Only a select few screenwriters, like Quentin Tarantino or Greta Gerwig, have the clout to keep their scripts intact on their journey to the big screen. The average jobbing Hollywood writer doesn’t have that privilege. Once they sell their work to a studio, that studio is free to rip it to shreds and completely change the tone or the ending or the characterization if they think it’ll make the movie more profitable.
Some of the most popular and beloved movies ever made started out with a wildly different script that got majorly rewritten along the way, from Pretty Woman’s origins as a dark drama to Beverly Hills Cop’s origins as a Sylvester Stallone actioner.
Ghostbusters
When Dan Aykroyd first conceived the Ghostbusters, they were called Ghost Smashers and they wore S.W.A.T. gear and traveled across time and space to battle huge, monstrous apparitions. Director Ivan Reitman significantly scaled back the story to be set entirely in New York.
The team’s name, costumes, and social standing were changed, and the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man was the only big ghostly villain that survived from the first draft. Plus, Zeddemore’s role was massively cut down after Eddie Murphy lost interest in playing the part.
Pretty Woman
In its final form, Pretty Woman is a lighthearted romantic comedy about a wealthy man played by Richard Gere who falls for a prostitute played by Julia Roberts and they live happily ever after. Along with When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman is credited with revitalizing the rom-com genre.
But the movie’s original script wasn’t a comedy. It was a dark drama entitled $3,000 in which Vivian was hooked on drugs. At the end of the movie, she and her friend leave on a bus for Disneyland.
Daredevil
The Ben Affleck-starring Daredevil movie is remembered as one of the worst comic book blockbusters ever made. But it was originally written as a darker, grittier, more grounded movie.
Fox executives sunk their hooks into the movie and filled it with generic CGI effects and out-of-place humor in an attempt to emulate Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, which had become a box office smash during Daredevil’s production. Sadly, the perfect tone for Spider-Man was a bad tone for Daredevil.
Monsters, Inc.
Pete Docter’s original pitch for Monsters, Inc. revolved around a 30-year-old accountant who’s stuck in a rut and stumbles upon some drawings of monsters he did as a kid. Then, the monsters come to life and follow him to work and on dates, and it’s revealed that they represent the childhood fears he never conquered.
It’s an interesting story, but the final version of Monsters, Inc. with Billy Crystal and John Goodman is an untouchable masterpiece, and one of Pixar’s finest works.
Beverly Hills Cop
In its earliest stages of development, Beverly Hills Cop was meant to be a straight action movie with dark themes and gritty violence. Sylvester Stallone was tapped to write and star.
When the producers were unhappy with Stallone’s script and decided to retool the project as a comedic vehicle for Eddie Murphy, Stallone turned his script into Cobra.
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
After finishing Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Steven Spielberg began working on a horror-tinged sequel entitled Night Skies. It revolved around a band of ten evil aliens, led by Scar, coming to Earth and killing cattle. Only one of these aliens wasn’t evil: Buddy, who is left behind by his fellow aliens and befriends a young boy.
Spielberg scrapped the evil aliens after realizing it was a xenophobic premise and just kept the concept of Buddy, making him the lead character in a new script called E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.
Fatal Attraction
At the end of Fatal Attraction, Dan’s obsessive one-time lover Alex is killed at the hands of Dan’s wife. This is a cathartic, satisfying ending, but it wasn’t the conclusion in the original script. Initially, Alex killed herself at the end. She got Dan’s fingerprints on the knife, so he was arrested after her death.
Glenn Close much preferred this ending because it was ripped straight from the history of film noir and spoke to Alex’s obsession. However, test audiences hated it, so the studio changed it.
Hancock
The offbeat Will Smith-starring superhero comedy Hancock has a promising first act that introduces a hard-drinking drifter with incredible superpowers, but it devolves into crowd-pleasing drivel in the second and third acts. This is the result of studio meddling.
The original script by Vincent Ngo was called Tonight, He Comes. Ngo was a big Superman fan and wanted to upend the character by creating a Superman figure who was a suicidal alcoholic. Unfortunately, that script got lightened up on the way to the big screen.
The Truman Show
Director Peter Weir reportedly made Andrew Niccol write 24 drafts of the script for The Truman Show before he was happy with it. Niccol’s original script, The Malcolm Show, was a dark sci-fi thriller set in a sprawling metropolis.
However, Weir wanted a lighter tone. The setting was changed to a small seaside town and a lot of the script’s darkest scenes — like one involving an attempted sexual assault that Truman decides to ignore — were cut.
Star Wars
George Lucas’ original 1977 Star Wars movie went through plenty of different characters and storylines between its initial conception and its final draft. For starters, the original title was much, much longer: Adventures of the Starkiller as taken from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars.
In the original draft of the script, the hero was female, Han was a green-skinned alien with gills, Obi-Wan survived to the end, there was a character named “Mace Windy,” Darth Vader was a bounty hunter, and C-3PO and Wedge Antilles blew up the Death Star.