Five Heavy Dramas That Started as Comedies
Movies always go through a number of changes between an idea in the shower to streaming from your couch, whether minor (your protagonist now wears leather jackets instead of tweed suits) to major (he’s also a wild stunt man instead of a quiet professor). It’s not uncommon, for example, to lighten up some dark source material for a broader audience, so you know when the opposite occurs — a comedy becomes a heavy drama or high-stakes thriller — some choices were made.
Alien
We’re usually relegated to merely imagining what a movie might have been like if it had been taken in a different direction, but in the case of Alien, we can see it. It started as Dark Star (which itself started as John Carpenter’s USC master’s thesis), a comedy featuring an alien very obviously made out of a beach ball. “I went away from Dark Star really wanting to do an alien that looked real” and “decided to do Dark Star as a horror movie instead of a comedy,” writer Dan O’Bannon explained.
Bad Boys
The movie that made Will Smith an action star was supposed to make Dana Carvey… not an action star, as awesome as that would have been. It was supposed to be a buddy cop comedy starring Carvey and Jon Lovitz, which would have been considerably less awesome, since according to Lovitz, “the script was shit.”
Collateral
Michael Mann isn’t exactly lauded for his sense of humor, so there’s little that’s funny about his 2004 hitman-taxi-hostage thriller, but it wasn’t always a Michael Mann joint. It was first helmed by Fernando Meirelles, who is also not known for his funny bone, but as he once told an interviewer, he “was going to do it more like a comedy. Have you seen After Hours? The tone is drama but it’s a comedy. It’s very funny and that was the tone I was proposing to the studio.” Then he decided he didn’t want to live in L.A. for eight months, a decision that’s only ever led to good things.
Jaws 3-D
For the third installment of the Jaws franchise, its producers opted for something a little lighter and brought in writers from National Lampoon for what would have been a spoof called Jaws 3, People Nothing about the disastrous making of a fictional third Jaws film. Unfortunately, a not insignificant part of the plot involved the shark repeatedly attacking the director, which apparently rubbed Spielberg the wrong way, and he threatened to never work for Universal again if the movie went forward. What they ended up with was only an unintentional comedy.
Eyes Wide Shut
Eyes Wide Shut is mostly about Tom Cruise getting sexually humiliated by Nicole Kidman and occasionally witnessing ritual orgies, but in Stanley Kubrick’s initial vision, he would have done it in a funny way. Well, Steve Martin would have. Kubrick had been kicking the story around since the ‘80s, and “his idea for it in those days was always as a sex comedy, but with a wild and somber streak running through it,” starring either Martin or, seriously, Woody goddamn Allen. An honorary Oscar to whoever is responsible for dodging that bullet, as they’ve contributed as much to cinema as anyone.