10 Movies That Actually Benefitted From Studio Interference

Alex Garland’s blistering adaptation of the comic book Law Man saw a perfectly realised Judge Dredd fight his way up 200 floors of utter sci-fi madness, a rookie partner in tow.

The world and their mum agree this was an excellent action flick that did so much justice to the comic book source material (Hey, studio: #whynosequel?). From the ego-less performance of Karl Urban to Lena Heady’s skin-crawling villain Mama, the drugs, the gore and the action, there’s very little to fault with this 2012 B-movie masterpiece.

If behind the scenes stories are to be believed though, we were originally in for a much more cerebral, action-less experience. In 2011, the LA Times reported that due to creative disagreements between director Pete Travis and the Studio, Travis was locked out of the editing room and banned from participating in the process.

Instead, in an incredibly unusual move, writer Alex Garland himself was thrown into the editing room and told to make it better; presumably ramping up the action.

And who can argue with results? To this day Dredd charts highly in lists of comic book film adaptations and still raises the rose-tinted spectacles for nerds the world over. Pete Travis’s version? We DREDD to think!

What’s more, this successful stint as film editor likely contributed to Garland’s decision to helm his own movies; so without studio meddling, we likely wouldn’t have gotten Ex Machina a couple of years later. There’s a two-for-one for you.