Live-Action Films »

Executive Meddling

Sometimes it's not the director who yells "Cut!" but the executives.

• The Accused: At first, director Jonathan Kaplan was doubtful of casting Jodie Foster as Sarah. Executives at Paramount wanted to cast the more bankable Kim Basinger in the role; however, Kaplan refused the studio's demands and proceeded to cast Foster as the rape survivor. The result: the movie was a success with audiences and critics alike, and Jodie Foster won her first Academy Award.
• Airplane!: The studio wouldn't let the producers use a propeller plane as the airliner, so the producers gave the jet a propeller plane sound instead.
• Alan Moore, because of this trope, not only refuses direct involvement with film adaptations of his comics, but also voluntarily relinquishes all profit rights to them. He also asks to have his name removed from adaptations' credits, which the studios only really started doing with Watchmen. Watchmen had a Troubled Production with two versions by different studios. The earlier Fox version saw a lot of changes. The setting was updated to take place during The War on Terror, it went from a character study to a straight action flick, and the plot was changed to Ozymandias going back in time to kill Dr. Manhattan, which somehow transported the characters into the "real world", where they're known as comic book characters. That one languished in Development Hell. The subsequent WB version similarly tried a Setting Update, only for Zack Snyder to threaten to quit if anything was changed.
• The Alien series:
  • The makers of the adult alien's action figure wanted to add genitals to them; the director of Alien: Resurrection wanted to do the same to the "newborn" alien. Both times, the producers said no, saying it was "too much".
  • The original Alien had a positive version of this trope, according to some sources. The film's executive producers Walter Hill and Creator/David Giler ended up writing the final shooting script on the film, modifying Dan O'Bannon's and Ronald Shusett's original treatment. Among the changes they made was the introduction of the character Ash and making the characters' dialogue flow more naturally, befitting their role as "truckers in space."
  • For Alien³, one of the Fox executives was apparently dead-set on the film revolving around prisoners in some way. Early script treatments were set on a prison barge or transport of some kind (causing tentative director Renny Harlin to quit the project, as it was just "more corridors, more guns, more aliens," and nothing new he could get excited about). When Vincent Ward started doing his story treatment set in a space monastery, it was suggested to change the monks from his version into prisoners. And of course, the finished film takes place on a penal colony.
  • Alien 3 soon ballooned into a legendarily Troubled Production. 20th Century Fox spent millions of dollars over four years trying to get the script up and running — every director who signed up left, either due to creative differences or refusing Fox's mandates, such as the inclusion of Sigourney Weaver. Ward got as far as building sets according to his vision, before he was fired for submitting an ending that would reference Snow White, with Ripley back in the sleeping pod and being watched over by the seven survivors of the monastery (all dwarfs).
  • Rookie director David Fincher was brought in to direct Alien 3 because the executives believed that they could control him, without a new script finished. Fincher had to make up the plot himself as he went along, by piecing together parts of other unfinished scripts and improvising the rest. And Fincher had other plans regarding being a simple workman and started several battles with the producers. Fox prevented Fincher from shooting key scenes (which he shot anyway, and made into the final cut), sent him back for reshoots after a deliberately botched test screening (using, as actor Ralph Brown put it, "brain-dead kids from Southern California"), insulted him on several occasions and eventually locked him out of the editing room. The producers would also try to hide the story of the film's production, blocking the original version of the making-of documentary Wreckage and Rage (originally titled Wreckage and Rape, telling you what the creators thought of it). Fincher hated the final product and was so discouraged from directing that he almost turned down Se7en. In the end, no fewer than eight people attempted to claim credit for the screenplay during the WGA arbitration process, with a further four not bothering for various reasons. In particular, Rex Pickett, who wrote a significant portion of the shooting script, ended up being one of the ones not wanting credit largely due to how unpleasant the whole experience had been.
  • Even H. R. Giger, the original designer for the first Xenomorph, was shafted in favor of Tom Woodruff and Alec Gillis's designs, but this didn't stop Giger from faxing his designs to Fincher after he disembarked from the project.
• Almost Famous:
  • DreamWorks SKG decided that Cameron Crowe's original vision of the film as a "band on the road" movie wouldn't appeal to audiences, so the theatrical version removed a large amount of Stillwater material in order to reshape the film as a love story between William and Penny. To compensate for tampering with the film, DreamWorks later released the "Almost Famous Untitled: The Bootleg Cut" DVD, which features the film as Crowe intended.
  • Crowe also planned for the film to be released as "Untitled," but DreamWorks demanded a more unique name. Extras were allowed to submit potential titles ("Saving William's Privates" was one) until Crowe settled on "Almost Famous."
• United Artists pressured director Robert Aldrich into shooting a more optimistic ending to Apache in the final days of shooting. Aldrich reluctantly agreed and was dismayed when the film was released with this alternate ending. He later concluded that "if you shoot two endings, they will always use the other one, never yours".
• The original Army of Darkness ending had Ash drinking too much sleeping potion and, instead of waking up in the present, arriving in the post-apocalyptic future and screaming through the credits. When test audiences complained about the ending, meddling executives stepped in to request a new, much happier ending be filmed in its place. However, Tropes Are Not Bad; the theatrical ending is widely considered better, as it gives Ash some closure and eventually allowed the franchise to return with Ash vs. Evil Dead. The original ending, though, was used in the international release.
• At the Circus: With the death of Irving Thalberg in 1937, this was first Marx Brothers movie at MGM helmed entirely by Louis B. Mayer. Unfortunately, he wasn't a big fan of the Marxes (or comedies in general), and made some decisions that hampered the movie.
  • Unlike earlier Marx Brothers movies at MGM, Circus was given a smaller budget. As a result, Circus eschewed a road show for testing the script and jokes, and the only screenwriter was the inexperienced Irving Brecher, who was chosen because he was cheap.
  • Similarly, Circus was directed by Eddie Buzzell, best known for directing various low-budget B-movies at Universal and MGM.
  • Midway through production, Mayer removed songwriters Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg from this film and reassigned them to The Wizard of Oz.
  • Mayer assigned Buster Keaton as a gag man for the film. Unfortunately, Keaton's elaborate physical routines didn't mesh well with the Marxes' verbal comedy, a fact recognized by everyone. Keaton resignedly noted, "I'm only doing what Mr. Mayer asked me to do. You guys don't need help."
• Baby It's You: John Sayles's choice for Jill was Rosanna Arquette, however, executives at Twentieth Century-Fox, the studio that was supposed to finance the film, wanted the younger Brooke Shields, who, ironically, was closer to the character's age. Sayles eventually cut ties with Fox and chose to finance the film independently by keeping Arquette on the project and selling the North American theatrical distribution rights to Paramount.
• Babylon A.D., which evidently made sense at some point, was reportedly disowned by its director Mathieu Kassovitz because of 20th Century Fox's meddling, as described here. They cut the film down so much that Vin Diesel, who hadn't seen a cut of the film for months, jokingly wondered if he was still in the movie at all.
• Back to the Future suffered from this extensively. Much worked well, and improved the film. There was one hilariously bad attempt, though..
  • The original mechanism to return Marty to the future was a Nevada nuclear test. Executives considered the cost prohibitive, and it was changed to the lightning bolt at the clock tower. It kept the action in Hill Valley, and gave Doc Brown plenty more to do.
  • Doc Brown himself was originally Professor Brown. The Bobs acquiesed to the change, which has since become iconic. ("Back to the Future" without Doc?!)
  • The time machine was originally a refridgerator (or similar). It was changed due to fears of children inadvertently locking themselves in the old-style refridgerators with latches.
  • Marty's mom's name was changed to Lorraine.
  • Professor Brown's original chimpanzee was changed to the dog Einstein.
  • Universal Studios President Sidney Sheinberg tried to rename the film, "Spaceman from Pluto," causing serious consternation. Steven Spielberg shut this down with this creative reply: "Thanks for the joke memo, guys: it's the funniest thing ever. We're still laughing about it." Sheinberg was too proud to admit that he was serious.
• Batman Forever and Batman & Robin both suffered from executive meddling after the relative failure of Batman Returns. That film was Darker and Edgier and didn't appeal to parents who still thought that Batman was for kids. Warner Bros. thus replaced Tim Burton with Joel Schumacher. Schumacher was a comic fan himself and wanted to continue the Darker and Edgier trend, even planning an adaptation of Frank Miller's Batman: Year One. Warner Bros. said no, telling him to make it kid-friendly and Merchandise-Driven. Schumacher long lamented the series being used as a toy commercial.
• Battlefield Earth is an interesting case. According to the original screenwriter it had a chance at being good, and the studio was behind that version, at least initially. Then the fans of the book's author got extensively mixed up with the process. Apparently their founder, who had written the original novel, had a very precise idea of how he wanted the film adaptation to turn out, and had left behind plenty of notes on the subject. And the rest is history.
• The classic Film Noir The Big Sleep had positive executive meddling. The film was completed in 1944 but then shelved so the studio could push through its backlog of WWII movies. It was finally released in 1946. In the meantime, stars Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall had married, and the pair's first film, To Have And Have Not, had been released, demonstrating their bankable chemistry. The Big Sleep was recut and new scenes, mainly featuring the two leads flirting, were inserted. This made the movie even more confusing, but the results were worth it. The original 1944 version survives, though, as it was shown to U.S. troops overseas during the war; both are available on DVD.
• Blazing Saddles: They tried. Mel Brooks was called into a meeting with the film company executives where they had a long list of changes that they wanted to make, including removing all instances of the N-word, and cutting the beans scene entirely. Mel took careful notes of all their requests, and when the meeting was over he dumped his notes in the garbage because his contract gave him final cut on the film.
• The script for the 1987 Blake Edwards screwball comedy Blind Date starring Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger was rewritten so much^note Blake Edwards, Leslie Dixon, Tom Ropelewski, and Michael Alan Eddy all did uncredited rewrites on the script. According to Launer among the scenes added were one where someone crashes into a bakery and becomes covered with flour. Other scenes involved someone while fully clothed, jumping or falling into a swimming pool and someone tossing something into a woman's cleavage. that Dale Launer, who wrote the original script^note The studio wanted changes; a black screwball comedy then turned into a standard screwball comedy. The screenplay was re-written "by a woman writer to soften it up". The woman writer was Leslie Dixon. This re-written draft was given to Blake Edwards —who also re-wrote it., pretty much disowned the finished film^note Launer tried to replace his name with that of his registered pseudonym Nigel Grosswanker, but the studio declined.. Launer called his experience with Blake Edwards to be the worst in the motion picture business. According to Launer, Edwards refused to talk to him and refused to have someone tell him that Edwards wasn't going to talk to him. The bottom-line for Launer was that Edwards was shooting his script^note Launer felt that Blind Date is a lame, slapstick piece of shit. The Los Angeles Times called it "an archaic, lobotomized screenplay by Dale Launer". He agrees with the critique, but disagrees about being given the blame. If you like the movie, "...give the credit to Edwards and Dixon, if you hate it, blame them." but was unwilling to have any communication with him whatsoever.
• In The Blue Lagoon, the relationship between Emmeline and Dick as Kissing Cousins has been a consistent theme across various adaptations, including the stage play and the 1923 and 1980 movie versions, the former of which is now lost. However, when filmmakers Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder took on the challenge of bringing their version of the story to the screen, they encountered obstacles due to the strict guidelines of The Hays Code. Joseph Breen, the influential head of the Production Code Administration, mandated significant changes to the storyline to comply with the Code's regulations. Breen stipulated that the characters should not be related, the romantic relationship should involve adults, and there should be no explicit depictions of sex, birth scenes, or parents' suicide. In response to these stringent requirements, the filmmakers made crucial alterations, including adding a wedding scene to the film to align with the Code's guidelines.
• During the filming of The Blues Brothers, Universal kept pressuring John Landis to replace some of the African American musical stars in the cast like Cab Calloway and Aretha Franklin with acts like Rose Royce who were more contemporary and successful (the notable exception was Ray Charles). Such changes would have contradicted much of the Aesop behind the movie, to give respect and attention to blues, jazz and R&B's rich history and traditions, which were being neglected as new trends in music were emerging and traditional Black musicians were being forgotten. Landis refused the changes, so some theater chains refused to book it into their theaters in white neighborhoods.
• The director of Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 wanted to make the film more psychological thriller exploring the relationship between media, fiction and reality that would also be a commentary on the media frenzy and fan community around the first film. The film would start out lighthearted and slowly grow stranger and darker, with the end remaining vague about whether the main characters committed horrible acts due to actually being under the influence of the Blair Witch or if they lost touch with reality while getting too deep into the fiction. The studio initially liked this take, but upon seeing the director's first cut, they wanted to add more gore and violence earlier on in the film, which included scattering around some revealing scenes from the ending and adding a completely new scene where the characters massacre a group of foreigners visiting the site of the first film. To make the mood of the film darker, the studio also changed the soundtrack to hard rock ^note for example, the original cut used "Witchcraft" by Frank Sinatra for the opening credits as Soundtrack Dissonance, but the studio replaced it with "Disposable Teens" by Marilyn Manson. Finally, that "Book of Shadows" in the title which is nowhere to be seen in the actual movie was added by the studio.
• According to an interview with the Borderlands (2024)’s stunt coordinator by Kotaku Eli Roth filmed a large number of gory battle scenes in keeping with the game’s violent tone. However, the higher ups insisted that they be removed to keep the movie PG-13 in order to widen the viewer demographic.
• Brazil (1985) stands out as one of the most contentious instances of Executive Meddling ever. It was a battle between the director, Terry Gilliam, and Universal and its COO Sid Sheinberg.
  • Sheinberg wanted to replace Michael Kamen's orchestral score with contemporary rock music (to "attract the teens"), change its tone from a sci-fi epic to a love story, and repurpose a Dream Sequence from earlier in the film to serve as a real-life happy ending (instead of its planned Downer Ending). He also tried to cut the film's running time from 142 minutes down to 97. Gilliam fought back, and despite Sheinberg trying to hold him to a clause saying the film had to run under two hours, accepted a 132-minute cut, but then dragged his heels on actually releasing it. So, Gilliam started running clandestine screenings for film students and for critics, with some of the critics putting it on their Top 10 lists, even though the film was still unreleased. Sheinberg wasn't impressed. Finally, a frustrated Gilliam bought a full-page ad◊ in Variety asking Sheinberg when he would release the film. Universal in the backlash finally released the 132-minute version, but Sheinberg, undeterred, finished his shorter, happier version with outside editors. This version, which aired on broadcast television in the United States, is known as the "Love Conquers All" version; it was not well received.
  • Gilliam's own, original 142-minute cut was the version released internationally, as distributor 20th Century Fox had no problem with the original content. it has since been recognized as a classic and is now available on home video. Gilliam swore off working with Universal for a decade until 12 Monkeys, which became a critically acclaimed film upon release. However, he was so wary about what happened with Brazil that during filming he had a documentary crew record everything behind the scenes (which eventually became the documentary The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of Twelve Monkeys) just in case. ^note Gilliam needn't had worried; Sheinberg had left Universal shortly after filming had completed, when a majority stake in the studio was purchased by Seagrams.
• The Bridge on the River Kwai, specifically the commando storyline. While present in Pierre Boulle's novel, it was a minor subplot compared to the prison camp story. Hoping to boost box office appeal, producer Sam Spiegel (over David Lean's objections) beefed up this storyline. William Holden's character Shears, a British officer in the book, becomes an escaped American POW shanghaied into helping destroy the titular bridge. Spiegel also demanded Lean add not one but two token love interests: a British nurse Shears meets at a Ceylon hospital and Siamese women who join the commando team. Spiegel's meddling certainly didn't ruin Kwai, though most critics consider the commando story weaker than the main plot. This was at least an improvement over Carl Foreman's early drafts, which featured more elaborate and outlandish action scenes like a submarine battle and elephant stampedes!
• The film of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was intended to be entirely different. Joss Whedon wanted a B-Movie feel to it; the execs much preferred the comedy aspects of the script. The meddling was so bad that Whedon — himself no stranger to executives meddling in his TV series — walked off set one day and never came back. A version of the original script apparently still exists and is considered canon in series continuity. Whedon claims that the Origin comic miniseries is the closest publicly available thing to it.
• The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: The producers thought the original ending was too anti-authoritarian, so they changed it—thereby inventing the cinematic Twist Ending.
• The 2013 remake of Brian De Palma's Carrie was not intended to be a remake at all. Director Kimberly Pierce intended to make a film that was more faithful to the Stephen King book than the earlier film, but the studio forced her to reshoot footage to bring it more into line with the deviations De Palma had originally made. A leaked screenplay confirms this.
• Carry On Screaming!: Charles Hawtrey replaced Sydney Bromley as Dan Dann at the last minute, because the American distributors wanted him for his popularity there.
• Casablanca was barred by The Hays Code from having Ilsa leave her husband for Rick at the end; this led to the film's famous Bittersweet Ending. The execs also refused to let Rick be arrested at the end, leading instead to the famous line, "Round up the usual suspects."
• The film adaptation for The Cat in the Hat was supposed to be more in line with the book, retaining its family-friendly subject matter and sticking to the source material rather than adding things in. Once the box office success of the film adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! came around, however, Universal and DreamWorks SKG hired several writers from Seinfeld to drastically rewrite the script, shoehorned multiple adult jokes that Dr. Seuss would never ever approve in his stories, and cast Mike Myers as the title role, Alec Baldwin as the antagonist and Kelly Preston as the mother. Many people who watched the final film, including Audrey Geisel, were dissatisfied with how it turned out to the point where the latter turned down any further plans to adapt her husband's work into live-action films. Nowadays, for many people, it serves as the textbook example of how not to do a family-oriented film.
• A draft of Charlie's Angels (2000) was written by Barry Sonnenfeld, but a subsequent rewrite trashed everything except the opening scene, which doesn't inform the plot. Sonnenfeld joked that he wrote everything except the plot, dialogue and characters.
• The Chronicles of Riddick: Originally, Rhianna Griffith, the actress who played Jack, was slated to return, a decision backed by Vin Diesel. Instead, Davalos got the role because studio executives thought she was prettier. Likewise, the second live-action movie featured significant cuts which made the movie less fun to watch.
• Clerks improved from executive meddling. First-time director Kevin Smith had trouble finding a distributor until it was suggested that part of the problem was that it had an unnecessary and out-of-place Downer Ending in which Dante is killed by a robber. He changed the ending, and the rest is history.
• When Steven Spielberg pitched a special edition of Close Encounters of the Third Kind featuring scenes that had to be cut from the original shooting due to budget and schedule issues, Columbia allowed him to produce it under the condition that he also shoot an ending scene taking place inside the space ship, which Spielberg didn't want to show. Naturally, for the film's 20th anniversary, Spielberg released a director's cut of the special edition that didn't include the executive-mandated spaceship scene.
• The original cut of Cobra ran for about 120 minutes with a full-blown X rating. Afraid the movie would be overshadowed by the then recently released Top Gun though, Warner Bros. told Sylvester Stallone to edit it down to an R rating and shorten it to its final theatrical length of 87 minutes to allow for more screenings per day, both in an attempt to attract a greater audience.
• In Conan the Barbarian (1982), the original plan was for Arnold Schwarzenegger to be the narrator. The suits didn't like that, so Mako became the narrator. Tropes Are Not Bad; not only did having someone else narrate the movie lend a more mysterious and inscrutable air to Conan's character, but Mako's narration is so high on pork content that it's impossible not to like it.
• This occurred heavily in The Core. John Rogers originally wanted to have a magnetic reversal occur, but he was told that it was too far fetched. The capsule that drilled into the core was also expected to have a window. While discussing one particularly stupid incident in the development of the film, Rogers commented that "This [kind of thing], by the way, is why screenwriting pays so well. They don't pay me to write. I'd write for free. They pay me NOT to punch people in the neck."
• The Crow (1994) is notable for averting Executive Meddling for the most part and for being endorsed by the comic's creator James O'Barr. O'Barr once mentioned in an interview an executive who tried to meddle, suggesting it be adapted as a musical starring Michael Jackson. O'Barr thought the guy was joking; when he insisted he was serious, O'Barr showed him the door.
  • The first sequel, on the other hand, is infamous for being cut in half in an attempt to make it more like the first. Director Tim Pope and screenwriter David Goyer have both renounced the theatrical version, and the supposed "Director's Cut" only has ten more minutes of footage. The novelization and comic adaptation, however, kept the script intact.
• Dad's Army (1971):
  • Norman Cohen rewrote the screenplay to try and make the film more cinematic than just another episode of the show, while executives from Columbia Pictures made other changes to the film's plot and pacing.
  • Columbia Pictures got the crew to film in Chalfont St. Giles rather than Thetford, and rather controversially had Liz Fraser playing Mrs. Pike over Janet Davies.
  • Cohen also wanted to cut the first scene of Major General Fullard to remove him getting into a military staff car. David Croft and Jimmy Perry fought to keep this in as following this, Major General Fullard is absent from the film for a long time following this scene and they doubted audiences would remember someone who they thought to be a civilian.
• Daredevil's original version didn't survive when Fox executives saw spinoff potential in Jennifer Garner's Elektra. They recut the film to give Elektra more prominence, cutting off most of Matt Murdock's backstory, his legal career, and any sense to the ending. The result received largely mixed reviews, and the eventual Elektra film was panned.
• Days of Thunder was a mess because of this. Producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer wanted to be seen as autuers so they argued with director Tony Scott about nearly everything. As a result, shooting was shut down so often that the film ballooned overbudget from shooting delays. Additionally, Simpson failed to win auditions as an actor, so he that a role be written for him in the movie.
• In the original The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), Klaatu was initially supposed to survive the barrage of bullets via the Applied Phlebotinum that brought him back to temporary life in the final cut to reinforce his God-like powers. Unfortunately the censors didn't like the ending, suggesting it was too left-wing of a movie, forcing the line, "That power is reserved for the Almighty Spirit."
• Coinciding with Focus Group Ending, Deep Blue Sea's climax was reshot after test audiences were continuously upset at Susan, the person who started the whole mess by increasing the sharks' intelligence, getting away nearly scot-free after all the death and damage she caused (several audience members were noted as yelling "Die, bitch!" whenever she came onscreen). This was compounded with the anti-climatic death of LL Cool J's charming, parrot-loving chef character, Preacher. Ultimately, they changed it so that Susan pulls off a Heroic Sacrifice by drawing the final shark to her and giving the hero time to finish setting the bomb to kill the shark, and letting Preacher survive his injuries and help detonate it.
• Averted with Dirty Dancing. Corporate sponsors persuaded Vestron Pictures to cut the subplot about Penny's abortion or else they would no longer support the film. Vestron ultimately gave these sponsors the door, though this probably had less to do with respect for the filmmakers but rather the fact that they had lost interest in the film and were considering sending it straight to video.
• Discworld:
  • A planned adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Mort was nixed when producers wanted to "lose the Death angle". The book can largely be described as "Death takes an apprentice". Here is Pratchett's comment about it:
  "What you have to remember is that in the movies there are two types of people 1) the directors, artists, actors and so on who have to do things and are often quite human and 2) the other lifeforms. Unfortunately you have to deal with the other lifeforms first. It is impossible to exaggerate their baleful stupidity."
  • There was a film version of The Wee Free Men in the pipes, but according to Terry, the script he was shown "had all the hallmarks of something that had been good, and then the studio had got involved." The project is now mired in Development Hell.
• Disturbing Behavior was practically shredded in the editing room, having nearly twenty minutes cut (the theatrical edit is just 84 minutes long) and a different ending put in by the studio over the objections of director David Nutter. Among the scenes cut include numerous story and Character Development scenes whose absence the film greatly suffers for, which perhaps explains the film's tepid reception by critics and at the box office. Fortunately, all of the scenes in question are included on the DVD. The Sci-Fi Channel's edited-for-TV version of the movie often reinstates the deleted scenes, making it something of an unofficial director's cut, though it leaves the theatrical ending.
• DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story is a spoof of the Sports Story Tropes. This was reflected in the original ending, which spoofed the trope Underdogs Never Lose by having the heroes lose the final round to the Jerkass villain, only for one of their number to win big in Vegas and recover some of their losses. The suits didn't like this and insisted that the heroes win. In response, the director created an overly complicated ending with an obviously labeled Deus ex Machina, and a scene in the credits shows the villain whining that he only lost because "audiences can't cope with anything challenging." The DVD has an "alternate ending" which gives insight into how the original might have gone; if it were genuine, it would have been the cruelest ending ever.
• Several scenes in Dracula Untold were shoved in late in production, after Universal decided to hop on the bandwagon of shared universe films with their classic monster properties.
• Dragonball Evolution suffered immensely from executive meddling. Ben Ramsey's original script was a much more faithful adaptation of the source material, complete with Pilaf and his gang, Oolong, Pu'ar, the Nimbus and even a cameo from Krillin. The higher-ups at Fox didn't want a kids' movie, so the concept of the movie being based in the early portions of Dragon Ball was scrapped in favor of having the movie set during Goku's teen years, modernizing the Dragon Ball world and making the story more of a coming of age film, so that the casual audience wouldn't feel alienated by Dragon Ball's original premise. Needless to say, the script was changed a lot once it was out of Ben Ramsey's hands.
• This is why Pete Travis was fired from the post-production of Dredd and replaced with screenwriter Alex Garland. Reportedly, Travis's cut was not the action-filled film that the studio and producers wanted, so he was locked out of the editing room and eventually let go. Garland could even seek co-director credit, but he and Travis managed a deal. Luckily, the film received a generally favourable response from audiences & critics, and despite failing at the box office, has since become a cult classic,
• Mostly averted in the case of Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999), but not for lack of trying by New Line Cinema late in the production, according to BuzzFeed's 15th anniversary piece on the film. After principal photography was over, while the film was being edited, New Line, which hadn't really paid much attention during shooting, looked at its tracking numbers and found that not only were very few potential viewers aware of the film, fewer still planned to see it. Panicking, they asked the filmmakers to recut the film Lighter and Softer, more like a conventional teen comedy along the lines of Clueless. But there wasn't much existing material to do that with, by then it was already too late to get the cast back together for reshoots, and most of the editing was done. The studio never realized that, as the screenwriter put it, it was a movie for girls who saw Clueless and said: "Fuck them!"
• Dune (1984) had its runtime pared down by hours, and the result was a confusing mess to many people who didn't read the book. Oddly, though, that's David Lynch's preferred cut of the film. He was so displeased with the three-hour TV version that he asked for his name removed from the credits.
• Shortly after acquiring distribution rights, Lionsgate took Dying of the Light away from writer/director Paul Schrader and cut the film down. The end result was critically panned, and Schrader has disowned this version.
• After screening The Elephant Man, nervous execs requested that David Lynch's more abstract scenes be removed. Producer Mel Brooks responded by saying, "We are involved in a business venture. We screened the film for you to bring you up to date as to the status of that venture. Do not misconstrue this as our soliciting the input of raging primitives."
• Enemy Mine (1985): The studio executives believed the title would confuse audiences who wouldn't realize that "mine" was the first person possessive, and so insisted on the addition of a subplot involving a mine. Run by the enemy.
• The original cut for Event Horizon was 130 minutes long, but executives at Paramount were unsure about this, given that the film would be rated NC-17. After a disastrous test screening, Paramount told Paul W.S. Anderson to remove thirty minutes and cut some of the violence in order for the film to be rated R. Because of this, the running time was shortened from 130 to 95 minutes and the film was a critical and commercial disaster. Anderson has since regretted shortening the running time of the film. The 35 minutes of deleted footage were presumed lost until 2012, when Anderson himself said that a videotape containing the original cut was found while he was being interviewed at the San Diego Comic-Con.
• The Ex: According to screenwriters David Guion and Michael Handelman, executives completely changed this Zach Braff comedy when it didn't test well, and then changed it again for DVD. Guion later said in an interview:
  "That movie was a bit of a cautionary story for screenwriters in terms of that it was a movie that struggled a little bit and didn’t test well initially, and the financers panicked and said, 'We better show a lot of people getting hit in the balls.'"
• Ex Machina had a difficult time getting a United States release. Universal's international arm produced and took most of the bill for the movie internationally. However, Universal's US executives rejected a US release believing that it wouldn't fit with the studio's film slate that year (and it's not hard to understand why; Universal had a cluster of box office smash hits that year and didn't see any room for Ex Machina to be part of it). Their arthouse unit, Focus Features, also rejected the film for similar reasons, meaning that indie film studio A24 had to broker an agreement with Universal to get the film to America. Unfortunately for Focus, Ex Machina's worldwide acclaim and decent financial results may have played a role in that unit's reorganization under Universal Pictures International and Focus Features head Peter Schlessel (who was instrumental in snubbing Ex Machina) consequently getting his pink slip.
• Exorcist: The Beginning is possibly one of the most extreme examples of this trope in action in cinema history. The entire film's existence is the result of Executive Meddling, when the studio saw the original cut, hated it, and had the whole movie redone with a new script and new director. When the recut film flopped at the box office and was critically thrashed, they allowed the original cut to be released as Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist, which got slightly better reviews.
• Paramount changed hands during the production of Explorers, with the new higher-ups wanting to bring forward the film's release date. This necessitated a very rushed production, to the point where the paint on the sets hadn't finished drying when filming began. After director Joe Dante and editor Tina Hirsch submitted the original rough cut in late spring, the studio told them to stop working on the film and changed the release date from late August to early July to take advantage of the busy summer market. According to Dante, about an hour and a half of footage wound up on the cutting room floor, with sequences having to be re-dubbed to help the film make more sense and provide a sense of closure. While Dante appreciates the warm reception the film received in the years since its release, he remains conflicted due to the released version not being representative of the movie he wanted to make.
• Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald was a victim of a studio mandated runtime of 2 hours and 15 minutes and ensuing massacre in the editing room to get it under said time limit. The general consensus of the theatrical cut of the film is that it is confusing, incoherent, and poorly paced with the second act in particular being all over the place. Several scenes that were in trailers towards the end of marketing were completely absent in the theatrical cut, there are scenes floating around with completed effects that aren’t even in the official extended cut, and it’s now known that at least two characters who are crucial to the backstory, Kendra and Ariana Dumbledore, filmed scenes that have never seen the light of day. The film would be given an extended cut on the Blu-Ray that is considered a huge improvement with fourteen added minutes. The story was given some room to breathe and is much easier to follow as a result of it. Anyone who’s seen said cut will ultimately believe that Warner Bros. and former CEO Kevin Tsujihara are to blame. Tsujihara didn’t like producing longer movies because they could play less often in theaters. He would ultimately be fired from his role a few months after the release of the film after it was revealed he was sleeping with an actress (while married) to whom he was promising roles and audition. The extended cut is not considered a masterpiece and is still seen as over edited but its parts do come together to make a coherent whole.
• Fantastic Four (2015):
  • Josh Trank envisioned his film as being between 2 hours and 20 minutes long; the studio cut that down significantly to a little over 1 hour and 30 minutes, plus about 10 minutes for credits. Judging by Trank's Twitter comment that he disliked the final cut, it also appears that the rumors that he wasn't very involved in editing and reshoots are true, meaning that the studio took over. Numerous reviews noted that the reshot scenes (in which Kate Mara wears a noticeable wig) are primarily in the second half, which feels like it belongs to a different movie than the first half.
  • The studio gave the movie a 122 million dollar budget, which was smaller than the 150 million Trank initially thought he had to work with. This led to some planned action sequences being cut, such as a Missing Trailer Scene where the Thing dive bombs an enemy terrorist camp.
  • Entertainment Weekly later revealed that Josh Trank lost the dressing room because he was combative and abusive toward the cast, producers, and crew, at one point almost getting into a fistfight with Miles Teller. This, combined with personal issues (such as Trank trashing his rental house in response to a landlord's complaint^note the damage was so severe that, in order to stave off a pricey lawsuit, a Fox executive had to fly out to New Orleans to personally apologize for Trank's behavior), led Fox to pull Trank from the film's production prior to the reshoots. The same article also mentions that Fox insisted that Trank include Kate Mara as Sue Storm and as a result, the two didn't get along during principal photography.
  • Ironically, according to sources who have spoken out in articles about the production, Fox tried to keep their distance from the project as a response to the perception of Fox as micromanaging taskmasters due to X-Men Origins: Wolverine's own Troubled Production and just let their new auteur work. However, by the time the production was going off the rails and they started to meddle, it was too late to save the project, which now had a disorganized vision and executive meddling.
• Roman Polański's The Fearless Vampire Killers suffered terribly from this when it was released in America. For starters, America is the only country in which that was the title. In Europe, it was released under Polanski's original title, Dance of the Vampires. Executives also cut out 20 minutes of footage (from a film that was only 107 minutes, to begin with), dubbed over the characters to make them sound American (and not very well), and added a cheerful little slapstick cartoon short to the beginning, which clashed badly with the tone Polanski was reaching for. The finished product was so bad that Roger Ebert would simply say that, in the screening he attended, no one laughed even once, although a couple of people cried.
• Fight Club:
  • At one point, executives at Twentieth Century Fox were doubtful of Helena Bonham Carter as Marla, and wanted the younger Reese Witherspoon for the role of Marla. However, director David Fincher rejected the studio's demands, as he felt Witherspoon was too young, and cast Bonham-Carter as Marla, based on her performance in the 1997 film The Wings of the Dove.
  • The scene where the narrator severely beats another member of the club out of jealousy for the apparent attention he was getting from Tyler Durden originally focused more on the beating. Censors deemed this unacceptable so the scene was altered to focus more on the narrator's face, and the reactions of the onlookers. Many considered the alteration to be more disturbing than the original scene.
  • During the scene where Tyler is discussing with the narrator the night of sex he has just had with Marla Singer, there was originally a flashback line where she intimately whispers to Tyler that she "wants to have [his] abortion". Studio executives were outraged by this line and demanded that director David Fincher change it. Fincher complied under the executives' promise that he would change the line only once. The studio executives begged for it to be changed back when it turned into Marla nostalgically exclaiming that "[she] hadn't been fucked like that since grade school". (Helena Bonham Carter herself only said the line because being English, she didn't realize how young "grade school" would be.)
  • The film ends with the success of Project Mayhem and what appears to be a sort of reconciliation between Marla and Tyler, which differs rather greatly from the novel's ending. Even the book's author, Chuck Palahniuk, is said to have liked it better than his own ending, though he also mentions in his book "Non-Fiction" that the process of watching the book become the movie was deeply depressing, most especially the way actors such as Brad Pitt and Edward Norton wrote in their own bits of dialogue.
• Blake Edwards' A Fine Mess was originally intended as a heavily improvised homage to Laurel and Hardy's 1932 short The Music Box, with Richard Pryor and Burt Reynolds as the leads, in the spirit of Edwards' The Party. Problems with the studio are among the reasons why it eventually turned into the scripted chase comedy that was released.
• According to this interview with director Jeffrey Bloom, Flowers in the Attic (1987) had many conflicts between him and the producers on how the movie should have gone. Bloom wanted to remain faithful to the book, including more suggestions of Brother–Sister Incest, but many scenes were either cut or never filmed due to time restraints. During post-production, Bloom walked away from filming the new ending for the final cut in which Corrine is hanged with her wedding veil because he felt it was dumb. He speculates that, had author V. C. Andrews lived to see the film, she would've hated the ending too. The new ending was filmed without Bloom's involvement, and the original ending was thrown out.
• As related by Frank Darabont in Fangoria Magazine, the meddling was rampant in director Chris Walas' The Fly II. The screenwriters wanted to explore a number of themes, among them an exploration of what it means to be a son to a father. Those themes were dropped in favor of Squick and Gorn. Darabont says that at the first screening, Walas turned to him at the film's conclusion and said, "It's not the movie I wanted to make, either." Mel Brooks reportedly remarked that "In all my years, I have never seen such vile studio interference on a project." The worst thing? All these decisions were made by executives who hadn't even seen the first film.
• The original cut of the Roger Corman Alien knockoff Forbidden World was originally titled Mutant and contained several comedic moments. However, Corman hated mixing genres (especially comedy) and after seeing test audiences laugh at the film, he ordered director Allan Holzman to make thirteen cuts, each one removing something that the test audiences found funny, reducing the movie's runtime to 77 minutes. Corman also had the title changed because he claimed that nobody would know what a mutant was. He sent his assistant to a local high school to ask the students which title was more appealing, with the replacement Forbidden World being the more popular vote. Although the film did well, Holzman was disappointed because he felt that Corman's edits made the film mundane, with the more serious tone drawing attention to how absurd the movie was. Holzman kept a print of his director's cut and refused to give it to Corman until Corman threatened to have him arrested. The two eventually reached an agreement, and the print was donated to UCLA (after Holzman made a copy). Holzman's 84-minute director's cut would finally see the light of day (albeit in rather poor quality) in 2010 along with the theatrical cut in Shout! Factory's Blu-Ray restoration of the film.
• Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, the second-to-last of Peter Cushing's Frankenstein movies, has a particularly insane example that everyone except the one person who held the money hated from filming all the way to this day: the rape of Anna by Doctor Frankenstein. He had done many villainous things throughout the movie, from blackmailing the young couple to do his bidding through all the way to the murder of several innocent people — but all these things could all be traced back to Frankenstein's insane and hyperfocused amoral dedication to scientific progress. This was what had always made Cushing's Frankenstein an interesting and complex villain. Then the rape scene was thrown in because the producer demanded "More sex!" Cushing is visibly shaken during the entire scene and took the actress Veronica Carlson out for dinner afterwards in order to talk through what they had just experienced. Carlson in turn asked her friend Roger Moore to be present on the set for moral support. And just to make it official, director Terence Fisher stormed off the set in the middle of shooting the scene and the producer had to finish it himself.
• Friday the 13th:
  • Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was supposed to be one-third on the boat, and two-thirds in New York, and the studio forced the director to reverse the ratio. The main reason the studio forced this decision was because they simply didn't have enough of a budget to be able to film all the New York scenes.
  • The seventh movie was originally going to pit Jason against Freddy himself. However, the two were owned by Paramount and New Line, respectively, and neither side could come to an agreement over how to proceed. It took New Line getting a hold of the rights to Jason (plus years of Development Hell) for Freddy vs. Jason to come along.
• Gigli was originally intended to be a black comedy. Producers, however, made it into a Rom Com to cash in on J-Lo/Ben Affleck romance at the time. Seven Razzies (and director Martin Brest's retirement from filmmaking) ensued.
• G.I. Joe: Retaliation, just weeks before its scheduled release, was pulled for reshoots to give Channing Tatum's character, Duke, more screentime (as a response to Tatum's increased box-office draw). It is also believed that the film was, in part, rescheduled over the studio's fears of the film bombing in an already crowded fall 2012 movie market.
• While the Ed Wood "masterpiece" Glen or Glenda would have been a horrible movie regardless, the suits pulled the strings behind the scenes, adding softcore bondage so the film could draw more publicity as an adults-only extravaganza. Ironically, this meant that the film didn't make much of a profit and only gained national attention when it was re-released in theatres in the coming decades.
• Godzilla:
  • Director Ishirō Honda wanted King Kong vs. Godzilla to retain the dark tone and sociopolitical subtext of the prior films, but was made to create a more straightforward story with a Lighter and Softer tone in order to appeal to a wider and younger audience. Honda strongly disliked this decision, but it definitely worked because King Kong vs. Godzilla remains the most-attended film in the entire franchise, even decades later.
  • Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack! owes its existence to executive meddling. Director Shusuke Kaneko's original plan was to use Varan and Anguirus, but execs at Toho wanted him to use more popular and visually impressive monsters, leading to the film where King Ghidorah is a good guy.
  • A relatively minor example compared to most, but one very strict rule given by Toho to the producers of Godzilla (1998) was that Godzilla could not eat people. He's only seen eating fish (which is still the only instance of Godzilla actually eating anything material onscreen in any movie), although the producers still got around this by having his raptor-like offspring hunting people and having him chomp on vehicles with people in them (presumably, this doesn't count because he's clearly not intentionally trying to eat the people out of hunger).
  • Some of the crew behind the MonsterVerse franchise have stated that Toho gave them a number of stipulations regarding their depiction of Godzilla (which were much more strict than the 1998 film, possibly as a direct result of it). He cannot be shown eating or drinking, he cannot be shown running, flying, or jumping, he cannot be considered part of a species/race, he cannot show emotion, he cannot be given any weaknesses, and he cannot be associated with radiation. Nearly all of these rules are broken in at least one of the films, so it's not clear how strictly Toho expects them to be followed.
• The Golden Compass was left with much of its content on the cutting room floor. Chris Weitz's original cut was three hours long, in line with New Line's desire for the next The Lord of the Rings. Then they changed their mind, worrying about the general darkness of the His Dark Materials series, and tried to lighten it up, doing so by cutting the Downer Ending and 45 minutes' worth of other scenes. This created such glaring gaps that they needed reshoots to smooth them out. They also added a very strange and obvious Sequel Hook. They even insisted on cameos from The Lord of the Rings actors like Christopher Lee and Ian McKellen, the latter of whom voiced over a character already being played by someone else. The film went so far over budget that New Line sold the international distribution rights in order to finish post-production. This blew up spectacularly, as the film did poorly domestically but was a smash hit internationally. As for the original cut, it's unlikely to see the light of day; Weitz claims it still needs $2 million worth of effects.
• Goodfellas: Martin Scorsese's choice for Karen Hill was Lorraine Bracco, however, the studio pressed Scorsese to cast Ellen Barkin, Melanie Griffith, Madonna, or Michelle Pfeiffer for the role. However, Scorsese refused, and kept Bracco on the project.
• Ian McEwan claimed of his work on The Good Son that meddling occurred once Macaulay Culkin stepped into the project. The script was subsequently taken out of McEwan's hands and rewritten.
• The theatrical cut Greed was cut to two hours by MGM. Erich von Stroheim's original cut was nine and a half hours. Most of the cut material is deemed lost.
• There were two cuts of Heaven's Gate: a five-hour cut and a studio-mandated 210-minute cut. This was the only time during the film's production that Michael Cimino would capitulate to studio demands.
• With Gremlins, Warner Bros. thought the film focused too much on the gremlins and wanted most of their scenes cut. Producer Steven Spielberg, in a move reminiscent of Back to the Future's response to meddling, suggested that the studio could cut every gremlin scene and call the movie People. The studio wisely backed down.
• Grizzly Man: Averted to the applause of a grateful nation. The executives wanted to actually play the audio recordings of wildlife activist Timothy Treadwell's final moments (basically, the audio of a man and woman being mauled and eaten by a wild animal) in the film. Werner Herzog vehemently refused on grounds of taste. The most audiences got was his reaction to listening to the recording himself with headphones on so the sound couldn't be picked up. Based on his reaction, and merely Jewel Palovak's (Treadwell's ex-girlfriend) reaction to Herzog's reaction, anyone who viewed that film really dodged a bullet. Hell, he even warned her never to listen to it and urged her to destroy it (she still has it, but won't listen to it or release it).
• This happened a lot to Guillermo del Toro's films. He's notorious for sticking to his guns, like a lot of Mexican directors, meaning that he would often run into problems; in fact, he's one of the few to even want to work in Hollywood to begin with.
  • Mimic was left unrecognizable by executive meddling. Del Toro likened it to "having a beautiful daughter and watching her arms get cut off," possibly a Titus Andronicus reference.
  • Pan's Labyrinth: Executive felt that viewers wouldn't get the setting, Franco's Spain, and wanted the film set in Nazi Germany instead. Del Toro stuck to his guns here and won out.
  • Hellboy (2004): Executives felt that Hellboy should be changed from an out-and-out demon to a human who was (somehow, inexplicably) born in Hell who would turn into Hellboy when he got angry, a la the Hulk. Del Toro vetoed all attempts to change the character and again eventually won out. Additionally, the executives wanted someone with name recognition to voice Abe Sapien so they brought in David Hyde Pierce to dub over the lines Doug Jones had already recorded. This ended up backfiring on them because once Pierce saw the immense amount of work Jones had already put into the character and performance he refused to be credited or do any promotional work for the part out of respect.
  • Pacific Rim: Del Toro resisted the studio's insistence on 3-D, thinking it wouldn't add anything to the movie (if it didn't detract from the experience outright). He eventually conceded to the conversion, but he oversaw the whole process to make sure it was done right. Fortunately, this wasn't hard to do, as many scenes were already in CGI. On a lighter note, Tomokazu Sugita, who dubbed Raleigh's voice for the Japanese release, relates a funny story: he originally dubbed the "Elbow Rocket" scene according to the script (this version of the dub was used in the Japanese trailer), and then an exec from Warner Japan told him "Since this is a robot movie, and this is Japan, why not just yell 'Rocket Punch'?"
  • His adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness never got off the ground; executives killed it because The Wolfman (2010) (itself a victim of heavy meddling, as seen below) got poor reviews, taking this to mean that there was no market for gothic horror films, especially period films with no Token Romance.
• Halloween:
  • Halloween II (1981): John Carpenter didn't want to do a sequel, but the producers said that they were doing one with or without him. He figured that if someone was going to be paid to write the script, it might as well be him. Rick Rosenthal was then brought in to direct, but the producers didn't like his decision to make it more of a thriller than a slasher, so they got Carpenter to shoot some extra scenes, mostly involving killings. As a result, Rosenthal is not a fan of the released version.
  • Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers had so much meddling that it resulted in two different altered cuts of the film. One way or another, the executives took over the film after it ran over time and budget. Their first attempt to salvage it became the "Theatrical Cut". The "Producer's Cut" is the other version, which trims the violence and cursing, has a ton of alternate takes, changes the opening narration, and cuts 20 minutes from the Theatrical Cut. The two also have very different explanations for Michael's killing ways; the Theatrical version offered a scientific reason, but the Producer's Cut said it was supernatural.
• Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle centers around the subtle and omnipresent (yet hilarious) issues faced by the ethnic minority Indian and Asian main characters. The execs wanted to change them to both being Jewish, which not only would have negated the central concept but also have proven the entire point of the film. The director refused, but he did place a Jewish buddy duo in the film. The film's sequel, perhaps trying to avoid this, put the racial issues front and center and has Harold and Kumar arrested as terrorists.
• Before being #MeToo'd, producer/distributor Harvey Weinstein is infamous for recutting films without the consent of their directors, to the point that he has been nicknamed "Harvey Scissorhands" and "Darth Weinstein".
  • The Hairy Bird: After the film was acquired by Miramax for U.S. distribution, Weinstein sought to make edits to the female-driven film to make it more appealing to male audiences. Miramax did not publicize the finished film and sent it straight to video. Weinstein thought the original title of the film was too offensive, ^note as it alludes to male genitalia, so he had it changed to All I Wanna Do. In the U.K. and Canada, the film has the title Strike! Australia is the only place the film retains its original title, as Weinstein neglected to secure Australian distribution rights.
  • Fanboys: The executives ordered so many changes that whole swathes of subplots make no sense unless you ignore them. The DVD version is better, but it's still ridiculously obvious which scenes the executives demanded. The original still exists, and the director still has a print of it, but he's not allowed to show it to anyone. The director recounts the whole debacle in this podcast.
  • Scream 4 was another victim of Weinstein's tampering, with both Hayden Panettiere and director Wes Craven reportedly complaining about script changes. The DVD Commentary brings up a number of instances, particularly noting that the film originally ended with a "We got a heartbeat!" scene involving Panettiere's character Kirby. Given that the finished version has the most downbeat ending of the series and was the least successful at the box office, and given both audiences and critics gave Panettiere major props, leaving Kirby writhing on the ground in agony with her fate left in the air might have been a mistake. Scream VI later undid this meddling.
  • The 2013 South Korean film Snowpiercer nearly went through Weinstein's editing machine as well, ignoring protests from the film's director, Bong Joon-ho (famous for The Host (2006)). The original unedited film was a box-office hit in Korea, and it also got positive reviews after screenings in the UK. Weinstein cut the film by 25 minutes and edited it to play up the action at the expense of character development. Bong fought for the original cut, pointing to the negative press surrounding the recut, and he got his wish — but Weinstein scaled back the number of theaters that would show it.
  • He also did this to Vampire Academy, much to the chagrin of its screenwriter, Daniel Waters.
• In his commentary on the 20th-Anniversary DVD release of Hellraiser, Clive Barker says that the suggestions made by executives improved the film. Ironic, since they were trying to tone it down. The same cannot be said however for the fourth film, Hellraiser: Bloodline. This was edited and rewritten by the studio to such a degree, Barker cut ties with the film franchise and director Kevin Yagher refused to be credited for it.
• Highlander II: The Quickening: After production ran late and over-budget, the insurance company took over production. They made numerous changes, including changing the Immortals' Back Story and merging two fight scenes together. Director Russell Mulcahy blamed this for the film's incredible crappiness and tried to salvage it by recutting into something closer to his original vision; it would be released as Highlander II: The Renegade Version.
• Gee Malik Linton wrote, produced, and directed Hija De Dios as a psychological social drama treating abuse of women and children in the New York Dominican community with Ana de Armas in the central role. Lionsgate Premiere tried to reshape the film as a New York cop procedural thriller starring Keanu Reeves under the title "Exposed", and the director had his name removed, using the alias "Declan Dale" instead. An alternate version that follows the director's vision was edited by Roman Polanski's longtime editor, Hervé de Luze, under the original name.
• The Hitman movie was severely meddled with, at least according to well-substantiated rumors. If you watch the trailers (and promotional stills) carefully, you can see the remains of a different "train station" scene. It is said that the producers ordered the editor, Nicolas de Toth, to direct the re-shoot — without even notifying the director, Xavier Gens. The leaked near-final script contains scenes that could be matched to the remains seen in trailers and promotional photos.
• Rob Zombie's 2003 horror film House of 1000 Corpses was initially filmed while Rob was negotiating for Universal Pictures to distribute it. When Universal execs saw the final cut, they turned pale and refused to release it, though it was eventually picked up by Lionsgate. Rob groused to Guitar World magazine shortly thereafter, "I called it House of 1,000 Corpses; what did they think it was going to be about?"
• Hussar Ballad. Soviet authorities weren't pleased with Igor Ilyinsky, famous for playing in comedies, portraying such an iconic figure as Field Marshal Kutuzov, and tried to force the director to replace him, even after the film was already finished. The director managed to show the film to Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law, who liked it a lot and arranged for it to be released.
• The planned ending of the 2007 film of I Am Legend tested poorly and was replaced at the studio's insistence. The new ending was nothing like the book's and also completely against the point of the original film. Among other things, it introduces serious plot holes, skips the shocking twist that made the book so successful (while still heavily foreshadowing the now-nonexistent twist), and even removes the reason for the movie to be called "I Am Legend".
• James Brooks' Ill Do Anything was originally written and filmed as an Old Hollywood-style musical. Then it was shown to test audiences, who believed the musical numbers should be cut. Brooks was forced to remove the songs and shoot several new scenes in their place, releasing the film months later as a non-musical. As Nathan Rabin points out in his review of the original bootleg for his book My Year of Flops, one of the film's themes is "test screenings and Hollywood's pathological need for approval." The irony was not lost on him.
• The 1967 spy comedy In Like Flint has agent Flint uncovering a plot by a group of powerful women executives (in those pre-liberation days they were heads of cosmetic companies, fashion houses, etc.) who commandeer and arm a space station to take the reins of power from men and run the world their way. As originally scripted, Flint argues with them that even though they had been dealt an unfair deal in life, their plan was simply the other side of the coin, adding that "if it's a slug on one side it's a slug on the other". Someone in the studio hierarchy trimmed his eloquent case down to "Ladies...forget it!" and the movie's producer quit in protest.
• The existence of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is due to this trope. Steven Spielberg wanted to end the series with Last Crusade, but both Harrison Ford and George Lucas insisted that a fourth film be made. It went through 20 years of negotiation and Development Hell, caused mostly by Lucas being set on very specific scenes and plot points that had to be used in the movie. Writers like Frank Darabont and M. Night Shyamalan either quit or were fired by Lucas. The film was finally made and released in 2008, when Spielberg had no other projects in sight and Ford had given an ultimatum demanding that the movie be done now or never.
• The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996), already a Troubled Production, saw the studio make things worse when they fired Richard Stanley from his dream project because Val Kilmer was notoriously unreliable. They replaced Stanley with John Frankenheimer, who managed to make enemies out of both Kilmer and David Thewlis, leading to a disorganized shoot and a Box Office Bomb.
• Jennifer's Body: A version that ultimately caused the movie to suffer greatly. Diablo Cody created the movie as a horror comedy with feminist satire. The executives decided to market the movie exclusively to teenage boys because "Megan Fox hot", test screening it to 12-14 year olds when the movie was rated R and thus that demographic wouldn't even be able to see it in theatres without their parents going with them. The response from that demographic was "Needs Moar Bewbs". Even worse, executives originally wanted to promote the movie on amateur porn sites by having Megan Fox live chat with users of the site, which had to be shot down. The movie was ultimately thrashed critically and led to Diablo Cody having a Creator Breakdown and the derailment of Megan Fox's career.
• John Carter is infamous for how Disney botched so much of its release. They first dropped the title of "John Carter of Mars", as they somehow reasoned that the "Mars" name was the reason their movie Mars Needs Moms was a huge box office bomb. They failed to properly develop word-of-mouth buzz and gave it Invisible Advertising that completely failed to mention how the property influenced virtually every sci-fi story of the last century. It all ended with a massive box office bomb.
• John Woo suffered this twice:
  • The first victim was Hard Target. According to several crew accounts (including one here), Woo was locked out from the post-production offices by Jean-Claude Van Damme under order from Universal executives to keep Woo from protesting the studio's treatment of his film.
  • Seven years later it happened again, with Mission: Impossible II. Allegedly, Woo butted heads with star Tom Cruise over Woo's cut of the movie. Once editing started, Cruise, under order from Paramount executives, locked Woo out from the offices, again to keep him from protesting the studio's treatment of the film. Needless to say, it was the failure of Paycheck, which too suffered from executive meddling, that was the straw that broke the camel's back, as Woo gave up on Hollywood after that.
• The Keep is a rather severe example. Running over three hours originally, the studio haphazardly cut it down to 96 minutes, resulting in an incongruous, David Lynch-type film. Characters spoke in fragmented conversations that seemed to skip ahead of themselves — you can actually hear the mid-sentence cuts to the audio track in some places. Michael Mann has disowned the film, and author F. Paul Wilson has since refused to allow any further film adaptations of his novels.
• This CinemaBlend article suggests that The Last Airbender may have been more a case of this trope than solely the fault of M. Night Shyamalan. Nepotism, script rewrites and cut scenes to keep the movie under 100 minutes long seem to have ultimately killed Shyamalan and the company's enthusiasm for the project, leading them to phone it in just to get their paychecks.
  • The biggest nail in its coffin was casting an important investor's daughter as Katara. This meant that Sokka, Katara's brother, had to look similar to her, along with the entire water tribe (originally modeled after Native American/Inuits). When someone realized that the entire movie would be white faces (the original cartoon featured a very diverse cast, none of them white), a conscious decision was made to diversify the cast by casting Dev Patel as the villain Zuko. Which meant the entire fire tribe (originally modeled after medieval Koreans) was now Indian/South Asian, making the entire movie about a tribe of white people saving the day from a tribe of brown faces.
  • Additionally, a crewmember of the movie posted just how nightmarish the production was to everyone, including Shyamalan.
  • To add insult to injury, the film was meant to be over 30 minutes longer, with footage cut out of the movie at the last minute to have the terrible 3D conversion. This was partly due to rushing this movie for its July 2 launch, and it was probably not worth it as it made the movie much worse with many of the major problems this movie has. And to add further insult, the novelization has over 20 differences — some major — that got axed out because of what happened!
• The controversial "Leia Poppins" scene in The Last Jedi came about because the head of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, told the director Rian Johnson that she wanted to see Leia use force powers other than her mental connection to those close to her.
• The Last Laugh: Director F.W. Murnau and screenwriter Carl Mayer originally wanted the film to end with the death of the doorman at the bathroom. Executives at UFA pressed them to conjure up a happy ending before the film's premiere in order to maximize its economic potential. Murnau and Mayer, obviously annoyed by this, created a cynical epilogue, showing the doorman having inherited from an eccentric hotel guest, who bequeathed his entire estate to the last person seen before he died. The executives also pressed the artists to change the film's title from "The Last Man" to "The Last Laughter".
• Limitless: The film's original, darker ending that was closer to the source material was changed after it didn't test well (combined with the writer and director not really liking it).
• Ben Affleck's fourth directorial effort Live by Night was hit by this. Affleck envisioned and filmed the movie as a three-hour-long character-driven drama, with Joe's brother Danny Coughlin (Scott Eastwood was cast in this role) even appearing in a supporting role. But Warner Bros. thought audiences wouldn't want to sit through a three-hour movie (despite the success of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit) and wanted it to be a crowd-pleasing action film so Affleck was forced to cut it down to 129 minutes with Danny Coughlin's entire character and another role played by Affleck's regular Titus Welliver being axed. Affleck's schedule also likely proved to be an issue as he had been cast as Batman during pre-production and would have to do Justice League (2017) right after Live by Night. This also is probably the reason why many character arcs feel incomplete or rushed, which was a complaint among critics along with the pointless Blade Runner-esque narration, which may have been added to fill the gaps left in the story. Affleck's real-life divorce from Jennifer Garner and his alcoholism probably didn't help things either. It ended up with a very mixed reception and a massive box-office bomb.
• Logan's Run had loads of important scenes cut. The studio suddenly decided it had to be rated PG. Even though the book it was adapted from was set in a dark, crapsack, Teenage Wasteland.
• Disney delayed production on The Lone Ranger after the underperformance of Cowboys & Aliens. It didn't help at all.
• The Lord of the Rings almost suffered this fate.
  • Peter Jackson knew a proper trilogy would be a hard sell, so he came up with a two-movie treatment. He showed it to Miramax; they agreed to it, but their then-parent company Disney balked at the projected cost. They leaned on Miramax to suggest changes, which included: mash it into a single film; "use or lose" Saruman; combine Rohan and Gondor (and make Éowyn Boromir's sister); cut the entire Moria sequence and describe it in an Info Dump; and pare down the four Hobbits to two and kill off one of them at some point. Jackson flatly refused, so Miramax gave him four weeks for another studio to bite, after which they'd just hire another director. Then New Line did bite, told Jackson to make it a full trilogy, and the rest is Oscar-winning history. The fallout at Miramax led to Harvey Weinstein's departure (and indirectly to Disney ousting CEO Michael Eisner as well).
  • Ironically, the prequel series The Hobbit suffered much more from executive meddling. Now Jackson presented New Line a two-film treatment which the studio accepted at first, only to then insist that it should be expanded to three films (even though the source material was much shorter than The Lord of the Rings was) shortly after production on the first film had begun . The studio originally threw the series into Development Hell when it refused to pay J. R. R. Tolkien's estate its due; when they finally cleared that up and got the green light to start filming, they gave Jackson only six months of pre-production (in comparison, to The Lord of the Rings spent three-and-half years in pre-production). They also forced a lot of added plot threads, which caused more than one Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole — in particular, they wanted more Alfrid scenes and forced Legolas into Kili and Tauriel's love story. One of the actors also revealed that Warner Bros. told Jackson they didn't care about the other dwarves or characters and wanted them sidelined to focus on action and more on Gandalf, Bilbo and Thorin, when originally Jackson intended to give the characters 50/50 screentime.
• Sam Peckinpah's Major Dundee got this treatment. He wanted to make the film similar to his later The Wild Bunch, but the studio wanted a regular "Cavalry vs. Indians"-like Western, and Peckinpah lost out.
• Mallrats:
  • The brief topless shot of Joey Lauren Adams was not part of the script, but insisted upon by Universal. When Adams refused to be filmed topless, Universal threatened to fire her from the film. Director (and Adams' boyfriend at the time) Kevin Smith had to persuade her to do the scene.
  • The "semen as hair gel" joke was removed for being deemed too gross, and almost resulted in the replacement of Jason Mewes with Seth Green as Jay.
• One of the wonderful defiances is from Tim Burton in Mars Attacks! He was told he couldn't kill Jack Nicholson's character. The solution? Cast him twice and kill him twice!
• Not even the much-lauded Marvel superhero movies by Marvel Studios are immune to this.
  • In Iron Man 2, studio execs clashed with Terrence Howard's agents, leading to him being replaced by Don Cheadle. They also re-cut Big Bad Ivan Vanko/Whiplash's scenes to make him less sympathetic. And they insisted on adding story elements that would help set up The Avengers, which director Jon Favreau thought made for a much less coherent story overall. Favreau was so put off by the studio that he refused to return for Iron Man 3.^note As director, anyway, Happy Hogan, his character in the first two Iron Man films, still returned for that film and later MCU films with Favreau reprising the role.
  • In The Avengers, Joss Whedon wanted Loki to have a muscular Dragon intimidating enough to go up against the Hulk. Marvel said no, not wanting too many Asgardian or fantasy elements in the movie. Marvel also replaced Edward Norton with Mark Ruffalo as the Hulk, although this one worked out as fans liked Ruffalo's portrayal (and Norton was notoriously difficult to work with).
  • Iron Man 3 fell victim to this twice from two different parties:
    • Disney was responsible for the first example (to the plot) - Shane Black originally intended to adapt the Demon in a Bottle comic book storyline^note this storyline dealt with Tony Stark's alcoholism, but Disney objected as children would be watching it and Robert Downey Jr. was reluctant to explore alcoholism on screen because he felt it could take him back to a mental state he'd worked hard to move beyond. Black complied if only for concluding that Iron Man facing both a villain and alcoholism would lead the two threats to be underdeveloped.
    • Marvel's corporate arm was responsible for the second one - The Big Bad was originally female, but they insisted it be a male character, as toys based on female characters wouldn't sell. As a result, the entire script had to be changed, and it led to the downsizing of both Ellen Brandt's and Maya Hansen's roles.
  • Thor: The Dark World was originally planned to focus more on the Dark Elves, especially Malekith, but those scenes were cut in favor of more of Ensemble Dark Horse Loki. (Fan reaction was mixed.) Director Alan Taylor also publicly complained about The Stinger that set up Guardians of the Galaxy, feeling that it clashed with what was otherwise a fantasy film; Marvel loves these stingers and had this one done without Taylor's involvement.
  • The original cut for Avengers: Age of Ultron was over three hours long. Naturally, the executives demanded that it be cut down to something more manageable, with priority being given to scenes that set up things for Captain America: Civil War and Thor: Ragnarok rather than what fit the movie's storyline.
  • This got Ant-Man stuck briefly in Development Hell. Edgar Wright signed on in 2006 and originally wanted it to be a standalone film, like the first Iron Man film. Marvel insisted on some sort of tie-in to the rest of the MCU, such as cameos by Howard Stark and Peggy Carter. Wright left the project as a result.
  • Ever wonder why Black Panther and Captain Marvel were stuck in Development Hell until 2014? Well, you can blame Marvel Entertainment CEO Ike Perlmutter, a reputedly racist and misogynistic Pointy-Haired Boss who believed, and could conceivably still believe, that audiences wouldn't want to watch movies with non-White Male Lead heroes (a belief that rings rather hollow given the success of The Hunger Games and Wonder Woman). Perlmutter himself would only allow Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige to make Black Panther and Captain Marvel on the condition that Feige would make an Inhumans movie^note Feige had no interest in adapting the Inhumans in the MCU, but Perlmutter wanted the Inhumans to replace the X-Men in the MCU. However, thanks to Marvel agreeing to take Perlmutter out of the picture after Feige convinced them that his meddling was dangerously close to causing Seasonal Rot and an Audience-Alienating Era, that movie never did end up happening; instead, the planned movie was made into a TV series, which unfortunately, but perhaps predictably for basically the filmed version of an editorial mandate, turned out absolutely awful and may have ended up the death knell for all Marvel TV properties besides the well-established and beloved Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. This issue, among many other questionable decisions Perlmutter made, led to Disney sacking him as Marvel CCO in October 2019 in favor of Feige.
  • Much of Marvel Studios' meddling came from a Creative Committee within former parent company Marvel Entertainment as a whole. Meddlers included such notable names as Joe Quesada, Brian Michael Bendis, and the aforementioned Perlmutter. Kevin Feige grew increasingly tired of the meddling and eventually convinced Disney to dissolve the Committee and completely separate Marvel Studios from Marvel Entertainment (making Disney themselves the only meddler).
  • Even once the Creative Committee was dissolved, this reared its head again when Disney Studios president Alan Horne went over Kevin Feige's head and fired James Gunn from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 following far-right online trolls uncovering some offensive tweets Gunn posted a decade prior (and which he had previously apologized for). While Gunn was eventually rehired after continued requests from Feige, the cast, crew, and fans of the franchise, production was still delayed until Gunn had finished working on The Suicide Squad for the DC Extended Universe.
• The original producer of Monty Python's Life of Brian abandoned the film just as the Pythons were getting ready to shoot (or, as Michael Palin put it, "when they finally read the script"). The film was left without a producer, but then in stepped former Beatle George Harrison, who was a total Python fanboy who also happened to be rich enough to finance the film on his own. He even founded his own production company just for this film, although it went on to produce a number of later successes as well. When asked why, Harrison just said, "I wanted to see the movie." Eric Idle would later call it "the most expensive movie ticket ever purchased."
• Shown in a subverted form in the movie Morning Glory. Rachel McAdams' character is hired to be the Executive Producer and given free rein to do whatever she wanted with the show within a show as long as it was within the budget.
• My Stepmother Is an Alien was supposed to be a film about child abuse, using the concept of an evil alien to build as a metaphor for this touchy topic. Said screenwriter Jerico Stone: "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." The film didn't turn out that way, for one, it was rewritten as a silly comedy instead of a horror film, at the behest of Paramount, who subsequently turned it down. It ended up at Weintraub Entertainment Group, and (like most of their output) was a flop.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 The Movie was originally envisioned as an origin story of how Joel got stuck on the Satellite of Love. The executives also wanted little (if any) movie riffing (obviating the point of the series), insisted on using only Universal's collection of movies, asked them to "dumb down" the riffs and add more cursing, rewrote the ending, imposed Invisible Advertising, and pared down the movie thinking people wouldn't get why it's so long — leading to a film shorter than most episodes of the original series. It was bad enough to contribute to Joel Hodgson leaving the series.
• Jacques Tourneur famously directed a number of atmospheric movies of supernatural nature that delivered chills while leaving much unseen and to the imagination. With 1957's Night of the Demon, he intended to show said demon, at most, in a brief "did I see that?" glimpse toward the end, but the producer insisted on a full-on rubber suit creature, very visible at both the beginning and the end. Opinions vary on its inclusion, but many feel it's a fine movie regardless.
• Zigzagged with the film version of The Nutcracker starring Macaulay Culkin. Producer Arnon Milchan wanted to add narration to the film for the sake of continuity but Kit Culkin, the Stage Dad from Hell (who also starred in a Nutcracker production), demanded to take out the narration or else he wouldn't let Mac promote the film. Milchan initially acquiesced to Kit's requests. Then Kit decided to make more demands, which pissed Milchan enough that he brought back the narration and risked millions of dollars in the process. A lot of people in Hollywood praised Milchan for having the guts to stand up to Kit.
• When On Our Own was picked up for video distribution by a Mormon-owned studio, they re-cut numerous scenes, re-dubbed lines of dialogue, and filmed an additional framing device to place the film within their religious ideals. The result was a film that often contradicted itself, and writer/director Lyman Dayton had his name removed from this version.
• On Dangerous Ground was supposed to have a depressing Did Not Get the Girl ending. Executives thought that that wasn't going to go down well with audiences, so they forced director Nicholas Ray to cut it out. That’s why the ending feels rather rushed; Ray refused to direct the revised final scene in question, so blocking was left to the main actors.
• The initial U.S. release of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America was cut by more than an hour and a half from 229 minutes to 139 minutes, and re-edited from an original non-linear storyline that would have given Pulp Fiction's editor nightmares into a straight chronological sequence — with the result that the film's stars (Robert De Niro and James Woods) don't even show up on-screen until forty minutes in. The European release was the original, and it was critically acclaimed.
• According to star Shannyn Sossamon, the decision to turn the American remake of the Japanese horror film One Missed Call into a PG-13 movie was made at the last minute by the studio against director Eric Valette's wishes. Valette allegedly has his own preferred Director's Cut which has never been released. Screenwriter Andrew Klavan says the actors, producer, director, and himself couldn't agree on what the movie should be, and that their pulling in different directions resulted in the final mess of a finished film.
• Passengers (2016): Sony chief Tom Rothman wasn't thrilled with the film's pricey budget, an estimated $120 million, and tried to reduce it by a third, to $80 million. Producer Neal Moritz, who never saw eye-to-eye with Rothman, threatened to sell the project to another studio in response, forcing Sony to back off. When Passengers got mediocre reception and bombed at the box office, Moritz's already-deteriorating relationship with Sony collapsed, resulting in him ending his first-look contract with the studio after nearly 20 years and signing with Paramount.
• An In-Universe example with the second Peter Rabbit movie: A group of executives who are interested in Bea's sequel to her book based upon the adventures of the titular character involve wanting to put him and his family in unusual situations like sending them to the beach, or taking them to space. Near the end, they come up with an idea involving a big chase sequence involving boats, cars, and motorcycles, which is how the movie itself actually ends.
• Planet of the Apes very nearly got a gritty reboot in 1995. Titled Return of the Apes, the movie would have been as bizarre as violent, with a plot centered around two scientists that travel to Africa 102,000 years before the present to look for a cure to a disease that is ravaging humanity in the future, only to run into a war between primitive humans and advanced gorilla-like apemen. It had a $100 million budget approved, Arnold Schwarzenegger had signed as the lead, Stan Winston was making the special effects, Terry Hayes was writing and Phillip Noyce was directing. So, how come you've never heard of it? Enter Fox executive Dylan Sellers, who thought that the script needed comedy. In particular, he thought that the film needed a scene in which Schwarzenegger would teach the evil killer gorillas how to play baseball. When Hayes turned in the revised script without this scene, only months before shooting, Sellers fired him, Noyce quit the project in protest, and the film went back into Development Hell. In the words of fellow producer Don Murphy, "Terry wrote a Terminator and Fox wanted The Flintstones." Sam Hamm was brought in and penned a more comedic, child-friendly, straight space Sci-Fi draft with two scenes featuring apes playing baseball. This script never got to the filming stage as Sellers was arrested soon after for drunk driving; afterwards, no ''Apes'' script included baseball.
• The infamous scene from Predator where the group freaks out and fires their guns wildly into the jungle was put into the film solely because the studio told John McTiernan that the movie needed more "gun shooting scenes". So he added a scene where the gun shooting was pointless.
• The Predator had many reshoots, a Release Date Change, and promotional pictures that show stuff that didn't end in the movie, so speculation on what the studio added is on full force (the Screen Junkies writers even debate on their Honest Trailers Commentary that the end result seems like "Studio Notes: The Movie"). Co-writer Fred Dekker later confirmed at least one imposition, changing the ending to be set at night.
• The movie of Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters suffered greatly from meddling, as expounded in this essay by the scriptwriter. Among other things, the execs wanted to change the slugs to space spores.
• Red Dawn (2012): The plot of the movie was originally centered around a Chinese invasion of America. After the movie was completed, the executives decided to change the villain from China to North Korea and went so far as to digitally alter every Chinese symbol into a North Korean one and add additional scenes. Theories abound, from suggesting that distributors were unnerved by the prospect of a Chinese invasion, to the risk of the film being Banned in China itself, which would leave a lot of money on the table.
• Ridley Scott is a frequent victim of this. For example:
  • Blade Runner. Amongst the things the executives tried to change was adding narration by the protagonist, Deckard, to explain the story because they felt the viewers wouldn't understand the movie otherwise. Executive meddling also changed the ending to have Deckard and Rachael driving off into the mountains, using footage from a different movie. Several versions have since been released that removed all these changes.
  • Kingdom of Heaven: Scott wanted to make a political drama, but Fox wanted a Gladiator-style action movie with a romance subplot. They also weren't enamored with the original cut's three-hour length. This led to some elements of the story being dropped, including Sibylla's character motivation, Balian's backstory, and King Baldwin V's entire character. They would be restored in the director's cut.
  • This is commonly referred to in regards to the Troubled Production of Prometheus. The film was originally intended to be much closer to a true Alien prequel, with Jon Spaihts' original script ("Alien: Engineers") being much more coherent and logical; among other things, it gave many of the supporting characters much clearer motivations, answered commonly-addressed moments of idiocy (the expedition team keeps their helmets on inside the ship at all times) and tied in much better to the Alien canon ( the team originally discovered the Engineer outpost on LV-426, and Holloway gave birth to a proto-chestburster). Midway through pre-production, 20th Century Fox brought Damon Lindelof of Lost onboard as a "name" writer to rework Spaihts' script, jettisoning a large amount of context, explanation, and connections with the main franchise in the process. Interestingly, the Blu-Ray special features have the cast and crew explicitly describing the film as an Alien prequel, despite the marketing and trailers distancing the film from the source material.
  • Ridley Scott wanted to cast Christopher Plummer as J. Paul Getty in All the Money in the World, but the studio insisted on the more bankable Kevin Spacey (also requiring an elaborate makeup job as unlike Plummer he was a few decades too young for the role). This backfired in a huge way when Spacey's long history of sexual abuse was revealed just a couple of months before the film's release, turning his name so toxic overnight that it was decided the more cost-effective option was to bring in Plummer like Scott wanted in the first place, get back all the cast and crew involved in Getty's scenes, and reshoot them all in just a few weeks while still aiming for the same release date. The kicker? It worked so well that Plummer received an Academy Award nomination for his performance in the movie.
• While he did enjoy acting in R.I.P.D., Jeff Bridges believes the studio changed some things around that made the movie underwhelming.
• James Whale's original cut of The Road Back (1937), a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), received generally favorable reviews. Charles R. Rogers, head of Universal Studios, bowed to threats from Nazi Germany and had re-edited the film, including having out-of-place comedic scenes filmed and inserted. The resulting film was a critical and commercial failure and was banned in Germany anyway.
• The original screenplay for Robin Hood (2010) was a very sought-after script titled Nottingham. It was about the Sheriff of Nottingham trying to investigate some murders in his city, with his efforts frequently being hindered by a brigand who lived in the local forest. Then the studio that bought the script brought Ridley Scott on board, who decided that one can't make a Robin Hood movie in which Robin Hood isn't the main character and threw away the script completely, turning the movie into yet another film about how Robin of Locksley became the famous outlaw of Sherwood Forest.
• The RoboCop reboot fell victim to this big time. The director and star both pushed for a hard R tribute to the beloved cult classic. Sony executives were more interested in ripping off iconic moments from Iron Man and Batman films to try and build a new superhero franchise. Reportedly, the director complained that for every ten ideas he had, nine were cut by the studio.
• A scene in The Santa Clause ended up deleted in the DVD releases because of complaints from the parents of children who watched the film. Said children dialed the number that Scott Calvin sarcastically gave (1-800-SPANK-ME), and discovered that it was a phone sex hotline.
• Scarface: MCA, Universal's then-parent company, wanted a more recognizable actress like Goldie Hawn or Sigourney Weaver to play Elvira Hancock. Brian De Palma refused, and he demanded that an unknown actress should play Elvira. His effort paid off, and Michelle Pfeiffer, a relatively unknown actress, was cast.
• Scooby-Doo (2002): James Gunn wrote a PG-13 movie around urban legends and Wild Mass Guessing developed by fans. Despite these elements being filmed, Warner Bros. forced many of them to be cut to get a PG rating. Later on, Gunn's contract mandated that he write a sequel called Scooby-Doo: Monsters Unleashed and he was forced to leave the Dawn of the Dead (2004) remake as a result.
• In-Universe in Scrooged. Frank's boss runs into him in the hallway and orders him to shoehorn some scenes with small animals into the production of A Christmas Carol to appeal to household pets, thinking that pet appeal would be The Next Big Thing.
• The movie version of the stage musical 1776 was commissioned by the U.S. government in the run-up to the Bicentennial. As such, it suffered from executive branch meddling, in particular regarding the Villain Song "Cool Considerate Men". It detailed the motives of what were then "conservatives" — i.e. the wealthy, risk-averse colonists who opposed the independence movement. Then-president Richard Nixon hated the song for its implied parallels to his conservative movement. He was unsuccessful in getting it removed from the play, but he was friends with producer Jack Warner and got it removed from the film. He went so far as to ask Warner to destroy the footage; Warner, no longer in charge of the studio, could only have the negatives packed into unmarked boxes. He would later regret cutting the song from the film, feeling it was essential to the plot. The song would make it to the Special Edition DVD release.
• The trailer for Shaft (2000) had a fight scene on an airport runway between Shaft and Wade. That scene was supposed to be in the movie, but it didn't make the final cut because of Jeffrey Wright's role as drug lord Peoples Hernandez being more of the antagonistic role.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (2020):
  • According to story co-writer Van Robichaux, Sony was aiming to give the movie a Darker and Edgier look in the hopes that it would snatch a PG-13 rating to boost its box office chances. However, when the film jumped ship to Paramount, a re-write of the screenplay was ordered in order to make the film more family-friendly. The action-oriented sequences were kept in, however.
  • The budget was initially set at $100 million, but Paramount reduced it to $90 million. Thanks to the costs to redesign Sonic, they found a happy medium at $95 million.
  • Robichaux was said to have frequently clashed with then-Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal during the early stages of production, before the move to Paramount.
  • Sonic's first, more "realistic" design was an active decision by Paramount executives, with them hoping to imitate the aesthetics of the live-action Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films. They openly knew that fans would hate it but they believed that it would be liked and accepted by the general public, similarly to how the aforementioned franchises had been received. However, the massive, almost universal backlash that followed the first trailer led them to immediately delay the film to have Sonic be redesigned to look more like his cartoony game design.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022): According to writer Pat Casey, the executives at Paramount almost vetoed Robotnik using a giant robot to fight Sonic and friends in the climax of the movie because they didn't understand why Robotnik would choose to use a giant robot against the heroes (despite robots being Robotnik's bread-and-butter in both the movies and the source material).
• According to Jamie Kennedy and director Lawrence Guterman on the former's YouTube channel, this was actually responsible for Son of the Mask turning out to be the steaming piece of garbage we know as today. It was originally supposed to be a more PG-13-oriented movie that, while probably still inferior to the first Mask movie, was supposedly an improvement over the version that we were exposed to today, but unfortunately, New Line Cinema didn't seem to like that cut and drastically changed the movie into its more sanitized, PG-rated state; the final product as a result did not sit well at all with critics and Mask fans alike.
• Spartacus: During post-production, Kirk Douglas received detailed memos from Universal Studios and Production Code offices demanding heavy cuts. Having received the instruction "Any implication that Crassus is a sex pervert is unacceptable," the producers excised the notorious "snails and oysters" scene between Olivier and Tony Curtis. More seriously, Universal trimmed several action scenes, along with political content that was deemed subversive. Apparently, the studio feared that if Spartacus had a chance of winning, viewers would perceive the film as Communist! Nearly 30 minutes were cut, most of which was restored to the 1991 re-release.
• Spider-Man:
  • Spider-Man Trilogy:
    • Spider-Man 3 director Sam Raimi wanted to do a movie focusing on a hero with negative qualities and a villain with positive qualities while wrapping up sub-plots involving Mary Jane and Harry "Goblin Jr." Osborn. The story was packed as it was, when producer Avi Arad insisted that fan-favorite Venom be added to the film. Raimi at first refused on the basis that he didn't understand the character of Venom that well, but eventually gave in. This left the movie with Venom and Eddie Brock shoehorned in. Gwen Stacy was also shoehorned in, filling a role that was originally just a random woman. It was commercially successful, but reviews were mixed. Raimi was dissatisfied with the final product, outright calling it "awful" in later interviews and blaming himself for its failure, while Avi Arad would apologize himself for forcing Raimi to do the character despite knowing the director's misgivings.
  • Sony was eager to start production on a fourth Spider-Man film and asked Raimi to direct once again. However, while Raimi wanted to do a story revolving around Peter and Mary Jane's wedding and the Vulture as the main villain, the studio wanted to do a Time Skip that involved Dr. Connors becoming The Lizard, as well as Peter cheating on her with Black Cat (reworked to be the Vulture's daughter) and leaving his wife and child. Raimi loathed the idea of the studio interfering once again and refused to do it, telling Sony to just cancel his project and do the Continuity Reboot that they wanted to create anyway.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man Series:
    • For The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the studio cut out bits that explored Peter's personal life, preferring to shoehorn in new characters and plot threads that had the sole intent of pushing future installments in the film series so they would have something to act as a competitor to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Andrew Garfield, who played Spider-Man, was not pleased and said so in an interview. Sony was so unhappy that they considered replacing him with another actor, a piece of information discovered in a massive 2014 data leak.) The film was not successful, leading to Sony striking a deal to allow Spidey to migrate to the Marvel Cinematic Universe while still maintaining film rights to the franchise.
• Star!, the first collaboration between Julie Andrews and director Robert Wise since The Sound of Music, was a victim of this. Upon its release in 1968, it was an expensive flop, no doubt due to the rise of New Hollywood, the oversaturation of movie musicals, and Julie Andrews taking an unexpected dark turn as stage icon Gertrude Lawrence. The latter issue seemed to be the biggest issue in the eyes of Twentieth Century Fox executives. In an attempt to remedy this, the studio decided to re-release it with a dramatically altered fashion against Wise's wishes. Fox hacked a third of the film's three-hour running time, minimizing (if not outright deleting) scenes involving Lawrence's inner demons to appease Andrews fans who only saw her as Mary Poppins or Maria von Trapp. The studio decided to release the new bastardized version under the new title of Those Were the Happy Times with an advertising campaign that tried to pass it off as a spiritual sequel to The Sound of Music. Unfortunately, this did nothing to make people flock to see it, and Happy Times soon faded into obscurity. Fortunately, Fox didn't junk the original three-hour version of Star! and the film has been seen in its unaltered state since at least the early-1980s.
• The Star Trek films:
  • Star Trek: The Motion Picture was a quasi-failure with a big price tag. Paramount tried to avoid this in the future by removing Gene Roddenberry as executive producer. They were also outraged by a script he wrote in which the Enterprise crew had to ensure the Kennedy assassination. But since Roddenberry made Star Trek to begin with, they had to kick him upstairs, where he could become his own meddling executive.
  • The original ending of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan did not have Spock performing a mind-meld on McCoy, and did not have the shot of Spock's casket having soft-landed on the Genesis planet. It was implied that he was Deader than Dead. This tested poorly, with Harve Bennett noting in Shatner's book Star Trek Movie Memories that there was "a silence, a heavily funereal silence" as the test audience left the theater. As a result, over Nick Meyer's vehement objections, the "Remember" shot and the tracking shot resting on Spock's casket were added to the final theatrical cut. Particularly sharp-eyed viewers will note the change in film quality during the "Remember" shot.
  • The traitorous Lt. Valeris in 1991's Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was originally written to be Lt. Saavik from the three previous films, so that her betrayal would have a more profound impact. However, Gene Roddenberry overruled writer/director Nicholas Meyer in what was by all accounts an epic battle of rank-pulling, and forced the creation of a "new" protégé for Spock. Meyer even pointed out that he wrote Saavik himself (as she first appeared in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan).
  • Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is one of the least popular Star Trek films, and fans largely blame executive meddling. Among the problems was that the script changed hands numerous times, and the budget and schedule were so tight that Industrial Light & Magic couldn't be used to make the special effects.
  • They tried with Star Trek: Insurrection; many observers claim this would have improved the movie. Paramount executives wanted to fix some of the film's plot holes, such as why the Designated Villains were bad guys for wanting access to a planet's miraculous healing powers, and why Picard was so intent to save a particular race of only six hundred (thus well below the threshold for avoiding dangerous inbreeding).
• As Star Wars takes heavy inspiration from Japanese culture, George Lucas originally wanted Toshiro Mifune to play Obi-Wan Kenobi but 20th Century Studios allegedly shot the idea down as they thought his thick accent would be too hard for Western audiences to understand. Mifune was offered the role for Darth Vader however, but turned it down as sci-fi wasn't a well-respected genre at the time and he thought he'd be doing his culture a disservice. He later regretted turning down the roles, which could have allowed him to define the nature of the Jedi in that landmark film franchise and cultural touchstone.
• Street Fighter (1994): Early on, Steven E. de Souza decided that they should only include seven fighters from the game in order to avoid having a messy story and bloated cast. The representatives from Capcom initially agreed, but reneged on their promise and forced him to include nearly the entire roster, causing the core cast to balloon from seven to fifteen,^note Fei Long was the only one of the 16 playable characters in Super Street Fighter II that wasn't in the film which doesn't even take into account supporting roles or Canon Foreigners. Also, Capcom really wanted de Souza to cast Japanese actor Kenya Sawada as Ryu, despite the fact that the director was looking for a comedic actor with better English-language skills. The character of Captain Sawada was created as a compromise, causing the cast to bloat even further.
• A Streetcar Named Desire had a fair amount of this going on during production. Some of the jazzy, brass-heavy music was deemed "too suggestive" and re-scored with strings. The ending was also changed, to show Stella leaving Stanley after he rapes Blanche. Blanche's monologue about her husband was also toyed with, making it nearly impossible to realize he was homosexual if you hadn't read or seen the play and ruining his motivation for killing himself. These changes were mandated by The Hays Code; a Director's Cut 40 years later would make up for it.
• The Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie was originally a Disney production. Disney wanted a more fantasy-based production, but they were in a hole early when they were forced to fire director Greg Beeman after spending $10 million in just six months. They scrambled for nearly a year before finally hiring Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel (of Max Headroom fame) — the only directors interested in it. They told the new writers to strictly limit new action scenes or anything requiring special effects; they were ignored, resulting in two rewrites before filming began. Then the execs micromanaged the heck out of Morton and Jankel, deleted 20 minutes' worth of footage, and created an atrocious animated intro to make up for it. It's said that this treatment was a big reason why Nintendo refused to license its characters to Disney for its theme parks (going with Universal instead).
• After almost finishing production on Superman II, director Richard Donner was fired by producer Alexander Salkind, who wanted a lower-budget movie with more camp. The result on the franchise was disastrous. Many of the stars, including Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, refused to work with new director Richard Lester, and the third and fourth movies in the series were so critically disliked that the pseudo-reboot/sequel Superman Returns, released almost twenty years after Superman IV: The Quest For Peace, ignores them entirely.
• The production of what would eventually become Superman Returns was similarly fraught with meddling, most of it from producer Jon Peters. Kevin Smith was originally recruited to write the screenplay in 1997, but he backed out after being inundated with Peters's demands, which were bizarre, to say the least. The film as we know it didn't emerge until 2003, when Bryan Singer was handed the project and steadfastly refused to alter the mythos. Among Peters's changes:
  • He demanded that Superman not fly or wear his iconic tights, the latter on the grounds that it was "too faggy". On the other hand, he wanted the film's villain, Brainiac, to speak with a "homosexual lisp" and have a robot sidekick who would be a "gay R2-D2 with attitude".
  • His choice to play Superman was Sean Penn, on the basis of his performance in Dead Man Walking, where he had what Peters called the eyes of a "caged animal, a fucking killer".
  • He wanted Superman to be an ordinary human being who got his powers from his suit, which was itself a living being which crawled out of a tennis ball tube. Peters is said not to like comic books, which may explain why he was unaware that he had ordered Superman to be turned into Venom.
  • He wanted a fight scene between Brainiac and two polar bears. This was ridiculous enough to be parodied in Superman: The Animated Series, where Superman steals something from Brainiac, hides it in the Fortress of Solitude, and jokes that he should guard it with a polar bear.
  • He wanted a marketable space dog Team Pet, whom he described as "Chewbacca a la mode".
  • And he really wanted Superman to fight a Giant Spider. It completely befuddled Kevin Smith, who could only surmise that it was an homage to King Kong (1933). This became Peters' most infamous request; it would be parodied by the animated Superman: Doomsday, where Superman does fight a giant mechanical spider, which a bystander — resembling and voiced by Kevin Smith — calls "lame". (Superman: Birthright did the same but made it awesome.) Peters, undeterred, would bring his Giant Spider obsession to other projects, including an abortive adaptation of The Sandman (1989), before finally getting his wish in Wild Wild West.
• Tank Girl suffered badly from this according to Rachel Talalay. They fought over the film and the studio cut out a ton of stuff. Like Blade Runner, it had an opening narration tacked on (which Lori Petty hated), and the studio also insisted on removing scenes of Tank Girl in bed with Booga from the video releases. The studio interference may have been the main reason why Talalay hasn't helmed a feature film since and now mostly works in TV. Large chunks of the plot and dozens of jokes (including the ones best-loved by test audiences) were cut, and the producers kept asking, "Who is Tank Girl? What is her motivation? What is the origin story of Tank Girl?", proving that film studios only understand these movies through the lens of Batman.
  Cecil: That's like asking for the "backstory" or "motivation" of Benny Hill. It doesn't add anything to the character; it just distracts from the time when they could be doing something funny.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) was hit by executive meddling, but many of the details are still unclear. Before the movie came out it was indicated that Eric Sachs (William Finchtner's character) was going to be the Shredder. Fans of TMNT accused the film of whitewashing Shredder, a Japanese villain, and the studio forced them to do reshoots to make the Shredder a Japanese man whose face is always in shadow. As a result of these last-minute changes, the Shredder's motivation and goals in the movie are pretty much non-existent, while Eric Sachs has a much clearer motivation for being a villain.
• Terminator:
  • Averted with the original Terminator. The film's backer, Hemdale, wanted James Cameron to end the film when Reese destroys the tanker truck with the Terminator inside, completely eliminating the memorable show-off between Sarah Connor and the now-skeletal Terminator in the factory. Hemdale would have most likely succeeded had Cameron not stuck to his guns.
  • Terminator 2: Judgment Day goes to great lengths in its introduction to imply that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the bad guy again and Robert Patrick John's protector. The production crew was rather disappointed when the advertisers decided to make a point of stating outright that Arnold was the good guy in every trailer.
• That Lady in Ermine had its ending changed from the original operetta and its adaptations. Angelina was supposed to be back with her husband after her identical ancestor convinced the Colonel of an invading army to leave. Execs thought it meant Angelina got away with cheating, so the ending was changed to the marriage being annulled and Angelina and the Colonel ending up together.
• In The Thing (2011), the executives chickened out and changed many animatronic effects to the cheapest CGI they could find. That awful-looking alien tetris tower inside the otherwise well-made starship was there to hide a completed animatronic alien pilot that remained from a better ending the writers had created but would be more expensive to produce.
• Not even Those Wacky Nazis are exempt from this trope.
  • The Nazi propaganda film Der Ewige Jude ("The Eternal Jew") was envisioned by Joseph Goebbels as an understated and subtle (well, by Nazi propaganda standards) demonstrations of the "evils" of Jewry. Goebbels believed that the best propaganda was primarily entertainment and not obviously propaganda. Hitler disagreed and demanded more polemical material, including laughably crude (even for Nazis) comparisons of Jews to rats. It was a box-office flop, and some viewers fainted at the crudity. Unfortunately, Goebbels would get his way with the much more effective and successful Jud Süss.
  • Jud Süss itself is a more straightforward example. Director Veit Harlan and star Ferdinand Marian hoped to make something more nuanced than standard Nazi propaganda; however, little of their attempted complexity survived Goebbels' micromanagement. Notably, the film initially climaxed with Süss providing a Motive Rant explaining his villainy as a reaction to lifelong antisemitism. Unsurprisingly, Goebbels ordered the scene cut, feeling it made Süss too sympathetic.
  • The same thing happened with Triumph of the Will but in reverse. Nazi officials (including Goebbels, though for reasons of personal rivalry with Leni Riefenstahl) complained there wasn't enough propaganda in it. Hitler, however, allowed Riefenstahl to make the movie her way, creating the classic propaganda movie of the era. On Triumph and her subsequent films, Riefenstahl had Auteur License, where most other German filmmakers were answerable to Goebbels.
• THX 1138: Warner Bros. inexplicably cut 5 minutes from the original theatrical release, much to the displeasure of George Lucas, who has stated that "Whether it's five minutes shorter or longer, it didn't change the movie one bit". WB did reinstate the cut footage when they rereleased the film in 1977 for obvious reasons.
• The producers of Times Square tried to remove the original cut's lesbian content and added songs so that the soundtrack would be a double album. Director Allan Moyle resisted and was fired. The deleted footage is apparently lost.
• Because of Sam Witwicky's mother going on pot-induced escapades and humiliations during Sam's tour of the campus in Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, both Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania forbade Michael Bay from stating the name of the college. Because of this, the college was also subject to Where the Hell Is Springfield?.
• Tremors had some positive meddling regarding the casting. The studio suggested that Michael Gross, then a household name due to Family Ties, should play Burt Gummer. The crew was worried, as this would be Playing Against Type for Gross, but Gross did so well in the role that he made the character an Ensemble Dark Horse and even took over the franchise starting from the third film. Similarly, the studio also suggested casting country singer Reba McEntire as Burt's wife Heather, who had never acted in a movie before; she was successful enough in the role to launch her own acting career.
  • Originally, the filmmakers wanted no hint of a monster in the film until the road workers were killed to preserve the mystery and suggest that a regular person was responsible for the murders. But the studio wanted to market the film as a monster movie, and thus demanded more onscreen kills before the big reveal. The filmmakers were forced to go back and add in two new scenes: one where Rhonda is unknowingly stalked by a Graboid as she heads back to her truck, as well as the death of a new character named Old Fred. This is another example of positive meddling, as these scenes add to the sense of mounting danger without spoiling the big reveal later on.
  • Most of the original score composed by Ernest Troost (which can be found on the soundtrack album) went unused due to the studio deciding that it was "too goofy." They instead hired Robert Folk to compose a new score which was more serious and action-oriented. While the final film would use a combination of the two scores, Folk ultimately went uncredited for his work.
  • After the working title Land Sharks was abandoned due to the existence of Saturday Night Live's popular Land Shark character, the film was retitled Beneath Perfection. However, Universal chairman Tom Pollack had the title changed yet again to Tremors in an attempt to capitalise on a recent series of earthquakes in Japan.
  • The original Graboid design had the worms cover their heads with a protective fleshy casing. However, Universal thought this made the design look too phallic, and ordered for it to be changed.
  • However, one instance of meddling which the filmmakers resisted was regarding the origin of the Graboids. In the script it was never explained, so Universal asked screenwriters Brent Maddock and S.S. Wilson to write a scene where Burt would find a UFO containing Graboid eggs. They obliged and pitched it to the crew, only for everyone to agree that it was terrible, so it was left out. It would later be explained in the sequel that Graboids are indeed from Earth (or have at least existed there for a long time, possibly over a billion years), with a Graboid fossil dating back to the Precambrian era.
• The TV Set discusses this trope. A fellow whose brother has just committed suicide wants to make a thoughtful Dramedy TV show that would serve as a fictional account of their relationship, and a way of coming to terms with suicide in general. A particularly pushy executive gets involved, and it gets turned into a Lowest Common Denominator comedy called Call Me Crazy! Oh, and does the brother have to commit suicide?

  Lenny: "Suicide is depressing to, like, 82% of people!"

• The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent gained some humor after Lionsgate presidents told the writers that the comedy would benefit from additional gags, when Nick and Javi begin brainstorming their screenplay. This resulted in a sequence of the duo sharing some LSD to come up with ideas, then becoming increasingly paranoid of their surroundings, allowing Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal more opportunities for Chewing the Scenery and slapstick. In the DVD Commentary, the writers look back on this as an instance of executives improving the final film.
• According to the commentary on the extended edition DVD, the creative team behind Underworld was pressured by the studio to keep Viktor a sympathetic character throughout, and have Lucian be a straight villain. One wonders what would have happened in such a movie, since that would have negated the story and the bulk of the action. The writing and directing team luckily prevailed, keeping the revelation of Lucian as a sympathetic figure and Viktor as a lying murderous jerk.
• The Watcher in the Woods was a major victim of Executive Meddling:
  • Disney thought that the film's original screenplay, written by Brian Clemens, was too intense. They hired their own people to revise it. They also cut 20 minutes off the film's run time and changed the opening credits sequence from its original, much darker incarnation.
  • The original ending was to have the Watcher appear and take the heroine to his spaceship, which contained the girl who was haunting the heroine throughout the film. However, Disney wanted to rush the film's release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the acting career of Bette Davis, who played the girl's mother. The scenes involving the spaceship weren't finished at the time, so they were left out of the film, and the ending became unintelligible. Rather than finish the special effects shots required for the film's intended ending, Disney put in a new ending in which the Watcher is now a pillar of light (instead of an insectoid alien), with the events of the missing girl's disappearance and the Watcher's presence being explained by the heroine's younger sister (who is possessed by the Watcher).
  • Disney also fought Anchor Bay's attempt to restore the original cut on the DVD; they did eventually allow a release with a rough cut of the never-filmed ending shown as an "alternate ending", along with a second "alternate ending" meant to approximate the original cut's ending. Both endings would eventually appear on the Disney DVD version of the film.
• Blake Edwards reluctantly consented to MGM cutting 24 minutes from his film Wild Rovers in return for a promise that the studio wouldn't interfere with his next film. Instead, the studio started meddling with The Carey Treatment while it was being filmed, resulting in a film that Edwards did everything to disown and whose screenwriters hid behind a collective pseudonym.
• The original ending to The Witches (1990) was more in line with Roald Dahl's original story. However, this ending did poorly with test audiences, so a new ending where Luke is turned back into a boy, with the same thing implied to have happened with Bruno was inserted, much to Dahl's utter dismay.
• In The Wizard of Oz's original script, Oz was a real place that Dorothy had really visited. Executives thought that audiences would be too "sophisticated" to accept a fantasy land like Oz (in odd contrast to today's mentality), thus enforcing the famous All Just a Dream ending. They also tried to cut the song "Over the Rainbow" just because they didn't like the idea of their star singing in a farmyard.
• The reason why the prologue for The Wolfman (2010) is so short and why a good chunk of character development and establishment are left out is because the execs thought the audience would want more Wolfman and less storytelling. The Director's Cut reinserts many of the removed scenes.
• The World Is Not Enough had an ending early in production featuring a poignant scene in which James Bond visits a mental hospital to cheer up Fallen Princess Elektra King, who has been institutionalized to treat her Stockholm Syndrome. This was nixed for unknown reasons, and replaced with a much less satisfying comedic ending featuring very bad puns and Dr. Christmas Jones.
• In the lead-in to World War II, mulitple Hollywood executives and censors were extremely leery about offending Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, albeit less for political reasons than fear of losing these lucrative markets:
  • For The Life of Émile Zola, Jack Warner personally ordered producers to cut references to Alfred Dreyfus's Judaism and French anti-Semitism. (The only acknowledgment is a brief close-up of Dreyfus's military record, listing his religion as "Jew.")
  • Warner also took Blockade, a Spanish Civil War epic, and excised all references to fascism.
  • This continued even after the war began; censor Joseph Breen tried to ban Fritz Lang's film Man Hunt as a "hate film" for depicting a near-assassination of Adolf Hitler. In this case, Fox studio head Daryl Zanuck sided with Lang and the film was released intact.
  • The book An Empire Of Their Own, which chronicles the rise of Hollywood by German and Eastern European Jewish studio magnates, documents the refusal of some portions of Hollywood to "make nice". While some German Jews ranking as film execs or studio owners were carefully walking the line about not criticizing anti-semitism, the Eastern European Jews running their own large studios in Hollywood were adamant on not just bringing German anti-semitism to the fore, but also highlighting the American Fascist Party and their brownshirt march through New York.
  • This even hit Casablanca. The rightfully legendary scene where the patrons of Rick's Cafe drown out Strasser and his Nazis in an epic Battle of the Bands was originally meant to be more pointed against the Nazis. The song used on the German side as filmed was Die Wacht am Rhein, a pre-Nazi marching anthem. The song that was intended was Das Horst-Wessel-Lied, the de-facto second national anthem of Nazi Germany and the official Nazi Party anthem. Warners vetoed the use of the song due to the fact that it was still under copyright to the Nazi Party. This meant that if Warner Brothers wanted to market the film in neutral countries (for obvious reasons, the Allied nations weren't in a mood to respect Schicklgruber's copyright claims on their own turf) they could have been put in the absurd position of being compelled to pay royalties to the enemy!
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Fox executive Tom Rothman didn't like the Darker and Edgier direction director Gavin Hood was going with the movie, forcing so many rewrites that portions of the screenplay were rewritten even after filming had started. He also decided that Deadpool, a Medium Aware Ensemble Dark Horse in the comics who can't shut up, should only make a brief appearance before his mouth gets sewn shut, obviating any reason for people to want to see him. The reaction to that one was so negative that even after Rothman left, no other execs were confident about Deadpool's theatrical success; the eventual Deadpool (2016) movie was a pleasant surprise on that front.
  • Deadpool (2016) had its working budget cut by Fox, from $65 million to $58 million dollars, right before the film was about to start production. Tim Miller admitted that this helped the film's pacing, and led to some action scenes being cut, as well as introducing a Running Gag of Deadpool forgetting his duffel bag. The film also makes fun of only two mutants being around in the X-Mansion due to the limited budget:
    Deadpool: It's a big house. It's weird I only ever see the two of you. Almost like the studio couldn't afford another X-Man.
• In-universe example in The Pentagon Wars. The film is about the incompetent development of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, where the top brass change their minds several times over what features and performance they want the vehicle to have. This causes Development Hell and budget overruns, and eventually, it gets to the point where they criticise features they previously requested i.e demanding a tall turret (so it can double as a scout) and a big gun and then complaining that it makes the vehicle look like a tank (which will encourage the enemy to target it first as it is the biggest threat).
  'Designer: Do you want me to put a sign on it in fifty languages saying, "I am a troop carrier, not a tank, please don't shoot at me"?
• The Trip (1967) was not originally intended as an anti-drug movie, but American International Pictures insisted on an Opening Scroll warning viewers of the dangers of taking LSD, as well as a Freeze-Frame Ending of Paul's face shattering, symbolizing his broken and traumatized mind. This completely conflicts with the rest of the movie, which makes taking LSD look incredibly fun and has nothing to suggest that Paul was harmed by his trip.
• While he had an Auteur License, Alfred Hitchcock sometimes dealt with the studios insisting on having one of their contract players in a prominent role. Ruth Roman in Strangers on a Train and John Gavin in Psycho were both cast in this manner over his objections, and there was some Hostility on the Set as a result.