12 Iconic Movie Characters Who Were Disastrously Recast

4. The Green Hornet - Seth Rogen

The Film: The Green Hornet (2011)

In The Original: Van Williams

Nobody in their right mind would have looked at the cast of Freaks And Geeks and suggested that any of them could play superheroes. Maybe a couple of outside chances - like Ben Foster, who would go on to be rubbish in X-Men: The Last Stand and James Franco, who bored in the Spider-Man franchise - but surely not any of the smokey slackers like Jason Segel or Seth Rogen, right?

Fast forward to 2011, and Michel Gondry was proving just how correct that early assumption was, by putting the square peg of Seth Rogen into the circular hole of the Green Hornet big screen remake. If they cast him for comedy effect, it failed, as the film is painfully unfunny. If they cast him as a surrealist expression to feed Gondry's penchant for weirdness, it failed because the film is weirdly conventional and plainly boring.

In contrast, Van Williams is a proper golden age serial hero, who isn't an idiot and seems to know what he's doing more than 13% of the time. With him as the lead (next to break-out star Bruce Lee), the show was like a straight 60s Batman show and it still stands up. With Rogen in the lead, the remake feels like a wrong-headed disrespectful joke at the show's expense.