10 Insane Ways Movies Got Sabotaged
These movies got scuttled in completely unhinged ways.
Even the simplest movie is the result of an incredibly complex series of creative and business decisions laboured over by hundreds or even thousands of people.
As such it's little surprise that so many promising planned projects never end up going before cameras, and while most of the time the reasons are banal - like the studio lacking commercial faith in the script - sometimes a film fails to come together for more baffling and ridiculous reasons.
These 10 movies, all of which seemed plenty promising on paper, were effectively sabotaged at some point in the production chain.
Perhaps they never went before cameras, maybe they were mangled in post-production, or they might've even been ruined by marketing and distribution.
No matter who was responsible - a filmmaker, actor, producer, or more likely the studio themselves - these films were all scuttled in completely jaw-dropping ways that proved just how easy it is to piss money away in the circus that is Hollywood.
Whether these movies actually came out or not, they were all undermined behind-the-scenes in ways that ensured they never stood a chance...
10. Neil Gaiman Leaked The Script Online - The Sandman
Neil Gaiman's legendary comic series The Sandman may have finally been recently adapted into a well-received Netflix series (pictured above), but Hollywood spent years trying to turn it into a blockbuster movie.
In the mid-1990s, infamous producer Jon Peters (Tim Burton's Batman) took a crack at it, with William Farmer penning a 1998 screenplay which Gaiman thoroughly detested, even deeming it the worst script he'd ever read.
This script turned protagonist Dream into a villain and made numerous other egregious changes, such as including a mechanical spider - a long-time obsession of Peters' which he finally managed to include in one of his movies with 1999's Wild Wild West.
As for how The Sandman never got made? In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Gaiman admitted that he leaked the atrocious script to Ain't It Cool News, who promptly posted a report rubbishing it, in turn killing any and all hype about the adaptation. Gaiman said:
"I sent the script to Ain't It Cool News, which back then was read by people. And I thought, 'I wonder what Ain't It Cool News will think of the script that they're going to receive anonymously.' And they wrote a fabulous article about how it was the worst script they'd ever been sent. And suddenly the prospect of that film happening went away. And instead Jon Peters turned his attention to Wild Wild West."