"What ifs?" are part and parcel of the moviemaking process. Drafts are revised, writers, directors and actors all come and go, and entire projects can fall to the wayside due to a mixture of the above or to a myriad of other factors, like scheduling conflicts or budget issues.
Movie production is fraught with peril, and while filmmakers perform little miracles all the time, sometimes those currents are too hard to battle, and the resulting product pales in comparison to what was initially envisioned - or at the least fails to live up to those early-production ambitions.
It's difficult to say whether or not an unrealised project would've bettered a disappointing release - filmmaking is a fluid process, and projects change all the time - but in premise alone it's easier to assess what would or would not be more compelling. The same could also be argued for the kind of talent attached, and wondering how they would've marshalled a given story differently.
From ill-fated sequels to doomed adaptations, here are those movies where the worst version ended up on the big screen.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
