5 Iconic Movies That Weren't The Director's First Choice

Again, this was 1991, so this massive studio didn't know that 1) Comic books can make for GREAT movies, 2) They'll eventually make for ALL movies by 2019, and 3) They'd be bought out and absorbed by Disney. But Raimi was probably pretty used to letdowns like that. He'd only made Darkman in the first place because he couldn't get the rights to the 1930s pulp hero the Shadow. And apparently he made a bid to replace Tim Burton on the Batman films before Joel Schumacher burst through the wall with his McDonald's sponsorship. But in the end, it would all work out. Raimi would go on to direct two awesome Spider-Man films and one that people write "Is it ACTUALLY good?" thinkpieces about. It's every director's dream!

Scorsese found doing the concentration camp scenes troubling, and Spielberg "wasn't in the mood" to make a movie in which Robert De Niro strangles Joe Don Baker while the latter, in a scene that's haunted me since childhood, drinks a cocktail of Jim Beam whiskey and fucking Pepto Bismol.

And so they decided to simply switch movies, because apparently you can do that when you're the two biggest American directors working. The rest is history: Spielberg won all of those awards, and we got to see De Niro beat the hell out of Nick Nolte for like the entire third act of a movie. Equal trade, I'd say.

Related: How 8 Great Movies Would Be Even Better With A New Director

But no worries, as Jackson had other irons in the fire. He was helping to shepherd a young director named Neill Blomkamp in making an adaptation of the game Halo, using his own production company. That's a film that would certainly allow for Jackson's trademarks of elaborate fantasy universes and making shitloads of money. But there was a problem: All of the production companies behind the film (20th Century Fox, Universal, and Microsoft) couldn't decide what they wanted to do with it. And because you can't really tell a billionaire executive "Hey, that would be a disgrace to both the game and storytelling itself," most of the blame fell on Blomkamp.

Eventually, the project sank under the weight of everyone grasping for control of it, and the Jackson/Blomkamp team moved on to District 9, an alien action thriller with heavy political messages about apartheid. And some of those guns that you see in District 9, like the assault rifle? Apparently those are just models that were developed for the Halo film, but painted white. So if you watch District 9 and you squint reeeeeeeeally hard, maybe you can still get a Halo movie out of it after all.

Related: 5 Reasons Great Directors Eventually Make A Bad Movie

Suddenly, audiences weren't into hip new portrayals of early 19th-century warfare, so everyone Kubrick had in mind to finance his epic dipped out. And so he made another historical drama, Barry Lyndon, instead, and had to settle for the conciliatory prize of some Oscars and an eventual spot in the Criterion Collection. But have you ever seen Barry Lyndon? Probably more of you than have ever seen Waterloo, but still. It wasn't exactly a Star War.

In the mid '70s, Kubrick had also planned to make a movie about the Holocaust, but that was initially shelved when the writer he approached admitted that he didn't "know the first thing" about the Holocaust, which might be a problem for such a project. Kubrick figured it was finally time to seek something more commercial. In that decade, with Jaws, The Exorcist, Halloween, and The Driller Killer, few things seemed as hot as horror, so he eventually landed on making The Shining, which was successful enough. Basically, an entire decade of Kubrick's career, one in which he made two bona fide classics that people still treasure to this day, only occurred because he never got a shot at Napoleon.

Related: 5 Ways Modern Movie Directing Has Changed (For The Worse)

Warner Bros. probably faxed back "Fucking NO" after reading that little tidbit, and so Lynch and his creative partner Mark Frost were left movie-less. But Lynch's agent told him that he should try doing a TV show. More specifically, a show about "America -- your vision of America the same way you demonstrated it in Blue Velvet." And considering that the most famous scene in Blue Velvet has Dean Stockwell singing Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" into a lamp while Dennis Hopper does a speedrun of every human emotion in the corner, Lynch knew EXACTLY what the agent meant by that.

Lynch and Frost pitched Twin Peaks to ABC, using the central concept of a popular young woman who dies under mysterious circumstances that even Lynch will say is pretty much based on Marilyn Monroe. The show would go on to become a cult classic, even though ABC got through the first season and was like "ENOUGH WITH THE ART PROJECT, LYNCH. WHO DID THE KILLING?" So the story of a movie that ended with a studio not wanting to know who did a murder ended with a TV show losing ratings because executives absolutely had to know who did a murder.

Daniel Dockery is a writer and editor for Cracked. He's on Twitter, which is kinda neat.

For more, check out Proof JJ Abrams Doesn't Understand Star Wars:

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