10 Movies Way Better Than They Had Any Right To Be

The knives were out for Marc Forster's World War Z long before it hit theaters in June 2013. Those expecting an cinematic disaster of epic proportions found themselves pleasantly surprised when the end result turned out to be a solidly entertaining, and highly profitable, summer blockbuster.

For a while it seemed like everything was going to plan, but as the $125m production neared the end of principal photography it became plagued by a series of setbacks. Shooting in Budapest was halted as Hungarian Counter Terrorism raided a warehouse and seized the movie's prop firearms, which turned out to be fully-functional, before the producers realized that the entire third act of the movie wasn't working and scrambled to come up with a solution.

Seven weeks of reshoots were scheduled in Budapest, a lot of which never even made the final cut, including an expensive battle sequence with the city doubling for Moscow's Red Square. Damon Lindelof was hired to rework the ending but ran out of time, with Drew Goddard ultimately coming onboard to salvage the third act that led to even more reshoots and saw the budget shoot up to a massive $190m.

When World War Z was finally released, the reshoots were painfully obvious but didn't harm the overall quality of the movie. It isn't great by any means, but the fact that those involved managed to salvage a perfectly decent popcorn picture from a production that came perilously close to coming off the rails altogether is an achievement in itself.