10 Movies Way Better Than They Had Any Right To Be

Even cracking the script for Edge of Tomorrow was a nightmare.

Dante Harper's original screenplay was reworked by Joby Harold, while Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman also submitted a draft. Director Doug Liman then abandoned most of what had already been written, hired Jez and John-Henry Butterworth to do a rewrite that was taken over by Simon Kinberg before regular Tom Cruise collaborator Christopher McQuarrie was eventually brought on, with the final script not even completed until shooting was well underway.

Then came the tales of the notoriously prickly Liman demanding everything filmed on the first day be re-shot entirely, extending the two-week schedule for the beach-set sequences to almost three months and working two crews seven days a week in order to meet deadlines. No wonder many in the industry didn't have high hopes for the project.

Things weren't helped by the generic title and marketing campaign that made the movie look like a standard sci-fi blockbuster rather than the unique 'Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers' hybrid that it actually was, and Edge of Tomorrow could only open in third place at the domestic box office with an underwhelming $28.7m, a worrying number for something that cost $178m to produce.

2014 was one of the best years for summer blockbusters in recent memory and the brilliantly intense, clever, and action-packed Edge of Tomorrow was right at the top of that list, although you wouldn't have thought it based on the negative buzz surrounding the movie almost from day one.