10 Movie Origin Stories We Almost Got

Fans of John Carpenter's 1982 horror classic The Thing were understandably nervous when Universal announced plans to release a prequel almost three decades later.

And though hardly terrible, the prequel largely felt totally irrelevant, failing to add much to expand upon the prior movie's tantalising lore.

Yet The Thing 2011 was very much a victim of executive meddling throughout shooting and post-production, resulting in the original practical creature effects being replaced with wonky CGI, and an origin story for The Thing being ditched almost entirely.

An original, partially-filmed prologue sequence would've explained that the alien piloting the buried spaceship crashed on Earth and killed itself for reasons initially unknown, while another alien would exit the ship and allow itself to freeze to death while being assimilated by the Thing.

Part of the original ending would then see Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) find the ship full of dead aliens, implying that the aliens collected the Thing as a specimen, only for it to breach containment, spread throughout the ship, and finally make its way to the ice outside, leading to what happens in the actual movie.

In the end, Universal felt that the movie's climax was becoming too complicated and so ditched the Thing's backstory, which in turn required the prologue to also be cut. Boo.