10 Films That Switched Directors During Production

After delivering what is widely considered to be the first-ever truly great superhero film, one would think Richard Donner would have carte blanche on what to do next. But apparently, one would be wrong.

Donner had always planned to make two Superman films, spending the first few months of production attempting to film them simultaneously. Until the studio cracked down on him and he was forced to focus solely on getting the first film into theaters before moving onto the next. The first film was released and became a huge hit, but producers the Salkinds were quick to squash Donner's dreams of delivering a follow-up.

They fired him from the project before he could resume filming the sequel. They then brought Richard Lester in to take his place, despite the fact that Donner had already completed filming over seventy-five percent of the film. Lester would go on to scrap significant chunks of Donner's film, in favor of filming new sequences so as to secure his credit as the film's sole director.

The resulting film was a conflicted mess that treated Superman and Zod's confrontation like a joke rather than a spectacle. Luckily, Donner would get to edit and release his own version of the film decades later as the Richard Donner Cut, which was a marked improvement over Leter's version.