What "can't miss" movies actually missed?

January 8, 2008 5:10 AM

What "can't miss" movies actually missed? I need help coming up with a list of movies that have been "Hollywood-ized". A promising film with a great story gets transformed into something worse during the film making process. Such as the ending gets changed, an obvious mis-cast of key characters, poor editing, whatever. I would like to keep the list of movies contemporary (within the last 25 years or so) Explanations for each movie listed is encouraged.
posted by unceman to Media & Arts (72 answers total)

Most crappy film adaptations of well-written novels fall into this category, i.e. The Golden Compass. Your question's a bit vague and covers an enormous number of films. Could you be more specific?
posted by Ndwright at 5:23 AM on January 8, 2008

I'd nominate I Robot. Replace strong female lead with invented male character. Replace Asimov's thoughtful look at what makes us human with the bog-standard "technology is evil and will kill us all" idiocy. Result? Big-budget schlock.

Starship Troopers suffered a similar hack job. Rather than a discussion of civil duty in a time of war, we got Space 90210 with giant bugs.

I think Ndwright is on the money, though. The other movies I could think of are all badly adapted novels.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:30 AM on January 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

Johnny Mnemonic. Great William Gibson short story... not sure what happened with the screen play, as apparently he was responsible for that, too.
posted by Coventry at 5:31 AM on January 8, 2008

Garth at Dark Horizons created his Worst Films of 2007 List based on the notion that "these titles ... had more opportunity to succeed, in some cases they had everything going for them" but ended up being terrible.
posted by puritycontrol at 5:32 AM on January 8, 2008

The recent Hitchhiker's Guide is a classic example. They threw out most of the original dialogue, which was great, and replaced it with crap. Sometimes they kept setups and threw out punchlines (the Vogon poetry scene, for example). They gave Arthur a Hollywood-type character arc--learning to be confident and assertive in order to impress the girl, etc., etc.--and didn't even follow it consistently: not 5 seconds after the scene in which he finally stands up to the bully, he's reduced to a quivering coward who won't follow his friends through a teleportation device, merely because they couldn't think up a better way to separate him from the group. Ford goes off by himself on John Malkovich's planet, requiring an extra minute or so of establishing shots, just so he can deliver a single really bad joke. And that's just the changes that actually hurt the movie; if you're counting any kind of change at all, there were even more drastic ones, like making Trillian dumb and having the meaning of life be some crap about falling in love, rather than 42 (as was previously thought).
posted by equalpants at 5:54 AM on January 8, 2008 [4 favorites]

I was just going to post Hitchhiker's Guide. It had a lot of hype and interest and classic books behind it and a good cast and talk of sequels. Then it came around and everyone went, "eh, it was alright I guess, nothing special", and it faded away.
posted by smackfu at 5:56 AM on January 8, 2008

V for Vendetta... which managed to completely miss out of the whole point of the original graphic novel, not even mentioning the word 'anarchy' never mind entering into any discussion into it.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 6:04 AM on January 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Well, the Vanishing was a terrific Dutch movie which, when brought to Hollywood, had the ending changed such that it's a disaster. No spoilers, but part of what made the original Dutch movie great was the courage of the film-maker in terms of how it all resolves. Not what Hollywood is famous for.
posted by cloudscratcher at 6:20 AM on January 8, 2008

Seconding "every adaptation made in Hollywood." This is what they do. They take promising material and turn it into easily-digested cliché.
posted by desuetude at 6:21 AM on January 8, 2008

The Lawnmower Man. It was so different from the original that Stephen King successfully sued the makers of the film to make them remove his name from the movie.
posted by Memo at 6:22 AM on January 8, 2008

Hook- good cast, a good story but what an awful movie.
posted by bkeene12 at 6:23 AM on January 8, 2008

Wings of Desire (german film) becomes....City of Angels.
Casablanca becomes....Barb Wire
posted by filmgeek at 6:25 AM on January 8, 2008

i'm sorry to Nth this, but "hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy also annoyed me. The death knell in its coffin was the latest nokia video phone floating past the camera when he gets whisked away in probability drive ship. not only a crass advert crow-barred into a film, but if they wrote that Arthur Dent had the latest video phone, they clearly had no idea what kind of character he was. Had they read the books? or did someone just tell them that it was a "wacky space adventure". arseholes.

i love this question. i love leaving the cinema, boring the hell out of people with my knowledge of what happened in the book and how they totally ruined it blah blah blah.
posted by galactain at 6:26 AM on January 8, 2008

Best answer: Bonfire of the Vanities is so notorious I think there's even a book about it. Based on a bestselling and critically lauded novel by a much-beloved author, a cast of stars, etc. Total, Ishtar-level failure.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:26 AM on January 8, 2008

Or the Matrix sequels being another classic fuck-up. If would have had to watch the last movie in a theater without access to a skip button I would have god damned killed myself.

And Verhoevens adaptation of Starship Troopers is pure genius and even then, any movie in which Michael Ironside gets dismembered is automatically great.

The AvP movies are great examples of how you can take something great and turn it to complete shit as well.
posted by uandt at 6:30 AM on January 8, 2008

Best answer: The shitty american remakes of other countries films list wouldn't be complete without mentioning La Femme Nikita and it's super lame american version - Point of No Return.

I felt that the first Narnia movie was a major let down as well. The visuals were impressive but they practically beat the view over the head with the foreshadowing of Edmund's eventual switching sides.

Chances are, the Lord of the Rings movies might be the ONLY time that a film came close of living up the it's novel, at least in that genre of novel.
posted by Richat at 6:35 AM on January 8, 2008

For hitchhikers guide. I think that it doesn't count. The source material works well as a book but not for a movie. So much of what makes it a good book just won't translate to motion pictures. It would have had to be even more different from the book than it was to be a good movie.

Spiderman 3 is my choice. Because it suffered from a Hollywood problem of sequel stakes raising. Spiderman 2 was one of the best superhero movies of all time. It had the tedious origin story out of the way it took a villain and made him interesting. So how do you top that?
Which is exactly the problem. What makes a movie good is not having more bigger things happen it is having some good things happen well. Oh no two and a half villians more dangerous than anything ever and a corrupting influence and a romantic subplot and and and and.

Comic books pull this stuff because people read the things every month. Movies come out every year or two. They don't need to participate in the arms race.
posted by I Foody at 6:38 AM on January 8, 2008

Any Hollywood film that attempts magical realism. Hollywood can't even do realism well, so when they tackle something like The Milagro Beanfield War or Love in the Time of Cholera, they muck it up pretty egregiously.
posted by Astro Zombie at 6:39 AM on January 8, 2008

Golden Compass again. I read a recent article somewhere written by Philip Pullman explaining the difference between a "novel" and a "story" and how a movie can only bring out the story but you'll never get the elements of the novel right.

I agree somewhat, you can never replace a novel with a movie. But to me it read like he was making a blanket statement that novel based movies will always be inherently inferior and that The Golden Compass the movie is crap because The Golden Compass the book is so awesome in comparison.

Baloney. I think there are loads of movies that contradict this to make it a false assumption and Hollywood (and Pullman) blew a golden opportunity. (pun intended?)
posted by like_neon at 6:42 AM on January 8, 2008

New Star Wars movies.
posted by yerfatma at 6:42 AM on January 8, 2008

Colin Farrell being cast as Arturo Bandini in Ask the Dust.
posted by fire&wings at 6:42 AM on January 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Any such list is likely to have lots of contentious entries on it. Any "can't miss" movie is going to have someone who hated it, and a fair number of those are going to have very mixed ratings. If you're going to include a film on the list, you'd probably want to include only those where almost everybody reviled the film. For example, I would have included Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, but a quick glance at Rotten Tomatoes shows it received 73% positive ratings. This is not spectacular given the source material, the director, and the cast, but it's not enough to be considered a universal failure. I thought it stunk surprisingly.

Personally, I loved the 2005 Hitchhiker's Guide movie. I didn't mind the happy ending story arc (though I could've done without the blubbery cheesy climax speech by Arthur). Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 58% (just barely "rotten" by their metric, which I think is there to overcome an inflation effect of some sort), so clearly I'm not alone (though I may be in a slight minority). That's just my opinion, however. I do wish people would stop complaining that Hollywood ruined the script and story. Most of that script was written by Douglas Adams, who already had a reputation for completely changing the story every time he re-adapted it (radio, novels, television, interactive fiction...) If you remember the novel, you'll also remember that it has no ending. It's nice to see the meandering, make-it-up-as-he-goes plot of the original radio show finally given a proper story arc, even if it did turn out a little Hollywoody.

I was about to chime in about how bad a choice Hook would be for this list (as this movie grew a lot on me upon reviewing). Then I did a little research and discovered that it passes the RT test (22%!). I was really surprised.
posted by ErWenn at 6:51 AM on January 8, 2008

Best answer: You may want to look through The A.V. Club's My Year of Flops. Not all of the movies there are what you're looking for, but most are. And Nathan Rabin does an excellent job examining how movies with such potential turn out so horribly.
posted by Ms. Saint at 6:52 AM on January 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

I was also going to suggest filmgeek's rich source, good or great non-English movies bastardised by hollywood. To his pair, I'll add The Assassin, the remarkable wringing out of Nikita.
posted by biffa at 6:53 AM on January 8, 2008

Every minute of the lethargic Lord of the Rings film trilogy. My God, that was utter tedium.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 6:55 AM on January 8, 2008

And clf is of course wildly wrong regarding Starship Troopers. One of the most intelligent action films ever made.
posted by biffa at 6:55 AM on January 8, 2008 [3 favorites]

I just watched Lolita (the original). My reaction, and my wife's, was "meh." This is in spite of the fact that it was directed by Stanley Kubrick, had a screenplay by Nabokov himself, and had an excellent cast (Peter Sellers was nonstop brilliant).

Part of this no doubt has to do with the fact that the subject matter had to be handled with such delicacy as to completely neuter it. And part of it is because much of the novel's strength was in Humbert's interior monologue, the wordplay and richness of language, etc, and none of that made it to the screen. Still, meh.

Contrary to this, Kubrick once said the novel "Perfume" was unfilmable. I saw the movie adaptation recently, and thought it was really good (then again, I haven't read the book).
posted by adamrice at 6:57 AM on January 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Some of the biggest turkeys killed planned sequels/prequels. Two examples:

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The movie had two planned sequels, but was a disappointment in every possible way. Alan Moore removed all credits from the movie:
"Since then, he has refused to allow any more movies to be made from work he controls. In the case of work whose rights he does not control, he has refused credits on any film adaptations, and has given his share of option money and royalties to the artists who illustrated the original comic books."

Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me: "Fire Walk with Me was greeted at the Cannes Film Festival with booing from the audience and met with almost unanimously negative reviews in the United States. (...) The film also disappointed many devotees of the TV series due to its darker tone, lack of humor and absence of resolution to the series’ cliff-hanger ending. (...) The film’s editor Mary Sweeney said, "They so badly wanted it to be like the T.V. show, and it wasn’t. It was a David Lynch feature. And people were very angry about it. They felt betrayed." Another Twin Peaks movie was planned, but according to the Wikipedia article, David Lynch said in 2001 that Twin Peaks was "dead as a doornail".
posted by iviken at 7:01 AM on January 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Seconding "every adaptation made in Hollywood."

This is utter nonsense. There have been many, many great adaptations. I listed some in a previous thread on the topic (Grapes of Wrath, The Graduate, Fight Club, Adaptation, Rosemary's Baby, Rashomon, The Vanishing, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, Sweet Smell of Success, The Hustler, The Third Man, Jaws, Requiem for a Dream, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Out of Sight, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, The Exorcist, Eyes Wide Shut, Blade Runner...)

I just watched Lolita (the original). My reaction, and my wife's, was "meh."

Yeah, it's a poopy film indeed. See the Jeremy Irons version. It's a much better adaptation of the novel.
posted by dobbs at 7:08 AM on January 8, 2008

This thread makes me feel very nervous (if I havent been already) about the Zack Snyder film of Watchmen.
posted by ShawnString at 7:12 AM on January 8, 2008

(hit send to early)

I just hope that they dont fuck it up. Thats all I ask.
posted by ShawnString at 7:13 AM on January 8, 2008

Any movie based on a book or short story by Philip K. Dick. See: Blade Runner (at least the original theatric release), Total Recall, and Minority Report. (I haven't seen A Scanner Darkly.) They (especially Total Recall and Minority Report) take Dick's original premise but then go off in a completely different direction with it, giving us what is ultimately a much less interesting story.

Dune (the 1984 David Lynch version)

A Series of Unfortunate Events: as if you didn't already have to cut out enough of a single book to fit it into a two-hour movie, they compressed the first three books into the movie, not to mention a tacked-on semi-happy ending which is contrary to the entire spirit of the books.

I'll disagree that all adaptations from other sources are bad. Many, sure, but not all. I could easily list a number of adaptations that I thought were good (some of which have already been nominated as "bad" in this thread), but that's beyond the scope of this thread.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 7:17 AM on January 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

Sometimes I wonder what films other people saw. I Robut? The movie that's about how it's having a choice to be good instead of being forced to be follow the laws that makes us, or a robot, human? And of course Starship Troopers was about civil duty in a time of war; the movie only recognizes how horribly awful a society managed entirely by the (ex-)military would be, to the disappointment of those Heinlein fans who were hoping for simpler rah-rah fuck-you-liberals fun.

Alien3 is a good example. The studio kept screwing around with it to the point of changing basic plot elements after some of the sets had been built. Monastery? No -- prison!

if they wrote that Arthur Dent had the latest video phone, they clearly had no idea what kind of character he was

Douglas Adams didn't read the books or know the character? IIRC from a commentary track, that was one of his -- changing the bit about how humans were so primitive they thought that digital watches were neat to cell phones.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:17 AM on January 8, 2008

Best answer: If you mean financially, then look no further than Pluto Nash.

If you mean in terms of quality... then it's going to be totally subjective. I couldn't disagree more with some of the opinions here. Superbad is awesome and Dune sucks? *grits teeth* Do we need a Metatalk thread for this?

I always enjoy reading about film production and following projects as they get made. I remember a few that seem particularly noteworthy because there were dramatic changes:

Two If By Sea, the rom-com with Denis Leary and Sandra Bullock, was originally written by Leary as a bleak, hard-hitting drama about a crack-addicted petty thief. Hollywoodized!

Evolution was originally written as a sci-fi/action horror flick in the vein of Species or The Thing.

I was amazed when I saw The Big Bounce. As it stands, it's a pretty poor movie that's clearly trying pretty hard to be an upbeat and wacky Elmore Leonard adaptation, like Get Shorty. But the truth is that the original director became incredibly ill during production and had to step down just before the end. The studio had a replacement finish shooting and edit the film. I think you can see the makings of a serious and damn good film in there, but it's been squashed into a mold that doesn't quite fit.
posted by zebra3 at 7:22 AM on January 8, 2008

kittens for breakfast wrote:
Bonfire of the Vanities is so notorious I think there's even a book about it.


...it is called The Devil's Candy. This is a great read and deals with your specific question of just what it is that can make a "can't loose" movie turn out awful (vanity and lack of budgetary constraint basically). The author was "embedded" with Brian De Palma's production team during the making of the firm and saw the turkey hatch out.
posted by rongorongo at 7:23 AM on January 8, 2008

Solaris. Compare with Andrei Tarkovski's 1972 version.
posted by juva at 7:30 AM on January 8, 2008

Town and Country. Horrible. "With New Line's Town and Country virtually pulled from release after earning only $6,712,451 in four weeks, the $80-million film now ranks as the biggest flop in movie history, FoxNews.com's Roger Friedman observed today (Wednesday). It succeeds the 1998 Kevin Costner starrer, The Postman."
posted by zerobyproxy at 7:34 AM on January 8, 2008

The live adaptation of "The Cat in the Hat" comes to mind. Classic story, should be good, right? The Boston Globe reviewer said something like, "this film couldn't have desecrated Dr. Seuss's name more if they had dug up his dead body and hung it from a tree and flogged it." I didn't see it, but apparently it had fart jokes in it. Why on earth would a Dr. Seuss classic have such jokes in it? Because it had to appeal to a "wide demographic" in order to make money, apparently. Luckily, the audience didn't fall for it.
posted by Melismata at 7:36 AM on January 8, 2008 [1 favorite]

- Jack Lemmon cast as Marcellus in Hamlet (he is the definition of "non-Shakespearian actor"
- The Black Dahlia -- Brian DePalma, Scarlett Johansson, Hillary Swank -- this was supposed to be Can't Miss Oscar material, but it failed miserably.
- Up Close & Personal -- written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne -- was supposed to be a realistic story about the first female news anchor Jessica Savitch. Instead Hollywood studio turns it into a sappy romance about Robert Redford. Dunne writes a book about the horror of the experience called "Monster."
posted by mattbucher at 7:46 AM on January 8, 2008

Terry Gilliam's Brazil

All of the hollywood J-Horror remakes. The only positive aspect is the release of the original Japanese versions to DVD.
posted by plokent at 7:59 AM on January 8, 2008

The original ending of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" had the Dreyfuss character locked up in an asylum for the rest of his life.

The first release of "Bladerunner" changed the ending, too, to make it "happy", despite not making any sense.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:17 AM on January 8, 2008

As your question is stated, Welles' adaptation of "The Magnificent Ambersons" fits the bill. It was fairly well warped from the original Tarkington novel, having a large amount of the narrative cut out and a happy ending re-filmed and tacked on the end. I believe there was a documentary made that cites the number of changes the studio made, and how all the material deleted from the original cut was destroyed.

[pause for cursory search]

Ah, yes; that would be It's All True-- mostly concerning Welles' attempts to shoot a film in South America, but also addresses Ambersons in that Welles was in SA at the time the studio was mucking with the original version.

However, it was a commercial success, and is now considered a classic, so if you're looking for box-office bombs, this might not be the best choice.
posted by the luke parker fiasco at 8:21 AM on January 8, 2008

Another vote for The Postman. It was a marvelous short story, degrading somewhat to merely 'very good' when novelized. On the big screen, it was horrible.
posted by Malor at 8:47 AM on January 8, 2008

Riding in Cars With Boys
The Seeker: The Dark is Rising- haven't seen it, but they apparently mangled one of my favorite childhood books pretty thoroughly.

Here's an interesting counter-take: Kubrick's The Shining. Mixed critical reviews, and Stephen King HATED it, but it was a hit.

Starship Troopers suffered a similar hack job. Rather than a discussion of civil duty in a time of war, we got Space 90210 with giant bugs.

I agree it's not a standard adaptation, but I think you missed the point.
posted by mkultra at 9:00 AM on January 8, 2008

Highlander 2. The original now looks a bit cheesy and totally 80s but at the time it was pretty damn awesome... the sequel was the worse film I've ever seen in the cinema by a long long way.

Every M. Night Shyamalan film after The Sixth Sense... his career has been a slow slide since his first, mega-hit, film, then accelerating down rapidly with The Village before going into total free fall with Lady in the Water
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 9:01 AM on January 8, 2008

As a die-hard Beatles fan, I found Across the Universe to be quite a letdown. It felt like a series of bizarre music videos with some sort of plot loosely tying them together. And the little Beatles references they threw in felt more campy than clever.

One of the only redeeming factors (for me, at least) was the brilliant casting of Jim Sturgess as the lead; he channels the spirit of Paul McCartney effortlessly. Unfortunately, he also channels Sir Paul's "Wings" era mullet, which is a distraction throughout the whole movie.
posted by chara at 9:01 AM on January 8, 2008

The Natural made from the novel by Bernard Malamud

They tacked on a happy ending that was totally antithetical to the point of the book. It was like someone read the book and decided to make a movie about it without even realizing what the book was about.
posted by The Gooch at 9:07 AM on January 8, 2008

While we're talking Kubrick and anti-climax, you have to mention Eyes Wide Shut and AI: Artificial Intelligence.
posted by tfmm at 9:16 AM on January 8, 2008

As for a movie that had its ending changed in a significant way because of studio interference, Heathers was supposed to end with the entire school being blown up, but the studio balked so the ending was changed to the "Veronica saves the day" ending which stands today. Still a good movie, though, so not sure if it totally "missed".
posted by The Gooch at 10:16 AM on January 8, 2008

Solaris. Compare with Andrei Tarkovski's 1972 version.

Right, because 1970s Russian remakes are Hollywood's surest can't miss.

I think you'd have to look to the 'TV show to feature' genre since many have done well and seem to be low-risk. From an economic standpoint, they seem to be a can't miss. Rocky and Bullwinkle come to mind as a pretty big failure in the genre.
posted by sexymofo at 10:16 AM on January 8, 2008

DaVinci Code. Tom Hanks does not equal Harrison Ford!
posted by santojulieta at 10:33 AM on January 8, 2008

Most fairytales or myths as portrayed by Disney. The Little Mermaid comes to mind immediately.
posted by cocoagirl at 10:48 AM on January 8, 2008

Solaris. Compare with Andrei Tarkovski's 1972 version.

Blasphemer. Soderbergh's Solaris is a magnificent little gem of a film. Spare and terse and languid all at once.

Tarkovsky's is of course wonderful too. But they're very different movies. Tarkovsky's is about strangeness and being and what is real and all that jazz. Soderbergh's is focused pretty tightly on love and guilt and forgiveness.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 11:11 AM on January 8, 2008 [2 favorites]

-Waterworld for its hype, massively over-extended budget, and poor box office performance
-Contact for inserting way more sentimental crap than the book had (blame the director) and Mr. Garrison's main complaint from Soutpark ;)
-The Island for having the potential of being a fantastic movie (giving Logan's Run a uhmmm..run..for its money). Instead the whole thing fell apart once they escaped, as the film then turned into typical Michael Bay mindless action.
-The Cell could've been a classic psychological thriller but was ruined by overall bad non-convincing acting.
-Transformers...we all saw it (well most of us) and were hyped up, liked the beginning...then noticed something odd..a VERY noticeable change in story atmosphere interjected here and there in the film...turns out there was multiple direction with very different styles making this film seem bipolar cool (Steven Spielberg) and mindless (Michael Bay..again) at the same time...yay.
-Independance Day was sadly a movie with a lot of really good potential ruined by bad direction and editing. (but hey, the effects were cool!)

That's all I can think of for now...whew, I'm starting to sound like a surly reviewer.
posted by samsara at 11:22 AM on January 8, 2008

I'd say Interview with the Vampire. Amazing book that literally brought me to tears. Movie was just meh. Odd casting. The story lost alot of its complexities in the translation to film.
posted by clh at 11:28 AM on January 8, 2008

@fearfulsymmetry, I disagree. The Village was one of the most subversive American films to illustrate the use of fear to control a community in a post 9-11 world.
posted by cazoo at 11:45 AM on January 8, 2008

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It wasn't bad, mind you, but they left out a key point or two from the book which would have made it much better.

Oh, and Russian Ark and Time Code have clever gimmicks which would have been great if other elements of the movie (like, say, an actual plot) had been better (or even present), but the clever gimmick alone could not salvage an otherwise dull movie.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 12:01 PM on January 8, 2008

Any movie based on a book or short story by Philip K. Dick. See: Blade Runner (at least the original theatric release), Total Recall, and Minority Report.

Yes indeed. You missed the most egregious example, though: Screamers (adaptation of Second Variety) - a simple story with a killer payoff in the very last line, which was completely ignored in favour of a happy ending. (Paycheck, of course, was just bad - but there wasn't ever enough in the original story to justify making a movie of it, anyway).
posted by Infinite Jest at 12:19 PM on January 8, 2008

The live-action version of The Grinch.
posted by flod logic at 12:24 PM on January 8, 2008

The Village was one of the most subversive American films to illustrate the use of fear to control a community in a post 9-11 world.

That's a bit of a stretch... I think it's generally seen as a critical failure. With a 'twist' you can see coming a mile off. I actually watched it on television a couple of nights ago and even the build up, character development etc is very clunkily done with plot-holes a mile wide. From who a director who was marked out as a 'can't miss' with his first film... this went wildly off target.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:32 PM on January 8, 2008

It's slightly outside your '25 years' but I think everyone expected Michael Cimino's next film after The Deer Hunter to be a similar commercial and critical success. However that film was an overlong self-indulgent mess, Heaven's Gate, and it sunk the studio.
posted by fearfulsymmetry at 12:36 PM on January 8, 2008

Best answer: Sugar and Spice- from wikipedia:

Sugar and Spice was first supposed to be a black comedy about murdering for money but the producers thought that this plot was too similar to the 1999 teen black comedy Jawbreaker so the screenwriter re-wrote the script to what it is now. Mena Suvari said, "Even though it doesnt have murder it's still was influenced by the movie Heathers."

Lona Williams wrote the original screenplay for this movie, and was an executive producer. After a falling out with producers, her name was removed from the project.

posted by Monday at 2:01 PM on January 8, 2008

I just hope that they dont fuck it up. Thats all I ask.

You ask too much -- of course they will. They can't help it.
posted by Rash at 3:28 PM on January 8, 2008

The worst movie I've seen in 2007 was undoubtedly "The Invasion". Talk about "can't miss" -- it had Nicole Kidman, who's been constantly in the headlines, and Daniel Craig, the new James Bond, in a thriller with a hint of sci-fi, an adorable little child in peril ... but it was unbelievably bad.

And not just bad in the sense of a fully-formed, professionally-filmed-and-edited movie which just happens to have a lame script, dodgy acting and hard-to-believe story lines (although it had all those too), but there were bits missing. Here's Nicole running through a suburban setting -- now she's downtown! Wha? Here she is having a conversation at the top of the stairs -- sorry, bottom of the stairs, and the conversation's over. Add in some weirdness with flashbacks and it was impossible to know what was happening with any confidence.

So when I say "unbelievably" bad, I really mean it. Something went terribly wrong with that movie and the studio can only have released it for accounting reasons rather than write the whole thing off.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 5:51 PM on January 8, 2008

Best answer: The V.I. Warshawksy movie was highly anticipated. It was based on the beloved mystery novels of Sara Paretsky, and was going to be the start of a franchise for Kathleen Turner. But it bombed (mostly due to turning V.I. into a sex kitten) and the franchise talk died.
posted by SuperSquirrel at 6:15 PM on January 8, 2008

Seconding "every adaptation made in Hollywood."

dobbs: This is utter nonsense. There have been many, many great adaptations. I listed some in a previous thread on the topic (Grapes of Wrath, The Graduate, Fight Club, Adaptation, Rosemary's Baby, Rashomon, The Vanishing, The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, Sweet Smell of Success, The Hustler, The Third Man, Jaws, Requiem for a Dream, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Out of Sight, They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, The Exorcist, Eyes Wide Shut, Blade Runner...)

As a correction: The Third Man was actually made in Shepperton, England not Hollywood, though I assume with lots of location shooting in Vienna. I think its a safe bet that Rashomon wasn't Hollywood either, and I can't imagine you like the Hollywood 'Vanishing' so presume you lost your train of thought here.
posted by biffa at 3:12 AM on January 9, 2008

Ha, that's awfuly pedantic to nitpick the Hollywood part rather than the adaptation part. Someone's taking the piss.
posted by smackfu at 5:42 AM on January 9, 2008

Response by poster: Wow. The responses are coming in faster than I can review them.

However, I think I need to clarify my original post a little better. I am looking for movies that were changed during the actual process. Most of the examples given here are merely box office bombs. That does not always mean that something was changed during the process.

For example, Waterworld may have been an enormous flop, but not because of any major changes in the movie. They spent way more money to make the movie than it brought in. As simple as that. Nothing was changed or ruined during the process.

Here is a list of movies that meet the qualifications

Sugar and Spice - Veered away from original black comedy about murdering for money
V.I. Warshawski - Changed main character into a sex vixen
Two If By Sea - Changed from bleak, hard-hitting drama about a crack-addicted theif into a romantic comedy
Evolution - Changed from Sci-Fi action into a comedy.
The Vanishing - Changed ending from Dutch original
posted by unceman at 5:54 AM on January 9, 2008

Ha, that's awfuly pedantic to nitpick the Hollywood part rather than the adaptation part. Someone's taking the piss.

As for my original comment, yes, I really meant Hollywood specifically. But I will concede that my comment should've been "almost every adaptation made in Hollywood." But many of dobbs examples are outside of the last 25ish years.
posted by desuetude at 6:35 AM on January 9, 2008

Up Close and Personal changed from a realistic news story to "A Star is Born" type romance. "To quote a spokesperson for the Disney company, who released the film, to Entertainment Weekly magazine, "Only a cold-blooded sadist would want to see a historically accurate movie about the tragedy of Jessica Savitch."
posted by mattbucher at 8:42 AM on January 9, 2008

However, I think I need to clarify my original post a little better. I am looking for movies that were changed during the actual process. Most of the examples given here are merely box office bombs. That does not always mean that something was changed during the process.

Um, "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"? The whole POINT of the original play was that Brick had homoerotic feelings and couldn't deal with them, and they TOTALLY cut that out of the movie and changed the ending?! Don't think the movie was a flop, tho.

The book and documentary "The Celluloid Closet" has several examples of original stories (books, etc.) that had the homosexual references completely removed and/or were rewritten for the movie version.
posted by Melismata at 10:45 AM on January 9, 2008

Caligula was originally conceived and written by Gore Vidal as, basically, a bigger-budget Masterpiece Theater. Unfortunately, he couldn't find any backers until he asked Bob Guccione, who said he'd finance it if the film added some... lascivious elements. After filming was done, Guccione added even more sex scenes in without the director's (or Vidal's) knowledge. The result is, as you'd expect, like you're watching TV for two hours, not realizing that you're sitting on your remote and periodically activating the button that switches between PBS and PlayboyTV.
posted by mkultra at 11:07 AM on January 9, 2008