10 Movies That Were Almost WAY Darker

Cool Runnings is a classic feel-good sports comedy about Jamaica's first Olympic bobsled team - a frothy, quite delightful underdog story that's only concerned with making the audience feel warm and fuzzy inside.

But in a 2018 interview, director Jon Turteltaub discussed earlier iterations of the film which were a little more dramatically ambitious and, well, edgy.

Until Turteltaub signed up, the film was still called "Blue Magaa" and designed as more of a serious story about a group of young Jamaican men attempting to escape the drug-addled streets of Kingston and win Olympic gold.

Turteltaub said the producers "couldn't make it work," and so "switched and made it fun and playful and for Disney, and hired [him]. The whole tone of the movie just shifted."

Turteltaub also stated that he originally had Kurt Russell in mind to play Coach Blitzer, and took some convincing to accept the suggestion of John Candy from, you guessed it, Jeffrey Katzenberg.

If this is what it took to bring the inspirational story to the masses, then it was probably worth it, even it it ended up lacking all the grit - and probably some of the real honesty - of its original iteration.