10 Abandoned Scripts Better Than The Finished Movie
2. Hancock Was A Hard-R Superhero Film About Alcoholism And Suicide
Hancock was made in an era when Superhero films were just starting to be taken seriously by producers. It came out the same year as Iron Man, when superheroes were still a tad on the cartoonish side but also included some authenticity. The DC Universe had yet to get too gritty, and the world wasn't ready for Vincent Ngo's Tonight He Comes, the dark, hard-R script that would eventually turn into Peter Berg's wildly uneven film.
Producer Akiva Goldsman liked Ngo's script, which he first read in 1996, but had no place for it. It wasn't until 2002 that it was rewritten by John August and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan that a ten-page treatment was handed to Will Smith. The script retained a lot of Ngo's bleak superhero movie, which featured a vulgar, hard-drinking Superman, which original director Michael Mann described as "a scathing character study" and compared the tone to Leaving Las Vegas.
Alas, by the time director Peter Berg got hold of it, "We thought the idea was cool, we just wanted to lighten it."
Read: Neuter it.