10 Films That Switched Directors During Production

In 2012, when Lionsgate decided to try their hand at rebooting the Judge Dredd franchise in a more proper and comic book-accurate fashion, they hired director Pete Travis to see it through.

Travis was by no means an auteur at this point in his career, with the dubiously-received Vantage Point as his only prior feature film. As a result, when Lionsgate wasn't fond of the direction Travis was attempting to take the film, they quietly forced him out of the project and allowed writer/producer Alex Garland to take over.

This had all long been rumored but was officially confirmed by star Karl Urban earlier this year;

“A huge part of the success of ‘Dredd’ is in fact due to Alex Garland and what a lot of people don’t realize is that Alex Garland actually directed that movie... I just hope when people think of Alex Garland’s filmography that ‘Dredd’ is the first film that he made before ‘Ex Machina.’ You think about it in those terms; it goes ‘Dredd,’ ‘Ex Machina,’ ‘Annihilation.’”

As Urban points out, Garland would go on to make hailed sci-fi classics like Ex Machina and Annihilation in the years following Dredd, which only lends more credence to the idea that Garland is the reason Dredd is so great.