Five Iconic Films Made Out of Spite
The animal known as man has three primary motivations: survival, reproduction and pure, unadulterated pettiness. Not even the Hollywood elite are immune to such urges. In fact, some of your favorite movies were only made out of sheer spite.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
By the late ‘70s, Steven Spielberg became known for an appealing brand of thoughtful action-adventure movies, but forget about that. What he really wanted to do was James Bond. After the franchise’s producers turned him down twice, he decided to run with an idea from his pal George Lucas and basically make the American James Bond. Think about it: A swaggering adventurer with an impeccable sense of fashion and a taste for the exotic, if a bit grimier than Bond tends to get. That’s one reason Spielberg was so excited to cast Sean Connery as Henry Jones Sr. After all, he said, “James Bond is the father of Indiana Jones.”
War of the Worlds
Spielberg really hates it when people tell him he can’t do something. After Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he wanted to show aliens’ less cuddly side, but he could never get his idea for an extraterrestrial horror off the ground, spending the next few decades making more family-friendly science-fiction. In fact, his main reason for adapting War of the Worlds in 2005 was because everyone kept calling him “the guy who can’t make a scary alien movie.”
The Nutty Professor
In the mid-‘90s, a series of bad decisions and child support court orders led to a string of critical and commercial flops for Eddie Murphy, leading critics to wonder if he’d ever been any good. To showcase his versatility, he signed on to a remake of 1963’s The Nutty Professor on one condition: that he would play seven different characters, including two women. Whether he proved those critics wrong is open to debate, but at least he gave us the phrase “women be shopping.”
Darkman
Hot off the heels of 1989’s Batman, Sam Raimi was raring to helm the next installment or possibly set up his own franchise based on the pulp superhero The Shadow, but the studios holding the rights to both turned him down. Having been shut out of the superhero world, Raimi resolved to create his own with Darkman, a 1990 Liam Neeson vehicle remembered by few but beloved by all of them. It worked out for Raimi: A decade later, he got to direct his Spider-Man trilogy. It was no Batman, but it was no The Shadow, either.
Scream
By 1996, it could be argued that Wes Craven had gone soft. In fact, it was argued, right to his face. “A little kid of around 12 came up to me and said, ‘You should do a real goddamn movie again because the movies you’ve been doing have been getting softer and softer,’” he later revealed. The rude tween provided just the push Craven needed to get off the fence about directing Scream, which he worried “crossed the boundaries of decency” but ended up revolutionizing the genre. That’s why Hollywood has gotten so toothless — they don’t make 12-year-olds like that anymore.
