Geek, “The original script was much smaller than the eventual film. It was a character piece, really, by Scott Rosenberg, who did Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead and Beautiful Girls, which were very small, little indie films with great characters. Jerry [Bruckheimer] liked it, obviously, and I liked it just because of the characters and their names, like Cyrus The Virus and Diamond Dog and things like that. I thought, well, I can do something with this. But I had to make it into a big summer action movie, whereas, at the moment, it’s a small character piece. So then I set about blowing it up out of all proportion, really.”
17.
Per Uproxx, Yesterday originated as Jack Barth’s screenplay Cover Version. In his version, the protagonist, Jack, was still the only person who remembered the Beatles, but their songs only got him slightly better gigs, not overnight sensationalism. Additionally, his love interest, Ellie, was his girlfriend and bandmate, not his childhood crush. However, when Richard Curtis rewrote it, the movie became a rom-com where Jack had to choose between Ellie and fame.
Barth told Uproxx, “I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I think that the reason that Richard turned him into the most successful songwriter of all time is because that’s how Richard’s life is going. He met Rowan Atkinson at Oxford. He came out of Oxford and immediately rode Rowan Atkinson to huge success in his early twenties. He’s never been knocked out, as far as I know. Why wouldn’t this guy become the most successful songwriter in the world?” Richard, who’s previously said he didn’t read Barth’s script and only heard the pitch, wasn’t available to comment on the interview.
However, there’s one infamous change that Yesterday made between the trailer and the release. According to Cinema Blend, an earlier cut featured Ana De Armas playing Roxanne, who was part of a love triangle with Jack and Ellie. However, that subplot didn’t do well with test audiences, so it was removed. But shots of ANA still appeared in the trailer. In 2022, two of Ana’s fans infamously sued Universal in a federal class action suit, alleging the trailer used “false, misleading, and deceptive” marketing to get them to rent to movie on Amazon Prime. Per THR, the suit was later settled out of court.
18.
In its original form, Galaxy Quest was titled Captain Starshine. Producer Mark Johnson’s scouts weren’t impressed with the screenplay itself, but they loved the logline — what if aliens mistake an old Star Trek-esque show as “historical documents” and seek out the crew of out-of-work actors for help when their planet is threatened? So, it was completely rewritten by a different screenwriter. Mark told MTV News, “The original David Howard draft of Captain Starshine — very few people have ever read that. The original concept was brilliant, but we needed someone like a Bob Gordon to take it from there.”
19.
When Andrew Niccol first wrote The Truman Show, he “did envisage something darker.” He told The Hollywood Reporter, “In the original script, there was an innocent passenger attacked on the subway as a way to test Truman’s courage, and Truman had a platonic relationship with a prostitute who he dressed as Sylvia…I always thought the premise was bullet-proof, and even though the original draft is set in an alternate version of New York City — if you can fake it there, you can fake it anywhere — I was happy to embrace [director Peter Weir’s] more idyllic, small-town take on a counterfeit world.”
20.
The Lost Boys co-screenwriter told the Guardian, “I’d read Interview With the Vampire by Anne Rice and was inspired by the little girl, Claudia, trapped in the body of a five-year-old for eternity. It got me thinking about JM Barrie’s Peter Pan – where our title came from. What if the reason he came out at night, could fly, and didn’t grow up was because he was a vampire? We took a fictional character and put him in a new light. What if it wasn’t all goodness and there was some evil intent? Warner Bros paid us $375,000 for the script. About a year later, we had a meeting with [original director, later executive producer] Richard Donner about rewrites. It was brutal.”
“We had designed the film to be a boy’s adventure, set in a time before sex rears its head. But that’s not what the studio wanted. Donner wanted the boys to be old enough to drive. What he meant was old enough to fuck. He also wanted Star – whom we’d written as a boy – to change sex and be the love interest. He was turning our story into a teenage vampire movie. Once we sold the script, it was out of our hands,” he said.
21.
When Mario Puzo first showed Al Pacino his script for The Godfather Part II, he warned him that it was “crap.” Al told Fresh Air, “He said, ‘I just want you to know before you read it, they want to do it, and that this is crap.’ And I read it, and he was right. It was not good. And so I just thought, well — and they kept upping the ante. They kept giving me more money. And I kept saying, ‘But I don’t want to do it.’ And then finally, when Francis [Ford Coppola] — because Francis wasn’t on the project. So Francis got on the project. And he cut them off at about 700,000. He said, ‘No, he doesn’t want money. He wants a good script. Stop giving him the money.'” He said that, after Coppola’s rewrites, “It was a great script.”
22.
And finally, according to Cinema Blend, the original script for Being John Malkovich was even weirder. Instead of Craig turning John Malkovich into a renowned puppeteer, he turned the actor into a puppet, with himself as the puppeteer. They got a Vegas show where they juggled chainsaws and performed scenes from On the Waterfront. Then, a rival puppeteer called The Great Mantini (whose puppet looked like President Truman) challenged them to an onstage puppetry duel where they performed the play Equus. However, the Devil, who wanted his followers to take possession of John in a world domination plot, possessed the Truman puppet and made it perform unbelievable tricks, ending by turning into a swan and catching fire. The real President Truman rose from the ashes and told the audience to vote for his puppeteer to win the duel.
Following his defeat, Craig abandoned John, who was taken over by the Devil’s followers. Flying over NYC, John made everyone in the world dance until their deaths. In the twist ending, it was revealed that The Great Mantini has actually been in control of Craig, but Mr. Flemmer has been pulling Mantini’s strings.
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