10 Directors Who Were Kicked Off A Movie

4. Paul Schrader - Exorcist: The Beginning

Richard Donner Superman
Warner Bros. Pictures

The story of Exorcist: The Beginning is Hollywood stupidity at its finest. After Paul Schrader spent $30m making the movie, he was fired and replaced with Renny Harlin. Harlin then spent $50m re-shooting almost the entire thing with a reworked script and several new characters.

If that wasn't bad enough, Harlin's version was savaged by critics and tanked at the box office so the studio gave Schrader a further $35,000 to finish his verion and release it in theaters under the title Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. Where it was savaged by critics and tanked at the box office.

The whole Exorcist debacle was basically the studio p*ssing its money up against a wall. After $80m spent on the effort of creating two movies by different directors both based on the same idea, the end result is nothing but two sh*tty movies and an exercise in how not to run a movie studio.

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