Filmmaking is a tough process — it requires the efforts of hundreds of people, and movies often go through drastic changes as they’re being made for all sorts of reasons. With Rogue One: A Star Wars Story dominating the box office for weeks after its release, a big part of the dialogue around the movie is how different the final film was from its first trailer: tales of reshoots and re-edits have cropped up around the project since long before it was released.
Reshoots, rewrites and re-edits are a reality for every would-be blockbuster being released. Sometimes, changes to a movie as it’s being made work for the final product, and sometimes they really don’t. For every film like Rogue One that's largely well-received, there’s also a story like that of Suicide Squad, Warner Bros. action movie starring a host of DC Comics supervillains, which reportedly was massively re-edited to change its tone once it was finished and has a finished product that's divisive among critics and fans.
But this sort of production trouble isn't anything new, even if we're talking about it now more than ever. There are a plenty of movies throughout the decades that emerged from big changes for the better — and several are considered major classics, even though the movie originally conceived looks nothing like the finished film audiences eventually came to love. Here are 11 examples of amazing movies that survived massive changes to become iconic.
What became Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror masterpiece went through a number of changes through its production, starting with its script. After the initial story was conceived by writers Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett, it had a number of tweaks, including casting the movie’s protagonist, Ripley, as a woman. (O’Bannon said he’d originally written all the characters to be gender-neutral to open up casting.)
Originally, the movie was set for a bleak but somewhat ambiguous ending, with Ripley escaping the movie’s ship, the Nostromo, on its shuttle, only to find the alien waiting for her — and that’s it. Scott pushed to add more to the ending, but actually wanted the alien to kill Ripley (and somehow record a message back to Earth by mimicking her voice). Fortunately for the character and the franchise, the producers thought that approach was too dark (and maybe weird). The compromise was the ending in which Ripley blows the alien out the airlock, then settles into hypersleep with Jones the cat.
There’s another major bit of Alien lore that was altered before the film was released, ultimately for the better. In editing, Scott cut a scene during Ripley’s escape near the end of the movie in which she finds Brett and Dallas, the two characters the creature had carried off earlier in the film. Both were cocooned to a wall and were being digested, more or less, and turned into eggs to hatch new facehuggers. Scott cut the scene for pacing (although you can see it in the 2003 re-release), and removing it left the door open for director James Cameron to create the egg-laying Alien Queen when he wrote the sequel, 1986’s Aliens.
Everybody knows now that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker's father, but that wasn't always the case when Empire Strikes Back was being developed. The first draft of the script was written by Leigh Brackett, who did write a meeting between Luke and his father -- the dad just wasn't Vader. In that version, Luke's dad reveals Luke has a secret Jedi-in-training sister and then administers the Jedi Knight oath to his son. Brackett died soon after she wrote the script, so George Lucas took a stab at the second draft. His version tweaked the story by making Vader into Luke's father, creating the entire Jedi-gone-bad backstory of Anakin Skywalker. Writer Lawrence Kasdan took over from there.
Even though the twist came relatively late in Empire Strikes Back's production, it was a closely guarded secret through the end. The identity of Vader wasn't discussed with the cast through filming to keep it from leaking. David Prowse, who played Vader and spoke his lines on set before they were dubbed over by James Earl Jones, was given a script that said what everyone else on the film thought was the real twist: that Luke’s father was killed by Obi-Wan Kenobi, rather than by Vader, as Obi-Wan Kenobi had said in A New Hope. Mark Hamill wasn’t told the truth until right before shooting his “That’s not true! That’s impossible!” close-up.
There’s an imaginary version of quintessential 1988 action movie Die Hard that doesn’t include Bruce Willis — instead, it stars Frank Sinatra. That’s because the movie known as Die Hard is based on the 1979 novel Nothing Lasts Forever by author Roderick Thorp, and that book is actually a sequel to his 1966 crime thriller The Detective. Sinatra starred in the 1968 film adaptation of The Detective, and his contract obligated Fox to offer the lead role to him.
Luckily for Bruce Willis and for the conception of Die Hard, Sinatra was hitting his 70s at the time and turned the movie down. Casting Sinatra would have been more in line with Thorp’s novel, which is close to what the movie became but focused on an older, retired cop. Fox then offered the movie to lots of other action stars, including Arnold Schwarzenegger, before finally landing on Willis, who was best known as a comedy actor at the time.
Die Hard’s script wasn’t even finished when the movie went into production, causing a few continuity errors to crop up along the way — like the fact that the truck Hans Gruber and his team arrive in at the start of the film is too small to house the ambulance that emerges from it toward the movie’s conclusion.
The 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz credits Victor Fleming as its director, but the truth is that the film had plenty of hands on it during it creation: five directors all had a hand in its filming. Norman Taurog was the original director but was replaced after a few early test shoots by Richard Thorpe. Thorpe was replaced after producer Mervyn LeRoy felt he was rushing production and hurting the actors' performances, and George Cukor was briefly brought on board. Cukor didn't last especially long because of a prior commitment to direct Gone With the Wind, and didn't end up filming any scenes by the time Fleming replaced him.
The movie also underwent a major casting change after the original Tinman, Buddy Ebsen, was hospitalized because the silver paint used in his costume made him severely ill. He was replaced by Jack Haley, which required reshoots and re-recordings of the previously finished Tin Man sections of the film. After all the changes, the movie mostly stuck with Fleming’s creative vision, but he didn’t even finish directing it. Instead, he headed off to take over directing Gone with the Wind, replacing Cukor yet again, and King Vidor finished The Wizard of Oz in his stead.
Before it was a film classic (and also before it was criticized for making slavery seem like no big deal), Gone with the Wind was a famously tough movie to make. It ended up going through three directors by its completion: director George Cukor worked on the movie for two years in pre-production before he was replaced three weeks into shooting in 1939. The Wizard of Oz director Victor Fleming took over at that point, reshooting some of Cukor’s scenes, and covering the bulk of the film. But Fleming was briefly replaced by another director, Sam Wood, who took over while Fleming was reportedly recovering from exhaustion. The final cut of Gone with the Wind sported contributions from all three directors, plus two cinematographers.
Another sci-fi classic from director Ridley Scott, 1982’s Blade Runner had a famously difficult production. Star Harrison Ford didn’t get along with Scott during work on the adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel, and neither did the film’s crew, who nearly revolted during filming. After the movie was complete, studio execs pushed for two big changes: a happier ending for Ford’s character Rick Deckard, and a voice-over narration track recorded by Ford. Scott and Ford both thought the movie worked as it had been filmed, but studio execs thought the narration would clear up the plot. Rumor has it that Ford’s performance on the narration was purposely awful, in hopes of pushing the studio not to use it. But in the theatrical print, they did.
Luckily, a 1992 director’s cut of the movie removed the voiceover and the happier ending. It also added some ambiguous scenes depicting Deckard’s dreams of unicorns, implying that he might be a Replicant himself. The superior cut of the movie helped elevate Blade Runner from a visually cool sci-fi movie to something much more enduring.
Michael J. Fox’s portrayal of the time-traveling, parent-matchmaking Marty McFly has become iconic since the release of Back to the Future in 1985, but actor Eric Stoltz was the person originally cast as Marty. Several weeks into filming he was replaced with Fox, and the rest is history. The reason for the change? Director Robert Zemeckis said Stoltz’s comedic timing wasn’t in line with what the movie needed. A big chunk of the original movie was shot with a different lead actor than who fans would come to know — and some of that footage, not featuring Stoltz but shot while he was on set, is believed to be in the finished film.
After the successes of Die Hard and Die Hard 2, a third movie in Bruce Willis’ action series was pretty much inevitable — it just was unclear what that movie would be. Several scripts were rejected for being too similar to other action movies that came out in the wake of Die Hard. There was a script called Troubleshooter that took place on a cruise liner, but which was dumped when Fox found out about the similar upcoming Sylvester Stallone film Under Siege. (That script went on to become Speed 2: Cruise Control.)
The script that eventually did go on to be Willis’ 1995 team-up with Samuel L. Jackson was originally called Simon Says. It was first acquired by Warner Bros. with the plan of turning it into a Lethal Weapon movie — which might explain the inclusion of Jackson’s Zeus as a partner character for John McClane — before Fox picked it up from WB and turned it into Die Hard.
Die Hard 3 also saw some significant changes to its ending before it was released. It originally concluded with Simon escaping capture and McClane blamed for everything, essentially leaving him a broken man. McClane eventually tracked Simon down and got some revenge with a riddle-filled game of Russian roulette with a rocket launcher, but the ending — and the idea of McClane as seeking revenge rather than justice — was deemed too dark. The alternate ending still does exist, though, and can be found on the Special Edition DVD.
The 1997 movie that helped make Matt Damon and Ben Affleck household names is a drama about a kid from the streets of Boston who is discovered to be a genius. Originally, though, Damon and Affleck’s script was about a kid from the streets of Boston discovered to be a genius and hunted by the government, who wanted to recruit him. It was also a thriller.
The suggestion to change it to a drama, focusing on protagonist Will’s relationship with his therapist, played by Robin Williams, came from Rob Reiner, whose company Castle Rock Entertainment originally bought the script. Removing the thriller part cut about half the script’s length, though, resulting in a total overhaul of the movie. That change would go on to net Affleck and Damon an Oscar for screenwriting (and one for Williams’ in the Supporting Actor category).
A noir story set in Los Angeles about the pressure of an actress’ dwindling fame eventually leading to murder: Sunset Boulevard, which came out in 1950, was always supposed to be a dark drama. The film begins with its protagonist, Joe Gillis, narrating his own murder, but in the original cut of the film, Gillis wasn’t floating face down in a pool like in the theatrical release — he was in the morgue, discussing with other bodies how they all ended up there.
When the movie was screened for test audiences, everyone in the theater thought the morgue opening was ridiculous to the point of being hilarious, completely confusing the tone of the film. Apparently, nobody was sure if the rest of the movie was meant to be a comedy or not. Director Billy Wilder reshot the opening, using what would become the famous pool scene, instead. That got the darker tone across, luckily with less laughter, helping to turn Sunset Boulevard into a noir classic about the pitfalls of fame and fortune.
Casablanca might be one of the most enduring Hollywood classics, but did you know the movie went into production in 1942 without a full script? Yes, the writers were scrambling to find the ending even as the film was being made -- and that was even after it missed its planned filming start date by over a month.
Plenty of other changes were made, though unlike other projects on this list, they weren't the result of creatives shifts or production upheaval — they were about getting implications of sex out of the movie. The strict Production Code, a self-censorship policy enacted by the Motion Picture Association of America, demanded some changes in the affair between Humphrey Bogart’s Rick and Ingrid Bergman’s Ilsa, and the implied trading of favors for sex by Captain Renault.
Phil Hornshaw is a freelance writer and the co-author of So You Created a Wormhole: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Time Travel and The Space Hero’s Guide to Glory. He was hoping the latter would help him get Han Solo hair, but so far he’s been unsuccessful. He lives with his wife and annoying cats in Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @PhilHornshaw.
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