20 Things You Didn't Know About Arrival
13. Some Of The Flick's Ditched Ideas Were Best Left In Its Development Stages
It is expected that Arrival’s final form was not in line with its many initial drafts, but what is surprising is just how vastly different certain plot beats were from its inception and early stages.
For starters, the Heptapods were initially designed to be like their description in the novel (barrel-shaped and possessing seven eyes arranged in a ring shape) before the design team settled on the visage seen in the film.
In addition to this, the ending was almost nothing like what played in the final cut, as it had the aliens giving humanity blueprints for an advanced spacecraft. This was deemed to be to too similar to Chris Nolan’s Interstellar and was changed to the aliens’ language been used by humanity to perceive the future.