8 Absurdly Bad Ideas Studios Almost Forced Into Great Movies

When The Walking Dead burst on the scene with its slow-burn character development and gruesome zombie kills, the show quickly became a head-smashing success. Viewers would eventually become frustrated with its oft-repeating formula, but it could have been way, way worse. Like, NBC worse.

Let's just say this was almost more than a parody.

At the time the series premiered in 2010, zombies were considered a dying fad, like superheroes or Pokemon. So networks agreed to snatch up the promising script as long as there weren't any of those pesky brain-eating corpses running around. Refusing to allow his zombie comic adaptation to continue without, you know, zombies, series creator Robert Kirkman kept shopping around his script, looking for someone with the guts to leave the horror element intact. (All these puns are totally accidental, incidentally.)

Finally, Kirkman found a home ... at NBC. The Peacock was unafraid of the zombie-centric script, but still had a few ideas of their own. Not content with their already procedural-laden lineup, the network suggested Deputy Sheriff Grimes continue his crimefighting ways after the dawn of the zombie apocalypse. Instead of rounding up deadly survivors and supply thieves, Rick and co. would solve a zombie-related crime every week.

AMC Studios

We're betting it wouldn't have taken long before "Huh, this one got eaten by a zombie too -- case closed" got horrifyingly boring. Maybe they could have mixed things up with zombie grand larceny or tax evasion?

The writers complied, but star Ryan Reynolds put up such a passionate (and public) fight that the studio eventually caved for good, allowing the original R-rated script to move forward ... for as little money as possible.

Clearly still reeling from the millions of preteen dollars sacrificed by the grown-up script, Fox decided to cut their losses, right along with the film's budget, to the tune of $7 million. Right at the beginning of shooting. The crew had to scramble to find adjust their sudden lack of money while preserving the action they felt was necessary to the plot. So mansions are only ever seen from the front doorstep, and the guns are forgotten right before the Big Epic Battle, all while Deadpool snarks about how very inexpensive this all is.

20th Century Fox

After yo-yoing the ratings and screwing with the budget, Fox had one more request to make, but it was a doozy. They wanted the movie to be linear. Meaning that, instead of being a fun action romp with manageable doses of darkness and sadness peppered throughout (the flashbacks), this would have been a downer movie about a guy who gets cancer, gets tortured, stalks his girlfriend for a while, and finally descends into dick jokes and revenge. Fortunately, the studio reconsidered, presumably after Deadpool himself leapt out of a screen and threatened to shoot them in the balls.

But Cuaron had a vision. All he wanted to make was a goddamn movie about astronauts trying to fall back to Earth without burning up, and those silly cliches had nothing to do with that. So he ignored the daily barrage of studio notes and went about making his movie the way he intended: basic, tense, emotional, and with precisely the right amount of Clooney face.

Warner Bros. Pictures

The result: seven freaking Oscars. Hope Cuaron remembered to thank the executives in his speeches.

One of the most popular book series to come out of Britain in the past ... ever, Harry Potter was destined to bask in the glorious pedigree of its British actors and locations. Warner Brothers, naturally, fought this every step of the way. The studio wanted to Americanize the material to maximize profits on their home soil. Because kids couldn't possibly be expected to focus on the tale of a powerful wizard child and his magical friends when strange and foreign phrases such as "blimey" and "smashing" came flying out of their mouths.

Warner Bros. Pictures

J.K. Rowling wasn't exactly thrilled ... but still, a hamfisted love letter to America is hard to pass up when goddamn Stephen Spielberg wants to direct the film version of your books. Unless, that is, Steve wants to mash a bunch of those books together into one animated abomination starring that punk Sixth Sense kid. Then you pass on it hard.

Warner Bros. Pictures

And pass Rowling did. Thanks to her artistic integrity, the series was able to retain its British charm, and the world was introduced to Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and, you know, others. Meanwhile, Spielberg took his obsession with Osment with him to film A.I., which was the last major movie the poor kid ever really starred in. Bloody hell.

Two of the movie's actors had extensive exposure to authentic Jamaican accents -- one through his work in reggae music and the other from being half-Jamaican and listening to his dad talk all day. The two would deliver their lines flawlessly, perfectly portraying the nationality of the characters they were hired to play. Disney, of course, did not approve of this. After hearing them, the studio would call up the actors and tell them to try being less accurate and lose the accent. But not all the way. Make it like Aladdin!

Seeing through Disney's blatant racism, the actors decided to keep the accents, but compromised by making them a bit less pronounced. It's a miracle they didn't turn the damn bobsleds into giggle-powered candyfloss chariots invented by Gyro Gearloose and Gadget the mouse.

Aside from the frequently vague critiques about the movie being dull, confusing, and overall not good, the executives spent the most of their time hating the voiceover -- a thing they had insisted on adding in the first place, against Scott's wishes. They hated it so much that it moved them to wonder if the actor -- nay, the entire crew -- were high as a kite during filming.

Warner Bros.

Scott was happy to drop the voiceover ... until the execs went, "Hey, you know what this movie needs? A voiceover." According to Harrison Ford, everyone had agreed the best version of the film was sans narrator, but at some point, the studio had a change of heart and demanded the voiceover be put back in. Ford was forced to perform the narration against his better judgement, which angered him deeply. You can guess how that will affect the plot of the sequel.

Back To The Future was a monster hit which smashed barriers to combine teen comedy, action/adventure, time travel, and a pinch of incest. You would think such a broad variety of themes would have protected the film from being labeled a "genre" stereotype, but that's exactly what Universal Pictures president Sid Sheinberg was sure the flick would be seen as.

His solution? Renaming the movie Space Man From Pluto. A title you may recognize as being 1) not at all related to the premise of the movie, 2) distinctly "genre," and 3) dumb as fuck.

Universal Pictures

Despite those small details, Sheinberg had a plan for how to justify the name: Shoehorn those words into the script wherever possible. The scene in which Marty visits his sleeping father to deliver a message as Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan? Now Marty's a spaceman from the planet Pluto. George McFly's sci-fi book series? Call it Space Man From Pluto. Random bits of dialogue where people call Marty things other than "space man from Pluto"? Make it so they call him "space man from Pluto" (for some reason). It's brilliant! And should anyone notice that the new name does indeed sound like a hack sci-fi flick title, pshaw! Sheinberg feels differently, and that should be enough.

Universal Pictures

Thankfully, Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis ignored the idea. (Spielberg went one further and thanked Sheinberg for such a rip-roaring "joke memo.") We're guessing Sheinberg is still suggesting the same title to every period drama, sports movie, and Truman Capote biopic he comes across, but no one's bitten yet. One day, Sid.

Carolyn sometimes tweets about movies on Twitter.

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