10 Movies That Were Only Made With VERY WEIRDLY SPECIFIC Conditions
Warner Bros. mandated that Justice League be no longer than two hours.
Hollywood sure is a crazy old business, and as moviegoers it's easy to forget the mind-boggling amount of glad-handing and deal-making that goes on behind the scenes.
Getting any movie, no matter how cheap, behind cameras is basically a miracle in its own right, and while studios are typically all-too-keen to throw money at sequels, they often only greenlight films once everyone has agreed to some head-scratching conditions.
Perhaps a producer has their own specific vision for part of the movie, maybe the director themselves will only sign on if their loony demands are met, or an executive more concerned with toy sales than storytelling might impose their will upon the creatives.
These 10 films were only shot and completed after the creative and business ends of the situation came together and agreed on a direction, no matter what the artists involved might've actually thought of the situation.
Unsurprisingly a couple of these movies were both critical and commercial failures as a result, though many actually managed to overcome these peculiar conditions and deliver an end product that mostly clung true to the original concept...
10. It Had To Feature A Giant Mechanical Spider - Wild Wild West
Wild Wild West sure was a disappointment, but who among us in the two-plus decades since has ever forgotten about the huge, 80-foot mechanical spider that villain Dr. Arliss Loveless (Kenneth Branagh) trots out as his ultimate weapon?
The film was co-produced by director Barry Sonnenfeld and eccentric mega-producer Jon Peters, with Peters being the one who came up with the ludicrous idea to feature a gigantic metal tarantula.
But there's even more to the story - as Kevin Smith explained in his live show An Evening with Kevin Smith, Peters actually recycled the spider concept from Superman Lives, a cancelled Superman reboot he was attempting to get made throughout the 1990s.
Superman Lives was set to star Nicolas Cage, with Tim Burton directing and Smith penning the script.
Peters insisted to Smith that the third act climax with the Man of Steel fighting a giant spider, but when the film never came together, Peters held onto the idea and imposed it upon Wild Wild West with a mechanical steampunk facelift.
In Peters' mild defense, the CGI mecha-spider still looks pretty great from a VFX perspective. The rest of the movie? Not so much.