10 Movies That Changed Drastically Midway Through Production

5. I'll Do Anything

Ill Do Anything
Columbia Pictures

The honour of "most bizarre change" on this list easily goes to James L. Brooks' 1994 comedy I'll Do Anything, which was dealt a major blow when test audiences reacted poorly to a significant aspect of the film.

With the project, Brooks wished to craft an old-fashioned musical, and wanted to include plenty of musical numbers peppered throughout the runtime. To that end, he brought in the likes of Prince, Carole King, and Sinéad O'Connor to record songs, and everything was shaping up quite nicely - that is, until a rough cut of the film was assembled and plonked in front of test audiences.

And unfortunately, the one thing they hated was the music. Naturally, Brooks was taken aback by this reaction, since he now had some major alterations to make. He basically had to pluck one of the core elements from his movie and fill in that hole with brand-new scenes, stripping the music entirely and heading back for reshoots to film some replacement footage.

The final cut was received relatively well so this re-jig wasn't a complete disaster, but going from a musical to a more straightforward comedy-drama can't have been easy.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!