14 Movies and TV Shows That Ate Another Franchise’s Scraps
Quentin Tarantino wrote an entire novel about one of his own characters, then realized it should just be a different movie.
‘The Ocean Liner Going on the Beach and Stuff’ Cinematic Universe
Speed was such a massive hit that Fox entertained hundreds of pitches for other stuff that could go real fast while Keanu Reeves falls in love. The idea that made the cut for Speed 2: Cruise Control ended up being some scraps from a proposed sequel to Die Hard. Director John McTiernan said, “The ocean liner going on the beach and stuff? That’s what we’d written for Die Hard,” and frankly I believe that’s exactly how it was written in the script.
‘Die Hard With a Vengeance’ Lived Several Lives Before It Even Started Production
It all started with a spec script for a sequel to Brandon Lee’s Rapid Fire, but after Lee tragically died, it was reimagined as Lethal Weapon 4. Mel Gibson wasn’t in the mood to turn his threequel into a fourquel just yet, so Fox got ahold of the script and turned it into a Die Hard.
Django Ruined His Own Sequel
Tarantino was so impressed with his own work, he wrote a sequel novel to Django Unchained. But he realized there was one core issue: “You know what’s wrong with this piece? Django. Django’s got to go.” He turned Django into Major Marquis Warren, Samuel L. Jackson’s character in The Hateful Eight.
‘Evan Almighty’ Was Its Own Weird Idea
Producers were licking their chops to cash in on the massive success of Bruce Almighty the moment it started making money. But when Jim Carrey killed that dream by opting out of a sequel, they shopped around for Biblical hijinks to throw Steve Carell into. They picked up a script called The Passion of the Ark.
‘Snow Day’ Was Supposed to Be a ‘Pete and Pete’ Movie
Pete and Pete: The Movie was one of the first ideas to go through the Nickelodeon Movies pipeline in 1995, but movies like Harriet the Spy and The Rugrats Movie got pushed into production first. The script languished for just a bit too long — when interest was revived, the Petes were too old to play their younger selves. It was reworked into 2000’s Snow Day.
An Entire Monster Cinematic Universe Fizzled Down to ‘The Invisible Man’
The 2017 Tom Cruise vehicle The Mummy was supposed to usher in an MCU-esque supergroup of a bunch of random crap that Universal could get the rights to. There were going to be spin-offs and team-ups of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, Dracula and even Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, but The Mummy bombed and everyone walked away in shame. The story finally became the extremely low-budget 2020 movie The Invisible Man, which to its credit turned $7 million into $145 million.
‘Ghosts of Mars’ Was Supposed to Be a Great Escape
After escaping from New York and then L.A., Snake Plissken was supposed to Escape from Earth. But when L.A. was a commercial flop, John Carpenter took that script and turned it into its own thing, 2001’s Ghosts of Mars.
‘Minority Report’ Was Supposed to Be Part of the Phillip K. Dick-Iverse
Total Recall is based on a short story by Phillip K. Dick, called “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” When someone else came along and wrote a movie based on his short story “The Minority Report,” it made perfect sense to make it a sequel. But Total Recall’s studio went bankrupt, and the story floated around for a while before it finally landed in Steven Spielberg’s hands.
‘Saw’ and ‘Saw II’ Were a Bizarre Instance of Parallel Thinking
Writer Darren Bousman got some of the worst news imaginable when someone read a script of his called The Desperate — someone else had already made a movie with nearly the same premise. In his words, “They are just so similar, bleak and disgusting.” But he later got better news than he could have ever imagined, when he was tapped to direct the highly anticipated sequel to the smash hit, using his original idea.
‘Colombiana’ Was a Sequel to ‘Leon: The Professional’
Once Leon: The Professional started taking off, Luc Besson got right to work on a sequel focussed on Natalie Portman’s character, Mathilda. But the company that owned the rights to the film threw up roadblocks, and it would be 17 years before the movie once called Mathilda would resurface as Colombiana.
‘Solace’ Was Supposed to Be a ‘Se7en’ Sequel
New Line Cinema was on board to produce a sequel to Se7en, called Ei8ht, but David Fincher was less enthusiastic: “I would have less interest in that than I would in having cigarettes put out in my eyes.” The film they bought became 2015’s Solace.
‘A Quiet Place’ Was Supposed to Be a ‘Cloverfield’
The writers of the movie that eventually became A Quiet Place were originally trying to sell it to movie execs as an installment of the Cloverfield franchise. Someone at Paramount saw its potential as a standalone film, and it blossomed into its own franchise.
‘The Following’ Was Supposed to Be a ‘Scream’
Scream creator Kevin Williamson wrote films number one, two and four in the Scream franchise. He had a Scream 3 idea all ready to go, and when that didn’t pan out, he turned it into the crime thriller The Following.
A Bastardized ‘Men in Black’ Film Became a Different Bastardized ‘Men in Black’ Film
Sony had a grand plan to mash 21 Jump Street together with Men in Black for MIB 23, which would have featured Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum instead of Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones. The good news is: It never got made. The bad news is: They later made Men in Black: International, starring Chris Hemsworth and Tessa Thompson hot off their successful turns in Thor: Ragnarok.
