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Serendipity Writes The Plot / Live-Action Films

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Examples of Serendipity Writes the Plot in live-action films.

  • Some films based on works that were originally in a fantasy setting have the characters transported to Earth in order to save money on elaborate fantasy sets. Masters of the Universe and Beastmaster II: Through the Portal of Time are just a few examples.
  • Many actors in silent films wore heavy, dark makeup to put emphasis on the eyes and mouths, due to the technical limitations of cameras at the time; they showed both yellow and red as dark.
  • In American Graffiti, Bob Falfa wears a cowboy hat because Harrison Ford refused to get a period-appropriate haircut and consequently be sidelined from working in other projects while waiting for it to grow back out.
  • While the Broadway version of Annie revolves around the Christmas season, the finale of the 1982 film is set on July 4th, America's Independence Day. The adaptation was necessary because principal photography was scheduled during the summer months.
  • Apocalypse Now:
    • Marlon Brando infamously showed up on the set overweight despite the script listing his character Colonel Kurtz as having a "lean and hungry" physique. Coppola was then forced to shoot Kurtz wearing a black t-shirt, only standing in the shadow and never below the shoulders to hide his figure, thus giving Kurtz the appearance of a man who has almost become one with darkness. He also didn't bother to memorize most of his lines, resulting in most of Kurtz's final monologue being improvised on the spot; his disjointed ramblings ended up being much more unsettling than anything a screenwriter could have written.
    • The sacrifice of the bull being intercut with the death of Kurtz at the film's conclusion was not part of the original script — but after witnessing the ceremony, Coppola filmed a recreation of it, liking the symbolic resonance of it.
  • In Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers and director Jay Roach initially wanted to include a Shark Pool containing sharks with lasers, to go along with Dr. Evil being a parody of James Bond villains and their love for the elaborate Death Trap. The problem? The movie didn't have the budget for that, but the special effects crew realized that they could use jets in the pool to create bubbles. When informed of this, Myers and Roach came up with the now-famous mutated, ill-tempered sea bass gag, and recognized that doing so would have made the Bond parody even more effective than their original, over-the-top idea of sharks with lasers. Myers and Roach also came up with the In-Universe reason that Dr. Evil's henchmen were unable to acquire the sharks due to them being declared an endangered species, and that they could not circumvent the ensuing regulations to acquire the sharks.
  • The direct-to-video science fiction film Auton was intended to star Nicholas Courtney, reprising his role as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart from Doctor Who. (The filmmakers were able to negotiate licenses to use Lethbridge-Stewart and the Autons, but not anything directly related to the Doctor himself.) During pre-production, Courtney had to withdraw from the production due to health issues. In his place, the film features an entirely new protagonist named Lockwood, who's arguably more interesting than a reheated Brigadier would have been and went on to feature in two sequels that develop him in directions that would not have been possible with Lethbridge-Stewart.
  • Baby Driver:
    • The original script had a comedic scene where the crew of bank robbers were instructed to wear Michael Myers masks for a heist, but JD, confusing the slasher movie villain with actor Mike Myers, wears an Austin Powers mask instead. The studio managed to get the rights for Austin Powers' likeness, but not that of Michael Myers, so the scene was slightly rewritten with the same basic Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure gag in place - instead JD was the one who procured disguises for the whole crew, so everyone ended up with Austin Powers masks.
    • One of the songs the producers licensed for the chase scenes was "Neat Neat Neat" by The Damned. Then they discovered the song was much shorter (two minutes and forty-four seconds) than the chase they paired it with. Their solution: have the crew get caught in a traffic jam during the chase, forcing them to change vehicles. After they get into the new vehicle, Baby restarts the song on his iPod and they pick up where they left off. It's during the transition that JD loses his shotgun which gets him killed for leaving evidence behind and furthering Baby's decision to leave a life of crime.
  • Back to the Future:
    • The scripted climax of Back to the Future called for Marty to take the DeLorean to a Nevada nuclear test site and return to 1985 using the power of a nuclear blast. This was beyond the film's budget, so the now-iconic clock tower climax was created.
    • Back to the Future Part II: Crispin Glover's refusal to do the sequels impacted the plot heavily. For example, George McFly being dead in 1985-A was originally conceived as just an excuse to not show him very much.
  • This trope is touched on in the classic black and white movie, The Bad and the Beautiful.
    • A horror movie producer couldn't afford decent special effects for the monster. He teams up with the director to use camera tricks to make the monster into The Unseen.
    • From the trivia in the movie's IMDB entry, "The scene showing the production of the fictional low budget horror film was based on how Val Lewton produced Cat People (1942)."
  • As originally scripted, the climax of Basket Case would have featured Belial going on a lengthy rampage through the streets of Manhattan before arriving at Sharon's apartment. The production obviously lacked the budget for such a sequence, so the solution was to replace it with a surreal dream sequence of Duane running naked through the streets, which is then revealed to be a psychic vision of what Belial is currently doing.
  • While filming a chase scene in Tangier for The Bourne Ultimatum the crew found that the foot traffic was too heavy to be controlled or redirected. As a result, the actors had to force their way through the dense crowd, lending the scene extra authenticity.
  • Casablanca:
    • In the unproduced stage play that the film was based on, the story ended with Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund running away together to America. The movie only got its iconic Bittersweet Ending because The Hays Code forbade movies from showing characters getting away with adultery.
    • Ingrid Bergman, once finished with the role, got a much shorter hairstyle for her next film, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. This saved the film's now-iconic song "As Time Goes By" from the cutting room floor. The film's composer Max Steiner felt that the song didn't work for the film, but replacing it would have required reshoots that Bergman's haircut rendered impossible to do.
  • Cats:
    • While never outright confirmed, this is widely believed to be a key reason for Macavity's more prominent role in the film compared to the stage show. In the stage show, Macavity doesn't appear until the climax of the story, when he kidnaps Old Deuteronomy. In the film, he makes multiple appearances throughout the story, and he also kidnaps Jennyanydots, Bustopher Jones, Gus, and Skrimbleshanks after their songs (supposedly because he's determined to ascend to the Heaviside Layer at all costs, and wants to eliminate his competition). It's widely believed that the filmmakers did this (in part) so that Rebel Wilson, James Corden, and Ian McKellen—who were among the biggest and most expensive names in the cast—wouldn't have to spend the entire movie in the ensemble, and each of them would have a plausible excuse to disappear from the film after their big solo.
    • Similarly: one of the biggest character changes from the stage show is Bombalurina's Adaptational Villainy. In the stage show, it's vaguely implied that she had some sort of involvement with Macavity in the past, but she's still a loyal member of the Jellicles, and she spends most of the show as a prominent ensemble player alongside her best friend Demeter, who's always by her side. In the film, on the other hand, she's apparently an outright minion of Macavity, and she only shows up to sing "Macavity the Mystery Cat" (which is apparently sung in praise of him rather than as a warning) before vanishing for the rest of the movie. This is widely believed to have been done to minimize the amount of time that Taylor Swift would need to be on-set for the film, since she was one of the biggest stars in the cast. Similarly: Bombalurina's close friendship with Demeter was likely omitted so that the filmmakers could promise Swift a solo number, since "Macavity the Mystery Cat" was a duet in the stage show.
  • In Clerks:
    • The entire plot could be considered this—director Kevin Smith happened to work at a convenience store at the time, the owners trusted him enough to film there in the off-hours, and said owners also happened to own the video store in the same strip mall. (One could also argue misfortune wrote the plot of Clerks II, as, despite Smith now being a decade older and a respected industry professional, the Quick Stop's owners refused to close the store for daytime filming, fearing the drop in customer retention closing for a month might cause.)
    • Some local hooligans jammed gum into the locks of the convenience store's giant window shade, forcing Dante to make a huge sign that said: "I ASSURE YOU WE'RE OPEN!" This gag is one of the film's most iconic images. But the truth is that Smith could only shoot in the store at night when the store was closed. Having the shades permanently down was a way to disguise the fact that it was dark outside during the daytime interior scenes.
    • This is also why the film is shot in black-and-white: there was basically no chance, given the budget, that exterior scenes (or scenes in the video store) would be shot at the point in the day when the scene was supposed to take place. In black-and-white, you can't really tell if it's 8 in the morning or 4 in the afternoon, so exterior scenes could be shot whenever. (That black-and-white filmstock was incredibly cheap in 1993 helped as well.)
    • The original script included a sequence (included in animated form as a DVD extra) of what Dante and Randall did at the funeral of Dante's ex-girlfriend. However, Smith didn't have the budget to rent a set and a bunch of extras in nice clothes, so just shot Dante and Randall entering the funeral parlor and immediately cutting to them being chased out. Smith felt that this was much funnier.
  • The opening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was originally scripted to take place in The Amazon Rainforest with Lacombe's team finding the airplanes in the center of Crop Circles. This was too expensive and it got changed to a desert so that the sequence could be filmed near Los Angeles.
  • Cube came about due to something like this:
    "We only have money for one set, one room."
    "That one room could represent a bunch of rooms that look identical."
    "Well, a bunch of identical rooms would be a maze."
    "So, why does this maze exist? Why are our characters trapped in it?"
    "I think that's the plot."
  • The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: The reason why teenaged Benjamin is played by a child actor instead of a de-aged Brad Pitt is because the special effects budget had dried up at that point and no one wanted to inflate the already giant budget.
  • The third act of Deadpool was planned to be more extravagant, but at the eleventh hour, Fox swooped in and slashed an additional $7 million off the budget. The filmmakers were forced to throw out a bulk of their planned action sequence, but devised a workaround in true Deadpool fashion: the now-signature joke of the hero accidentally leaving his bag of guns in the cab.
  • Die Hard started life as a loose adaptation of a thriller novel by Roderick Thorp called Nothing Lasts Forever, which was a sequel to a 1966 Police Procedural novel called The Detective—which was made into a film starring Frank Sinatra in 1968. Because of this, the studio was contractually obligated to offer the lead role to Sinatra. When he turned down the chance to reprise his old role, the filmmakers chose to drop any pretense of Die Hard being a sequel to The Detective, instead opting to go in a radically different direction. Among other things, this resulted in the grizzled, aging NYPD detective Joe Leland being retooled into the young, snarky NYPD detective John McClane, and the female lead being retooled as the protagonist's wife instead of his adult daughter.
  • The American adaptation of Fever Pitch (UK title Perfect Catch) was supposed to end with Jimmy Fallon's character coming to terms with the Boston Red Sox's perpetual bad luck, with the idea of "there's always next year." In fact, the Boston Red Sox were chosen because they have a fanbase but hadn't won in many years (sometimes explained as the "Curse of the Bambino"). But in Real Life, the Red Sox went on to win the World Series for the first time in over 80 years. Therefore, the film ended on a much more happy conclusion. The crew wound up having to film an extra epilogue during the 2004 World Series with Fallon and co-star Drew Barrymore, and you can even see the two of them, in character, kissing each other during a live television broadcast of fans celebrating on the field after the end of the final game. It's explained in this interview.
  • The sequence in The Fugitive where Kimble loses his pursuers in the confusion surrounding the St Patrick's Day Parade was added to the script after the filmmakers realized that their scheduled dates for location filming in Chicago included the day that the real-life parade would be held.
  • The Godfather:
    • Michael Corleone's son is named "Anthony" because that happened to be the name of the child actor who played him in the first movie. Due to the boy's young age and inexperience, he had a difficult time taking direction unless he was addressed by his real name.
    • Marlon Brando was originally slated to make a cameo in the final flashback sequence of The Godfather Part II, but backed out at the last minute. As a result, Francis Ford Coppola was forced to rewrite the scene with Michael sitting alone at a table while his brothers greet an unseen Vito just offscreen—creating the impression that Michael will never truly be able to escape his father's presence in spite of his death. He realized that this made the scene much more powerful.
    • The story of The Godfather Part III was heavily influenced by Robert Duvall's refusal to reprise his role as Tom Hagen (reportedly because he was offered a considerably smaller paycheck than Al Pacino and Diane Keaton), which prevented the film from definitively wrapping up the story of the Corleone brothers. This necessitated the film's rather disproportionate focus on Michael's relationships with his daughter and his ex-wife, as well as the introduction of his illegitimate nephew Vincent.
  • Godzilla:
    • Godzilla may owe much of his iconic cultural status to legal wrangling over the movie rights to King Kong. The Godzilla series very nearly ended at two movies after the first sequel (Godzilla Raids Again) underperformed at the box office—but when American film producer John Beck went to Toho with a proposal for a movie about King Kong fighting Frankenstein's Monster, they decided to replace Frankenstein's Monster with their own monster Godzilla (possibly due to Universal Pictures trying to claim exclusive movie right to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein), resulting in Godzilla being unexpectedly revived for a third outing. The resulting film turned out to be a major box office smash hit, with its fun and light-hearted approach to the Kaiju genre being very well-received by audiences. Contrary to popular belief, however, King Kong was much more popular in Japan than Godzilla in 1962, and Toho had always imagined him as the hero of the movie—but they couldn't make any more King Kong movies due to Merian C. Cooper (the director of the original 1933 film) attempting to claim ownership of the character's movie rights.note  As a result, they did the next best thing and made more movies featuring Godzilla, gradually turning him into their flagship character.
    • Most of Toho's giant monster movies retroactively became part of the Godzilla universe through Canon Welding so that the studio could save money by reusing their props and monster costumes in other films. Rodan, Mothra, Baragon, Varan, Manda, and Gorosaurus (and many, many more) were originally introduced in standalone movies that had nothing to do with Godzilla, but they were repurposed as supporting characters in Godzilla's world so that their costumes wouldn't go to waste. In essence: one of the first cinematic universes in the history of film was created as a cost-cutting measure.
    • The story of King Kong vs. Godzilla was partially influenced by technological constraints. Since Godzilla and Kong were both portrayed by stuntmen in rubber costumes (due to stop-motion animation being beyond Toho's budget), both monsters had to be portrayed as roughly the same size—even though Kong is less than 50 feet tall in the original 1933 film, while Godzilla is well over 100 feet tall in the original 1954 film (meaning that Godzilla should be at least twice as big as Kong). To explain how Kong doubled in size, the film portrays him as being addicted to the juice of a berry that grows on his native island, which causes him to grow enormously.
  • The Graduate famously ends with Elaine ditching her groom-to-be at the altar and running off with Benjamin, with the two breathlessly jumping on a bus with huge smiles on their faces—only for their smiles to gradually fade as the reality of their situation gradually sinks in, culminating in a final shot of the two of them looking confused and frightened as they contemplate their uncertain future. Critics loved the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, and praised the ending as one of the most brilliant things about the film. But in fact, it happened by accident: director Mike Nichols wasn't on the set the day the ending was filmed, and an assistant director filled in for him. But since the assistant director didn't know that he was supposed to yell "Cut!" when the shot was done, the cameras wound up rolling longer than they were supposed to, and caught Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross looking confused and uncertain. Evidently, they weren't acting: they were genuinely confused about why the cameras were still rolling.
  • In the 1970s, John Carpenter and Debra Hill worked on producing a suspense thriller from a script called The Babysitter Murders, about a group of teenage girls who are stalked and murdered by a serial killer in a peaceful suburban neighborhood. Due to budget constraints, they had to cut down the timeframe of the story (which was originally supposed to take place over the course of multiple days) to a single day, allowing them to keep scenery and wardrobe changes to a minimum. But they knew that the story would be much more effective if it took place on a day with some special significance—so they choose Halloween night, "the scariest night of the year". The rest is history.
  • Im Juli:
    • When Daniel and Juli are traveling through Romania, only photos are shown instead of real film footage. The reason for that is the Romanian government didn't give permission to film in their country, so they had to take photos instead.
    • Originally, Daniel and Juli were supposed to sing The Cure's "Friday I'm In Love", but the rights were too expensive. When the music supervisor was able to secure the rights for "Blue Moon" instead, the script was changed at the last minute to include a conversation on oldies.
  • Due to budget constraints, the giant octopus in It Came from Beneath the Sea was only given six tentacles.
  • James Bond:
    • In the climax of From Russia with Love, villainess Rosa Klebb was fighting James Bond using a poisoned shoe knife. The script called for her to be accidentally killed by her own weapon, but the director couldn't figure out a way to film it that didn't look ridiculous. Then someone realized that a) there was a gun on the floor from when Bond had disarmed Klebb and b) the heroine Tatiana Romanova, who had been an enemy agent recruited by Klebb before falling in love with Bond, was just standing there watching the fight. So the director changed the script to have Tatiana pick up the gun, and after some hesitation, shoot Klebb.
    • You Only Live Twice:
      • The Toyota 2000GT wasn't supposed to be a convertible, but it got converted into one due to Sean Connery's height.
      • Actress Mie Hama was having trouble learning English, while her fellow actress Akiko Wakabayashi made great progress. Since the former took this so seriously that she threatened to kill herself if fired, the producers just traded the roles between actresses: Hama went on to play Kissy, who appears much later in the story and has fewer lines, and Wakabayashi played Aki, who is in the story from the very start.
    • The famous ski jump in The Spy Who Loved Me wasn't supposed to be The Oner when it was filmed. They actually had around six cameras set up, but by the time conditions were right for the stunt only one was ready and working, so one uninterrupted shot of the stunt from start to finish is what they went with.
    • Tomorrow Never Dies was originally supposed to be Tomorrow Never Lies, but a fax to MGM studios made a typo and changed the last word to "Dies". The studio execs ended up liking the new title more and fought to keep it.
    • During most of Daniel Craig's tenure as Bond, legal disputes over the movie rights to the famous SPECTRE organization forced the writers to introduce QUANTUM as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute. But they finally managed to work out a deal in time for the aptly-named 24th film Spectre, resulting in the Retcon that QUANTUM was actually a front for SPECTRE all along.
  • Jaws:
    • Steven Spielberg couldn't get the mechanical shark to work very well, so it became mostly The Unseen, with the entire concept of the sailors using barrels to track it as a way to keep filming as though the shark was there. The film is widely credited as working far better because of the increased tension and the greater impact of scenes where the shark actually did appear.
    • Hooper was originally intended to die in the screenplay (as he did in the Peter Benchley novel). However, some footage captured by Spielberg's secondary crew, of a real great white attacking a diving cage that was visibly empty (because the stunt diver had unsurprisingly fled for his goddamned life), was so awesome that the plot was changed to let Hooper slip out of it safely, allowing them to use the shot with the empty cage. Production executive Bill Gilmore joked "The shark down in Australia rewrote the script and saved Dreyfuss's character."
    • The mechanical shark "Bruce" (or as the cast and crew ended up calling it, "The Great White Turd") had a habit of breaking down. While the actors were waiting for Bruce to be repaired again, Spielberg didn't want to waste precious shooting time, so he added a new scene. Specifically, the scene with Quint's famous monologue about the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Considering that that scene is considered to be one of the best dramatic scenes ever, it's safe to say that this was a good thing.
  • Jurassic Park's iconic T. rex chase scene was going to take place on a boat down a river, as in the book. However, it was beyond the film's budget, so it got changed to a Jeep chase through the jungle. The boat concept was reused for the theme park ride.
  • According to most accounts, Justice League (2017) was originally envisioned as a two-part film, but was cut down to just one (along with being significantly re-shot and re-edited) at the behest of the studio after most critics and audiences reacted negatively to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which was intended to set up its plot and establish its general tone and aesthetic. This is widely believed to be a key reason for many of the film's weirder storytelling decisions. To name a few:
  • The Karate Kid Part III was originally going to feature John Kreese as the main villain. Because Martin Kove had filming schedule conflicts due to shooting Hard Time on Planet Earth, Kreese was relegated to a secondary villain role, while the character of Terry Silver was created to fill the main villain role. Silver would go on to become a very integral part of the Miyagiverse, with the third season of Cobra Kai expanding on his and Kreese's backstory, while the fourth season brought him back as a main villain.
  • In Mickey Spillane's novel Kiss Me Deadly, the big MacGuffin is just a block of heroin, and the story ends with Mike Hammer burning the Big Bad alive. When it was made into a film in 1955, the Hays Code would have prevented both plot points (it forbade both graphic violence and explicit reference to drugs), so the plot had to be reworked to get past the censors. This resulted in the famous Plot Twist in which the MacGuffin turns out to be a mysterious box of ominous blinding light, and the ending where the Big Bad is horribly incinerated offscreen by the contents of the mysterious box. Amusingly, this also indirectly influenced the plots of both Pulp Fiction (which borrowed the mysterious briefcase of golden light) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (which borrowed the ending where the bad guys are horribly incinerated after opening the MacGuffin box).
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • The plot of the franchise was heavily influenced by licensing issues involving Marvel Comics characters. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Marvel sold the movie rights to most of their most popular superheroes (including Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four) to various movie studios, partly to recover from their infamous bankruptcy in 1996. After seeing how successful those studios were with their characters, they eventually got the idea to produce their own movies through their in-house studio Marvel Studios, allowing them to keep a greater share of the profits and ensure greater creative control. While going through the list of characters who they still had the movie rights to, they realized that the list included Iron Man, The Hulk, Thor, and Captain America, who were all core members of The Avengers. They instantly knew that an Avengers movie would be the ideal film to compete with 20th Century Fox's popular X-Men movies, but they also knew that it would alienate most casual moviegoers if they had to explain every character's origin story in the same movie — so they decided to give each character their own solo movie before having them all team up in an epic crossover. Later, after The Avengers turned out to be a massive success, the Guardians of the Galaxy wound up as the franchise's second major superhero team (effectively a foil for the Avengers) because they were one of the few major teams whose movie rights Marvel still owned at the time.
    • Avengers: Age of Ultron:
      • The story was notably influenced by production difficulties that plagued Iron Man and Ant-Man. In the comics, Tony Stark had a loyal butler named Edwin Jarvis, but Iron Man came out around the same time as The Dark Knight, which prominently featured Michael Caine as Bruce Wayne's loyal butler Alfred Pennyworth; the producers knew that they would be accused of ripping off the Batman comics if they kept Edwin Jarvis in the movie, so they reimagined him as an Artificial Intelligence called "JARVIS". The comics also had Dr. Henry Pym as a founding member of The Avengers and the inventor of the rogue android Ultron, but the planned Ant-Man movie ended up stuck in Development Hell so long that it didn't come out until after the first two Avengers movies. note  Since the producers had already decided to use Ultron as the villain of their Avengers sequel, they were forced to reimagine his origin story so that Tony Stark invented him instead. All of this culminated in a story with JARVIS as Ultron's Good Counterpart, where he's ultimately reborn in a robotic body as The Vision after Ultron tries to kill him. note 
      • Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's introduction was partly the result of an odd legal situation resulting from 20th Century Fox buying the movie rights to X-Men. In the comics, they were Magneto's children, and they initially fought with the evil Brotherhood of Mutants before doing a Heel–Face Turn and joining the Avengers. As a result, they're considered to be both X-Men and Avengers characters—meaning that Disney and Fox both own their movie rights, even though Fox exclusively owns the rights to Magneto and the concept of mutants. To get around this, Age of Ultron reimagines them as orphaned human test subjects who got their powers from HYDRA's experiments. They also abruptly kill off Quicksilver in the climax, possibly to avoid overlap with Fox's competing X-Men movies (which introduced Quicksilver around the same time, but left out Scarlet Witch).
    • Iron Man 3 notably reimagines "The Mandarin" (one of Tony Stark's most iconic enemies in the comics) as an English actor named Trevor Slattery, who's hired by Aldrich Killian to act as a figurehead for his crimes. The filmmakers apparently came up with that idea so that Marvel Studios could use the Mandarin without offending Asian viewers with the character's Yellow Peril connotations—but when fans reacted negatively to the change, the studio was prompted to make the short film All Hail the King, which reveals that the Mandarin is real, and Slattery merely posed as him. Later, they ran into difficulties during pre-production on Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, since the name of Shang-Chi's original Archnemesis Dad Fu Manchu (whose early stories are in the public domain) is trademarked by author Sax Rohmer's estatenote ; they realized that this gave them the perfect excuse to properly introduce the Mandarin (who was inspired by Fu Manchu anyway) by reimagining him as Shang-Chi's archenemy and father, believing that including a sympathetic Asian hero would balance out the presence of (and modernize and humanize) an Asian villain.
    • Spider-Man didn't appear in the MCU until Captain America: Civil War in 2016 (nearly a decade after the series began) due to Marvel Comics selling the character's movie rights in the late 1990s; Sony Pictures only agreed to a rights-sharing deal with Marvel and Disney after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed at the box office. This ended up having a pretty profound effect on the MCU's portrayal of Spider-Man. Most notably, Tom Holland's interpretation of Peter Parker is considerably younger than most previous versions, providing a cozy Hand Wave for why his existence never came up for eight years. note  By a meaningful coincidence, he was also introduced to the MCU around the time that Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. were considering leaving the series due to behind-the-scenes disputes, which heavily influenced the decision to portray Tony Stark as Peter's mentor and surrogate father—allowing Tony to pass the torch to Peter before his death, effectively naming him his successor.
  • In 2001, the car tuning company Teckademics put out a video called Mischief which was a collection of segments depicting street racing and basic goofing around in cars. It was successful enough for Teckademics to greenlight a sequel, but there was a problem: the footage for Mischief had been shot over a period of three years and they wanted a follow-up as soon as possible. It was later discovered that the Gumball 3000 road rally would be taking part in the United States for the first time. Someone realized that if they entered and filmed the rally, the coverage would take up the bulk of the video and they wouldn't have to film as many segments to go with it. It worked well enough to enter and film road rallies for the next two follow-ups.
  • Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
  • National Lampoon's Vacation was intended to take place at Disneyland, but Disney rejected the filming request and thus Wally World was created, represented by Six Flags Magic Mountain. It may explain why a reference to "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah" remained in the final cut during Clark Griswold's determined tirade after wrecking the car.
  • Complications arose during the production of A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master when the production ran out of money for the filming of Rick's death, which could not be removed as they had already filmed the character's funeral scene. They were forced to go for the much cheaper approach of Rick fighting an invisible Freddy in a hastily constructed dojo set before being killed.
  • Orphan: The script originally dictated for the film to be set in fall, with a pivotal scene at a Halloween party. However, when the cast and crew arrived on set (Canada, in November), a snowstorm enveloped the whole area white, making it impossible for them to disguise the season. They ended up changing the setting to winter, keeping most of the key scenes but discarding the Halloween one for obvious reasons, then adding a couple of scenes (including the climax) at a frozen pond. Many reviewers have noted that the winter setting makes the film much creepier.
  • Orson Welles suffered from low budget productions later in life. His 1952 film version of Othello had a scene where two characters have to fight each other. Unfortunately one of the costumes wasn't ready yet, so Welles decided to have the whole scene take place in a bathhouse, where the characters could be naked. It turned out to be one of the most original and talked-about scenes in the film.
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark sets up Indiana Jones running into a sword-brandishing mook, which was supposed to lead into a proper sword vs. whip fight scene that would have taken three days to film. However, by the time of the shoot, Harrison Ford was dealing with a bout of dysentery (Indy's annoyed "I don't have time for this shit!" look evidently wasn't just Ford's acting), and after consulting with Steven Spielberg, the last-minute decision was made to have Indy simply shoot the sucker.
  • RocknRolla: On the day of filming the sex scene, Gerard Butler had a nasty throat infection and Thandie Newton refused to kiss him. Guy Ritchie then improvised and revised the scene into the very funny montage.
  • Rocky:
    • Rocky and Adrian show up to the ice rink only to find that it is closed early for the holidays, and Rocky slips the custodian some cash to let them skate. The original script called for 300 extras, but Stallone had to hastily rewrite the scene when the film couldn't afford it.
    • Later, when Rocky complains about his shorts being the wrong color in the fight posters, the promoter clearly doesn't care, which marks the point when Rocky realizes he's not going to win the fight. This was a genuine prop error, as is a later scene where Rocky complains that his robe doesn't fit.
  • In Scream (1996), Ghostface's habit of cleaning his knife blade in-between kills was a suggestion from stunt performer Dane Farwell to prevent continuity errors from the amount of blood on the blade varying in each shot.
  • A prolonged chase scene in a Hall of Mirrors had to be cut from 1994's The Shadow after an earthquake shattered most of the prop mirrors on set. A CGI scene of the hero shattering mirrors with the power of his mind was used instead.
  • Sideways: Many critics noted the little detail of Miles completing the New York Times Crossword Puzzle in pen as a subtle way of showing that he was an Insufferable Genius who thinks highly of his own intelligencenote . This was completely accidental; the crew gave Paul Giamatti a pen because it was the only thing they had on hand.
  • By the time the final script of The Social Network was completed, higher-ups at the studio decided that it was still too long and it needed to be trimmed down. Director David Fincher, however, liked the final draft as it was and didn't want to cut anything, so instead of trimming it down by cutting scenes, he trimmed it down by having everyone talk as fast as they possibly could. This upped the pace of the movie immensely and became one of the best-known aspects of the film after it was released.
  • The opening of Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams was originally meant to take place at Disneyland. However, Robert Rodriguez discovered that Disney generally doesn't allow movies to shoot in their parks, not even Disney movies (note: The original Spy Kids films were distributed by Miramax Films, which is owned by Disney, and released under the Dimension Films name). This led to the scene taking place instead at a fictional amusement park with humorously impossible CGI rides. Rodriguez thinks this is mostly an improvement, although he still would have preferred it if Carmen and Juni had appeared undercover at the park wearing Mickey Mouse hats, they had to settle for propeller hats.
  • Star Trek:
    • Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:
      • Much of the plot happened due to the budget being severely slashed after Star Trek: The Motion Picture underperformed. Khan uses a single stolen Starfleet ship because this meant they only needed to build one new model, and they could modify the set of the Enterprise bridge to turn it into the Reliant's bridge. This also resulted in the action being relatively confined, and the film having to play up the rivalry between Kirk and Khan to epic proportions to make up for the two of them never actually sharing the set (Montalban was busy with Fantasy Island at the time).
      • The Kobayashi Maru was an attempt to smokescreen spoilers. Rumors were circulating that the film would feature Spock dying, and so a scene was created where Spock feigns his death during the training scenario. (Said scenario also reuses the Enterprise's bridge and the Klingon ship models and some footage from the first film, making it pretty cheap.) The idea was that anyone to hear about it would watch the first scene and assume that it was just a publicity stunt fakeout, making it a shock when he dies for real in the climax.
    • In Star Trek: Generations, the Enterprise-D's model and sets were built for TV and didn't translate well to the much larger and higher-resolution film screen. For that film, they attempted to work around it with lighting and camera tricks, but also destroyed the ship at the end to justify building a new Enterprise that would look better on the big screen for the next movie. A similar trick would be used for Star Trek: First Contact, where the brief appearance of the USS Defiant has it suffering a power outage on the bridge, allowing it to be shot in near darkness before its crew is evacuated to the Enterprise.
  • Star Wars:
    • In Return of the Jedi, the blade of Luke's new lightsaber is green because members of the VFX production team determined that a blue blade would have been too difficult to see against the blue sky of Tatooine during the battle over the Sarlacc pit. Conveniently, the climax of The Empire Strikes Back already showed him dropping his original lightsaber into a bottomless pit, so the writers had the perfect excuse to give him a new one. From the Prequel Trilogy onward, green and blue became the standard lightsaber colors for light side Force users.
    • During A New Hope, Grand Moff Tarkin is mostly seen from the waist up. Peter Cushing's boots were too small for him and, as a consequence, he wore slippers while filming most of his scenes.
    • The existence of the porgs in The Last Jedi is owed to an actual species of obtrusive avian. The island used as the setting of Luke's home is also the home of a species of puffins. The puffins are a protected species, and as such could not legally be relocated. It was determined that editing them out completely would have taken too much time and effort, so it was decided that a new alien species of bird would just be CGI'd over them.
    • Han Solo being frozen in carbonite during the events of The Empire Strikes Back was written into the plot because of the actors' contracts. Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher had already signed on for a third movie, but Harrison Ford had not. One of the series' most iconic moments was created to leave the door open for a Return of the Jedi sans Solo without completely excluding the possibility of Han returning if Ford chose to come back.
    • The Prequel Trilogy (as well as a few early Expanded Universe works) introduced the idea that "Darth" is an honorific title used by the Sith, roughly akin to "Sir" or "Lord", and that the Sith choose new names to signify the loss of their old identity. That idea started out as a cozy Hand Wave for how Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader could be the same person, which was a plot point that Lucas had not come up with until after he finished the original Star Wars. If you watch the original film with this in mind, it is clear that Vader and Anakin started out as two different people; when recalling Vader's downfall, Obi-Wan refers to him as "a young Jedi named Darth Vader", implying that he was still called "Darth Vader" when he was still a Jedi, and he later addresses him as "Darth" to his face, implying that "Darth" is actually his first name.
    • The prequels introduced the idea that Yoda was the Grand Master of the Jedi Order before the rise of the Empire, and that he gave all new Jedi apprentices their first lessons in the Force. This likely started out as a justification for Obi-Wan being Qui-Gon Jinn's apprentice in The Phantom Menace, despite him referring to Yoda as "the Jedi Master who instructed me" in The Empire Strikes Back.
    • The minor Jedi character Stass Allie was created because Gin Clarke, who played Adi Gallia in The Phantom Menace, wasn't available to reprise her role in Attack of the Clones. The producers tried having a similar-looking actress wear Clarke's costume (intending her to be The Other Darrin), but they realized that she looked too different—so they decided that she was actually Adi Gallia's cousin Stass Allie. Later, The Clone Wars wrote in a storyline where Adi was killed in battle with Darth Maul and Savage Oppress to explain why she wasn't in Revenge of the Sith.
      • The same thing resulted in the creation of Agen Kolar. Hassani Shapi was unable to return for Attack of the Clones and was replaced by Tux Akindoyeni, who looked different enough to be a separate character. In contrast with Allie and Gallia, there was extensive confusion between Kolar and Koth from 2002-2005 with many sources misidentifying Kolar as Koth.
    • In The Empire Strikes Back, the scene where Luke was captured by the Wampa on Hoth suffered similar problems to Jaws, resulting in the creature being relatively unseen in the final product. note 
  • Terminator: The entire premise of the first film was created because of this trope. The idea was sparked from a nightmare James Cameron had about a metallic skeleton walking out of a fire. Cameron felt a robot that advanced could only come from the future; but due to budget constraints, the film had to be set in the present and the Terminator had to be disguised as a human for the majority of the film. The filmmakers also came up with the rule that only organic material can travel through time (meaning that characters from the future always arrive in the past without any clothing or equipment) as an excuse for the characters not having any futuristic weaponry, which saved a lot of money on props and special effects.
  • The Sunday brothers in There Will Be Blood were re-imagined as identical twins when actor Kel O'Neill, who was originally cast as Eli Sunday, dropped out of the movie, thus forcing Paul Dano (who had been cast as Paul Sunday) to play both roles.
  • In the first Tomb Raider film, the amphibious duck vehicles in Siberia were included in the movie because the director thought they looked cool. Similarly, the procession of monks was not written in the script, but the procession happened to take place as they were filming and the monks consented to appear in the movie. In the second film, most of Lara's outfits have long sleeves, because the concealing makeup used to hide Angelina Jolie's tattoos in the first movie was not as effective as the filmmakers would have liked.
  • Transformers Film Series:
    • Michael Bay's Transformers films spend a surprising amount of their running time focusing on military personnel because of the high cost of the CGI needed to animate the titular robots, in heavy contrast to the military aspects — the vehicles are actually loaned to the production by the actual U.S. military as long as there's military promotion in the movies and the military is presented well. The further one goes into the series, the more on-screen time the robots in question have, as the budget gets bigger and CGI gets cheaper.
    • On a smaller scale, the Decepticon Bonecrusher's vehicle form is a mine sweeper. The reference photo they used for it had the sweeping mechanism appear to be several feet wide. When they got a real one on set for practical effects, they found out it was only about a foot wide. They felt the mistake made it look more menacing and built a new mechanism for the shots.
  • One of the biggest concerns while filming the original Tremors was how such a low-budget film could afford so many shots of the gigantic Graboid worms. Their solution was to alter the Graboids' design by adding tentacles to their mouths which they would use to reel in their prey, which were a lot cheaper to create and shoot. This would end up benefitting the film, as it allows for a bait-and-switch where the audience is led to believe that the snake-like tentacles are the creatures responsible for the murders before the big reveal of the Graboids.
  • The original TRON had its share of problems with the extremely primitive CGI of 1982. For one thing, the Solar Sailer's wings never quite looked solid. Secondly, there were all kinds of irregular shading and coloration on the backgrounds (which were actually hand-painted due to CGI being nowhere near ready to handle the task). Lisberger had a "Eureka!" Moment and realized that of course the Sailer wouldn't look solid and of course there would be glitches and bugs — the whole thing was set Inside a Computer System. So, he added a sound effect and the background became atmosphere while the Solar Sailer's translucent wings became an iconic image for the film.
  • TRON: Legacy features Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, as both his actual age (60 at time of filming) and as a 30-something man in flashbacks thanks to de-aging CGI. Programs in the Tronverse look exactly the same as their creators and Kevin Flynn created CLU when he was 30-something, so CLU is also played by Jeff Bridges with de-aging CGI. Since de-aging CGI is hideously expensive (and it doesn't always work that well), flashback scenes are often partially obscured by being depicted on fuzzy TVs, with blurs, or just by doing weird stuff with the screen. CLU also frequently wears a face-concealing helmet; fortunately, this makes him even more menacing. The program Tron appears briefly (again, as a digitally de-aged version of his creator's actor Bruce Boxleitner), but spends most of the movie Brainwashed and Crazy as "Rinzler" — again, making him even creepier. Plus, the fact that the computer world is artificial, but not perfect (which, in fact, it isn't, in terms of freedom...), lends credibility to the somewhat off-kilter and inhuman appearance of CLU, who uses Flynn's younger face as his own.
  • The VVitch is a period drama set in 1630s New England, but it was filmed on a shoestring budget of just $3.5 million, meaning that the filmmakers couldn't afford to replicate the period in lavish detail. To get around that, the plot starts with the central family being exiled from the Commonwealth of New England over a religious disagreement, and they spend the vast majority of the movie living in a remote farm at the edge of the forest. Though everything in their family dwelling is period-appropriate down to the last detail, it's a very simple dwelling, consisting of little more than a tiny ramshackle house and some stables. Luckily, it's a horror film about witchcraft, so the isolated setting fits the mood perfectly.
  • In Would You Rather, when Peter is forced to hold a firecracker as it explodes, Shepard Lambrick backs up against the opposite wall to avoid the blast. This was actually done to protect Jeffrey Combs' wardrobe from being splattered with gore, since the suit his character wears was on loan and the production team didn't have a spare.

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