10 Movies Everyone Wished Were WAY Crazier

7. Hancock

Will Smith playing an alcoholic, sex-crazed, wildly irresponsible superhero is one of those cinematic ideas that sells itself - who among us would need persuasion to want to see that?

Yet Hancock is unfortunately a textbook example of an inspired idea which got put through the studio mangle and emerged out the other side a safer, less-interesting piece of work.

Hancock started life as a spec script written by Vy Vincent Ngo called Tonight, He Comes, which was considerably edgier as it focused on a PTSD-afflicted superhero struggling to deal with all the human tragedy he's witnessed, and culminates in him drunkenly wiping out an entire police force.

But it was ultimately rewritten into a more "palatable" PG-13 blockbuster star vehicle for Will Smith, where those edges were planed away in favour of a more conventional, crowd-pleasing treatment.

Ngo's original script, which featured both gratuitous sex and violence, while denying the redemptive arc for its protagonist which occurs in the final movie, sounded wackier and more interesting in every way that the movie could've been.

Instead, the version we ended up with was antiseptic focus group slop solely concerned with making hundreds of millions of dollars - and artistically speaking, it was all the worse for it.