5 Movies That Got Rewritten to Death
It’s not uncommon for even some of the most beloved movies to undergo extensive rewrites. Hey, Good Will Hunting was initially a thriller about a math genius working for the NSA, and no, that’s not a joke. Sometimes, though, a movie gets exponentially worse with each rewrite, starting with a brilliant script and getting whittled down to box-office toothpicks.
Dragonball Evolution
If you want to see a Dragon Ball Z fan get mad, steal their lunch money, but you could also try mentioning the 2009 movie, which was both disowned by fans as barely resembling the series and lambasted by critics. Both lamented the movie that could have been, however, after the original script surfaced on the internet. It stuck much more closely to the original manga’s storyline, but it was deemed too expensive by the studio, who forced screenwriter Ben Ramsey into no fewer than five rewrites. That always turns out well, right?
Exorcist II: The Heretic
Few quality gaps between franchise installments are as wide as that between The Exorcist and its first sequel, but that’s not the fault of renowned Broadway playwright William Goodhart. In fact, the only reason director John Boorman decided to do a sequel at all was because he was so inspired by Goodhart’s pitch about the power of human consciousness. He wasn’t happy with the first draft, however, so despite Linda Blair’s insistence that “it was a really good script at first,” he rewrote it right through filming until “it ended up nothing like the same movie,” resulting in whatever that mess is that we got.
Ghostbusters II
In 2021, Bill Murray revealed that he was lured into making Ghostbusters II after producers “pitched a story idea that was really great,” but then he “showed up on the set and said, ‘What the hell is this?’” He doesn’t say exactly what wowed him, but it was presumably Dan Aykroyd’s initial draft that involved sending the gang overseas to bust up a Scottish fairy ring that Aykroyd later dismissed as “too inaccessible.” It’s apparently really easy to trick Bill Murray into making a movie, if anyone wants to give it a shot.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Fans of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer series must have been excited to learn that it was based on a largely forgotten 1992 film also written by Joss Whedon, only to find out the hard way exactly why it was so forgotten. Whedon envisioned a film much like what eventually became the series, but 20th Century Fox insisted it be rewritten as a lighthearted comedy because they felt it was too dark and Whedon’s humor “too abstract.” You know, everything that made the series such a success.
Justice League
Not that Whedon can do no wrong. After the death of Zack Snyder’s daughter left him unable to finish 2017’s Justice League, Whedon was brought on instead and changed so much of the superhero story that fans spent years demanding “the Snyder cut” — and actually got it. It’s a movie that will live in infamy, so bad that when fanboys screeched, studios actually listened.
