7. Indiana Jones And The Haunted Castle
The opening section of Chris Columbus' screenplay for the Monkey King features an elaborate set-piece where Indiana Jones visits a haunted castle with a bunch of angry villagers in Scotland, and finds himself going up against a whole host of booby traps, spectral dogs and a weird Baron who turns out to be a ghost - just another day in the life of Indiana Jones. But this somewhat bizarre idea was apparently transposed from another potential Indy script penned by Romancing the Stone's screenwriter Diane Thomas and factored down into an opening set-piece. And that script was - for lack of a better title - Indiana Jones and the Haunted Castle, the blueprints of which have never seen the light of day. Okay, so what we can gather from what we've been told over the years in bits and pieces is that Thomas' screenplay focused entirely around the haunted house idea, and when the script was shelved, Columbus took the castle and turned it into an opening for his own Monkey King script. So why did they shoot down Thomas' script? Spielberg was bored with haunted houses apparently, having just worked on Poltergeist.