12 Crazy Sequel Pitches That Almost Ruined Great Films

9. Ei8ht... Sort Of

How do you follow up a film so locked into its concept that it's called Se7en, and the plot hinges on the whole Seven Deadly Sins thing? Well, you go insane, and ignore how well the film worked as a stand-alone film, by bringing back the second lead character whose wife's head didn't end up in a box, and basically turning him into a wizard detective.

That's essentially what New Line Cinema tried to do when they turned a spec script by Ted Griffin and Sean Bailey into a possible Se7en sequel, adapting Morgan Freeman's detective into a psychic (he must not have thought it would be helpful in the John Doe case) to catch another serial killer. It would have made sense to team him up with a psychic to solve a set of grissly murders, but apparently the studio thought their way was either smarter or more entertaining.

David Fincher had absolutely no intention of making a sequel, which probably wasn't helped by the lunatic behaviour of those "creative types" charged with making a reasonable attempt at a script, who simply used something else and tagged the Se7en brand on to it, much like happened with Super Mario Bros 2 (the game, not the film - a sequel for that was beyond even the ludicrous realms of this article.)

Incidentally, this film was actually optioned, without the Se7en link, with Sir Anthony Hopkins in the lead, but it all seems to have gone cold.