15 Movie Sets You Didn't Know Were Hell To Work On

11. Scream 3

Why It Was Hell: By almost all accounts, making Scream 3 was a pretty miserable experience. Going into production just two months after the Columbine High School shootings, a cautious Dimension Films originally insisted that no blood or violence be shown on-screen, until director Wes Craven intervened and explained how absurd this would be for a Scream movie. Even getting the script finished was a shambles, and ultimately the film ended up being written as it was being filmed, with Ehren Kruger's character work having to be constantly rewritten by Craven for being inconsistent with previous films. Due to Craven not knowing exactly how everything was going to fit together, multiple versions of numerous scenes were shot to give him more editing choices, and this often meant that scenes were stitched together from several scarcely continuous takes, many of which had to be filmed in doubled locations because the original was no longer available. As if all that wasn't bad enough, Neve Campbell's shooting schedule was severely restricted due to her also filming Drowning Mona and the TV series Party of Five. She spent only 20 days on set, forcing the film to focus more on supporting characters, and because her Drowning Mona character had a different hair colour, she had to spend two hours every morning having a wig fitted. Was It Worth It?: Despite mixed reviews and a fan consensus that it's easily the worst of the four films, Scream 3 did gross more than 4x its budget, though it did gross slightly less than both prior films. The underwhelming box office put the series on Dimension's back burner for over a decade, before 2011's Scream 4 came back with an effortlessly superior sequel that nevertheless didn't launch at the box office, probably killing the series once and for all, banishing it to the land of TV forever more.
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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.