10 Films That Switched Directors During Production

After spending fifteen years leaping from one massively successful project to the next and delivering some of the greatest animated films of all time in the process, Pixar found themselves in an incredibly unlikely position in 2011.

Cars 2 was released, a film directed by studio-legend John Lasseter, and was an absolute flop. It made decent money financially, but not what Pixar had grown accustomed to, and was their first-ever unanimously critically derided film. As a result, Pixar suddenly needed their next film to be a sure-fire knockout.

This all led to the studio pulling Brave out from under original writer and director Brenda Chapman and handing the reigns over to studio-veteran, Mark Andrews. Chapman had all-but-finished the film, only to have it taken away from her, a process she described as;

"A heartbreakingly hard road...When Pixar took me off of Brave — a story that came from my heart, inspired by my relationship with my daughter — it was devastating,"

The resulting film was neither the financial or critical success that Pixar was so desperate for. And while Chapman wound up maintaining a co-director credit, the film is very obviously a watered-down of the story it wants to actually tell and is all the worse for it.