10 Insane Things Studios DEMANDED In Movies

Even the smoothest Hollywood production will typically see filmmakers dealing with the ever-dreaded studio notes, as producers and executives request adjustments both big and small to a project.

These notes can come during pre-production, in the midst of shooting, or while wrapping things up in post, and while studio input might be limited where trusted auteur filmmakers are concerned, it goes without saying that they can make some deeply wild requests of the directors they work with.

And that's certainly true in these 10 movies, where executives took umbrage with aspects of a scene which, to the cast and crew, surely seemed totally normal.

Studios are businesses first and foremost, and so are most often doing everything to avoid impacting their bottom line, but even so, their hyper-conservative, even cynical demands in these cases surely drove the filmmakers involved up the wall.

Studio feedback absolutely can be valuable and isn't necessarily the objective great evil that some believe it to be, but to the same token, sometimes the things their insist upon reek more of a fanciful power trip than a genuine desire to make the end product better...

Smoking in movies has become noticeably less commonplace over the years, with most major studios choosing to heavily restrict depictions of tobacco use in their films, especially for projects aimed at younger viewers.

All the same, when Colin Farrell was cast to play The Penguin in Matt Reeves' The Batman, he quite understandably assumed that he'd be smoking a cigar, as the iconic supervillain has in so many prior iterations.

But Warner Bros. mandated that the character couldn't be shown smoking at all, and worse than that, he couldn't even be shown holding an unlit cigar, per their own content guidelines for PG-13 movies which could be viewed by impressionable younger audience members.

Farrell "fought valiantly" for the cigar but ultimately lost - an especially odd outcome given that The Batman is a film jam-packed with brutal murder, and yet a morally reprehensible supervillain can't commit the great sin of... smoking a fat stogie.

There was a silver lining to this, though - for the spin-off TV series The Penguin, Farrell did indeed get his wish, and was freely able to smoke cigars throughout the show, much to his delight.