8 Great Movies Saved By Ridiculously Last Minute Changes

2. Disney Made It A Cinematic Release With Only Nine Months Left Of Production- Toy Story 2

Unsurprisingly for the series that singe-handedly turned animation on its head, Toy Story's journey to the big screen was far from plain sailing. The first suffered a complete production shut down and rewrite of the script when Disney took stock of the well-into production film and realised their corporate meddling had impeded Pixar from making the film to the best of their abilities, leading to a complete change of Woody's character (warning: that link is a satire of recent literary events, not a serious report on the interesting footage).

Toy Story 2 was only more fraught. The film was originally conceived as a direct-to-video sequel in the spirit of Disney's other cash-ins (see: The Lion King 1½), and wasn't even an official Pixar production at first (it involved the studio's key creatives, but was treated as a separate project). However, when it became clear from the early drafts there was something more special here than Cinderella II: Dreams Come True, the film was bumped up to a tentpole cinema release.

All good, except that the time-frame for this change was incredibly tight - the studio had only nine months to take the rudimentary cheap version and hand in the polished, finished product. But boy did they pull it off - they added in twelve minutes of story (including the video-game set opening and the entire character of Wheezy) and wound up making a film inexplicably better than the original.

Sadly, the lesson wasn't learned. In the mid-naughties Disney started production on a direct-to-DVD Toy Story 3, which would see Buzz recalled and the toys travelling to Taiwan to save him. This was thankfully scrapped when John Lasseter took over as Head of Animation, and Pixar started on their own version from scratch.