10 Movies That Changed Drastically Midway Through Production

10. WarGames

When WarGames first started filming, it was under the direction of Martin Brest, who was just coming off the success of his comedy-caper Going In Style, as well as some work on the sixth series of Saturday Night Live.

You'd think that hiring a director so strongly associated with comedy would mean that WarGames would also attempt to head down that tonal route - at least partially - but, reportedly, the movie that Brest started to make was anything but light-hearted.

Instead, Brest took a strangely cynical approach to the story, and this led to him being fired after roughly two weeks on the film, after the producers protested against his vision. He was replaced with John Badham, who took the reigns with the mission statement of injecting some fun into the movie, as well as loosening up the understandably nervous production team.

Badham has spoken about Brest's approach in the past, describing it as "dark", and giving us some insight into how he wanted to portray Matthew Broderick's lead character:

"From what I could tell out of what Marty was shooting, he’d taken a somewhat dark approach to the story, and saw Matthew’s character as someone who was rebelling against his parents... and the way it was shot, it was like they were doing some Nazi undercover thing. So it was my job to make it seem like they were having fun, and that it was exciting, but it wasn’t this dark rebellion."

While the final cut of WarGames can't be described as a comedy, there's a sense of enjoyment and fun that permeates the whole thing, a massive difference from the colder thriller that Brest was trying to make.