Troubled Production / Film Serial Offenders Franchises

Even the most iconic, lucrative franchises are littered with severely troubled productions.

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Franchises with their own pages:

• DC Comics Films
• Friday the 13th
• James Bond
• Marvel Comics Films
• Star Trek (also covers the TV series)
• Star Wars

Other franchises:

Alien

There's a good case to be made for the Alien franchise being cursed, as nearly every film was subject to some form of production woes.

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• See the Creators page for Alien and Prometheus (Ridley Scott) and Aliens (James Cameron).
• Alien³ had the most beleaguered production history out of the franchise, the details of which are the stuff of industry legend.
  • After the success of Aliens, 20th Century Fox was keen to get production of a third film moving immediately, but the producers Walter Hill and David Giler wanted each individual Alien film to be unique and were unsure of the direction in which to take the series after Aliens. Consequently, the film languished in preproduction for years as they went through numerous proposed scripts and rewrites. To complicate matters, neither they nor the studio had any assurance that Sigourney Weaver would return as the lead because after Aliens, she had become a spokeswoman for the gun-control group Handgun Control and was uncomfortable with the amount of weaponry present in the film. Thus, every script had to be written with this fact in mind. William Gibson submitted a draft wherein Ripley spent much of the story in a coma, meanwhile Hicks and Bishop would be the leads caught in a four-way conflict between Weyland-Yutani, the xenomorphs, and "the Union of Progressive People" on a space station. However, his draft was rejected for its lack of originality and he declined further involvement.
  • Eric Red was then brought onboard and quickly penned a new script that had a spaceship discover the remains of the Sulaco crew (who were killed by the xenomorphs), after which the action would be moved to a small city which appears to be on Earth, but would later turn out to be a biodome in space. Said biodome would then get invaded by the aliens—who now have the ability to infect technology—with the entire station itself morphing into a giant alien by the end. Hill, Giler and Red himself all disliked the script, and the lattermost was ousted. Tentative director Renny Harlin also left soon afterward, explaining that he could not get passionate about yet another action flick like Aliens. Next, David Twohy came onboard and wrote a new script centered around a prison planet wherein the prisoners were being used by Weyland-Yutani for illegal experiments with the xenomorphs. Hill and Giler liked the script, but Twohy—sensing Creative Differences—ended up withdrawing from the project sometime thereafter. (Twohy would take his script idea and eventually make Pitch Black with it.)
  • By this point, nearly four years had passed since pre-production began. Fox soon decided that Ripley was central to the franchise and could not be left out, and Weaver was brought back with a $4 million payday, a co-producer credit and assurance that Ripley would die at the end, as Sigourney didn't want her character to be overused in sequels and was less-than-interested in a potential Alien vs Predator crossover (this was shortly after Predator 2 came out; which had a scene wherein a xenomorph skull appears on a predator ship). Vincent Ward was then hired and wrote a script with John Fasano wherein Ripley crash-lands on a planetoid satellite constructed mainly from wood (with a very thin atmosphere around the surface) and inhabited by ludite monks. The producers all liked the script and Fox—eager to get the film into production—immediately gave the greenlight for sets to be built. Crucially however, they did all this before the crew began to question whether the whole "wooden planet" idea even made sense or if it was too fantastical for the Alien universe.^note One of the producers was bewildered as to how and where one would get enough trees to maintain a wooden facility, and David Jones—one of the VFX supervisors—noted that a thin atmosphere made no physical sense because a heavy, miles-deep atmosphere is required in order to create dense enough air for humans to breathe. This means that they either accepted the script without reading it through and learning all the details, or that they were intending to browbeat Ward into changing the wooden planet idea during production. Whichever it was, 1/5 of the planned budget had already been spent by this point, and Fox told Ward to rein in his plans (even prompting then-CEO Joe Roth to ask what the fuck was going on - his words - after hearing about one of Ward's proposed ideas being to have Ripley be placed in a cryotube by "seven dwarves" in the finale)
  • Apparently, at least one or two suits at Fox were dead-set on having the film be set in a mining facility run by convicts, and so Greg Pruss and Fasano were brought in to tweak Ward's script and make it comply with a list of the executives' demands, but both left after butting heads with Ward. Ward himself left shortly thereafter, realizing that Fox was never going to let them make the film which they agreed to in the first place. Larry Ferguson then came in to try and salvage Ward and Fasano's script, only for Fox to criticize its unfavorable treatment of Ripley's character. Finally, producers Walter Hill and David Giler did an emergency rewrite which combined Ward's plot and narrative with Twohy's prison setting and Fasano's religious themes, but were unable to finish it before Fox rushed the film into production.
  • David Fincher—who at that point only had a handful of music videos to his credit—was brought on board to helm the film. He was greeted with a long list of problems; a major set had already been constructed (a monastery set built before the setting was changed from the wooden planet to a prison—but still kept and repainted as a church inside the facility), the budget was running behind, the script was still incomplete and roles still hadn't been cast. After being informed by the executives that he had to include as many of the creative ideas the producers asked for, Fincher rushed into production to make up for lost time.
  • One reason Fincher was hired was because Fox and the producers Hill and Giler both assumed that he—making his directorial debut—would be easier to control. However, Fincher soon proved to be a "my way or the highway" type, resulting in a two-month fight between him and the producers over the still-unifinished script (wherein he repeatedly criticized the studio's budgetary restrictions). Eventually, Hill, Giler and screenwriter Rex Pickett (who was also hired to rewrite the second half of the duo's script) outright abandoned Fincher and left him to finish the screenplay himself. Fincher would end up rewriting lines and entire scenes on-the-fly during production while also trying to keep Fox (who were requesting daily updates from the set) at bay.
  • Assembling the cast had its own problems. The film is infamous for killing Newt and Hicks off in the opening credits. Newt was something of a given, as the actress had aged too much to play her again (and cryogenic suspension wouldn't give her the chance to age enough for a new actress). Hicks however, was also killed because Vincent Ward felt it was an important part of the character arc he had written for Ripley—one involving her inner-struggle for redemption and survivorship. After Ward left the project, the aforementioned rewrites just kept this particular plot point and went with it. Michael Biehn was so disgusted when he learned about Hicks getting offed that he demanded to be paid as much for his image being onscreen for a few seconds as he had for filming all of Aliens.
  • Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth fell ill from Parkinson's disease a few days into filming, necessitating a replacement in Alex Thomson. The kicker here is that a line producer for the film had lost his own father to the same illness and feared that working on the film might kill Cronenweth in his condition, meaning he arranged for the replacement based on personal experience.
  • The Xenomorph's host was intended to be an ox and a sequence of it bursting from one was filmed. However, when it came time to film a live ox for certain scenes, the animal proved uncooperative and could only be used for a few, undemanding shots. That, and the crew realizing that an ox was too docile and cumbersome a host for such a ferocious creature as the Runner, led them to switch it with a rottweiler. The entire ox subplot was later salvaged for the Assembly Cut using a handful of shots—with Babe's impregnation by facehugger and the prisoners using a herd of oxen to haul the EEV out of the water taking place entirely offscreen.
  • The VFX team tried to portray the Xenomorph using a whippet in a costume, but the dog's movements were too silly-looking, forcing them to switch to a rod puppet. This created a noticeable size discrepancy as the rod puppet is clearly smaller than the full-sized suit worn by effects supervisor Tom Woodruff Jr. for closeups.
  • As the budget swelled, Fox executives became more anxious about the overall direction and meddle overtly with the overall production. They consequently forbade Fincher from shooting important scenes which they either didn't like or felt needlessly added to the film's budget (including the now Signature Scene of the Xenomorph confronting Ripley in the infirmary and a later scene wherein she confronts it in the basement), forcing the director to grab a camera and skeleton crew and film it himself.
  • Late into filming, Fox sent in a troubleshooter to investigate the spiraling production costs. Eventually, they decided to wrap up filming in England and bring the crew back to Los Angeles and put together a rough cut of the film so that Fincher could narrow down the most important scenes that still needed filming, which would then be done in LA. Producers Hill and Giler were also brought back onboard by the studio to give input, and it was deemed that the film had many issues that required significant reshoots (including a finale that was deemed too similar to Terminator 2: Judgment Day), and a pivotal sequence that had to be filmed (the death of the xenomorph!).
  • Fincher (depending on which source you believe) either spent the next year attempting to edit the film or was locked out of the editing suite altogether by the studio. Fox execs wanted the film to be cut down to as short a running time as possible, thereby allowing cinemas to screen it more times per day. The rough cut was screened for the crew, and reportedly made several members throw up due to a graphic autopsy scene, resulting in most of it being cut. The entire subplot wherein the prisoners trap the alien—only for Golic to release it later—was cut, as were several scenes which explored the prisoners' religious beliefs. Executives also didn't like the idea of having the alien burst from a dog and forbade Fincher from shooting it. However, a test screening of the film without it left many viewers wondering where the alien even came from, and thus, the studio permit Fincher to film it. The reshoots reportedly pushed the budget to $65 million and were done in Los Angeles with almost an entirely new crew. This was reportedly the last straw for Fincher, who walked away for good at the end of the reshoots, leaving the crew and studio to finish the editing process on their own. Because of the breakneck pace of the reshoots, composer Elliot Goldenthal only had a single night to create a new piece of music for the reshot finale. The finished film was released in May 1992 to a mixed critical response.
  • Even its post-production history was sordid. Fincher refused to come back and re-edit the film for the Alien Quadrilogy DVD set, as he was still bitter over the whole experience, leaving those who assembled for the project to restore the film themselves—hence the term "Assembly Cut". Likewise, Fox executives severely cut down Charles Lauzirika's documentary on the film, "Wreckage and Rape", citing that it made the company look bad. It wasn't until 2010 that the uncut documentary (albeit with the Censored Title of "Wreckage and Rage") was released on the Alien Anthology Blu-Ray set.
• Alien: Resurrection was relatively sedate. There was only one major thing that went wrong during filming — Ron Perlman injuring himself and nearly drowning while filming one sequence, which required the shooting schedule to be slightly reshuffled to give him time to recover — and production and post-production otherwise flew by without a single problem. At most, there was that water chase sequence which proved an exhausting experience for all in the cast and crew. That's not to say things were entirely okay behind the scenes, though, as writer Joss Whedon had major differences of opinion with the producers and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet over the tone and design of the film, but was overruled on every occasion. Even then, he didn't kick up much of a stink, since he was too busy setting up Buffy the Vampire Slayer to get involved in any major disputes. It's also been noted that his show Firefly a few years later has a strikingly similar set of characters as the film, which is speculated to be his effort to show what he really wanted them to be like, much like the Buffy series was his response to how the original film butchered his script.
• Most of the trouble with Alien vs. Predator was in actually getting the project to the point where they could film anything. The initial draft was written by Peter Briggs in 1991 and set to go into production once Alien³ had been released, but the rights holders for the two franchises spent the next few years battling out over the direction of the screenplay, resulting in several screenwriters coming and going and various new drafts being produced, but nothing of any real substance being accomplished. Eventually the project slipped into the background, and wasn't revived until 2002, when Paul W.S. Anderson approached the studio about producing the film. Anderson eventually got a workable screenplay by ditching everything bar a few story elements from the original Briggs draft and writing his own story from scratch. As with Alien: Resurrection, filming was pretty trouble-free, but the studio were convinced that an R-rated film would not be a box-office success and ordered Anderson to make the film PG-13 at most. There was also a spat over the writing credits, which the studio had recommended should go to Briggs and Anderson for the story, and Anderson and Shane Salerno for the screenplay, only for the Writer's Guild to inexplicably deny any form of credit to Briggs or Salerno and instead award co-story credit to Alien writers Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, who had never been anywhere near the project. The end product was a box-office success, though ironically made less money than the previous year's R-rated Freddy vs. Jason.
• Production on Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem also wasn't too bad all things considered, but suffered from a low budget — most infamously resulting in an on-set clip of the film's cinematographer angrily bemoaning the near-nonexistent lighting budget he had, which went viral a couple of years later — and Executive Meddling that firstly demanded that the film take place in a modern-day urban setting, and secondly forced the Predalien to be hastily expanded into the main villain at a late stage in the writing process. The inexperience of directors Colin and Greg Strause, who had long careers as effects designers but had never actually directed a feature film, also didn't help much.
• Alien 5 (which was supposed to go into production as Alien: Covenant was filming) got cancelled because of this and Executive Meddling. Despite James Cameron stating that the film's script was "gangbusters" and Sigourney Weaver's avid support for the film; Ridley Scott stated in an interview that the film had no script during its long development and Neill Blomkamp was unable to get one in time for production, and that Weaver and Michael Biehn hadn't even signed on yet. Fox also had no faith in the project and preferred Scott's Alien: Covenant so they canned it. It's also likely Fox wanted to avoid a repeat of Alien³. Blomkamp has since confirmed it's officially dead.

The Exorcist

• The Exorcist was a hellish experience that went over budget and schedule ($4.5 million and 105 days to $12 million and over 200 days plus 6 months of post-production!).
  • William Friedkin proved to be a Prima Donna Director who didn't care much for the cast and crew and intentionally made the set as hostile as possible in order to make the actors appear genuinely stressed on camera, even firing guns at random moments to make doubly sure that the actors were constantly on edge. During post-production, he disliked Lalo Schifrin's would-be score so much he threw the ttapes away in the studio parking lot, choosing instead to score the film to pre-existing music (most notably Mike Oldfield's "Tubular Bells").
  • Ellen Burstyn complained that for the scene Chris is telekinetically thrown against a wall, the stuntmen were pulling her too hard... and Friedkin's response was a take so strong Burstyn suffered permanent damage!
  • Massive air-conditioning units were brought in for the climactic exorcism, bringing the temperature on the set down close to freezing. Linda Blair had to spend the entire time dressed in nothing but a thin nightgown and developed a lifelong dislike of cold temperatures.
  • To make it worse, there were strange events (such as the interior sets of the MacNeil residence getting burned) that led people to consider the film cursed.
• Exorcist II: The Heretic had it even worse:
  • Friedkin and writer William Peter Blatty were repeatedly asked for ideas for a sequel but turned the studio down on finding out that the producer assigned the project, Richard Lederer, wanted them to just make a quick-and-dirty sequel to exploit the first film's success. Instead, a screenplay was commissioned from William Goodhart, whose only other screenplay credit was the obscure 1969 film Generation; the exact contents of Goodhart's screenplay have never been made publicly known, but apparently mixed in the first film's themes with a lot of odd metaphysical symbolism.
  • The studio then hired John Boorman to direct the film — an odd choice when you consider that he actually disliked the first film, and was more interested in the metaphysical aspects of Goodhart's script than any of the actual Christian themes. Boorman and co-writer Rospo Pallenberg then scrubbed all the remaining Christian elements from the script, leaving it barely recognisable as an Exorcist sequel. They then had to perform further last-minute rewrites which swapped out Regan's mother Chris for Sharon, the nanny from the first film, after Ellen Burstyn refused to appear as Chris again.
  • Filming was where things really started to go wrong. The production was refused permission to film at almost every location they asked for (including the house from the first film), leading to them having to recreate everything on the studio backlot and inflating the $9,000,000 budget all the way up to $14,000,000. Linda Blair was already in the midst of her drug habits and constantly turned up late to shooting, to the point where she actually considered it an achievement that she was only 20 minutes late one day. Co-star Richard Burton had his own substance issues, as he was constantly drunk on-set and frequently lashed out at Boorman and his co-stars. Boorman was laid low by a serious lung infection for a month, resulting in Pallenberg — who had never directed a film before — taking over as director for many key sequences. The crew also had no idea how to realize the swarms of locusts that were required for the climax, resulting in them using a combination of styrofoam "packing peanuts" fired from an air cannon, and actual locusts with their legs clipped, with mixed results. On top of that, the locusts could only survive for a day or two in the American climes, resulting in them having to be constantly replaced at considerable cost.
  • When the film was finally released it was laughed off the screen during its premiere, leading to Boorman hastily producing a re-edited version, which was no better received. The studio had granted Boorman to do the final cut of the movie without any kind of studio oversight. The result was considered such a disaster that no major studio has allowed that since for any movie.
• The Exorcist III had probably the smoothest production of the franchise, though even then there was a lot of friction between writer-director William Peter Blatty and the studio, who forced him to reshoot large sections of the film, scrapping all the footage showing Brad Dourif as Father Karras and recasting his original actor, Jason Miller in the role. However, most of the reshot footage was the same script-wise (with some segments and bits of dialogue not included, such as the Gemini Killer psychologically toying with Kinderman, suggesting he might be the real deal or an accomplice who was never caught or possibly someone with psychic powers who can sense the killings - which ironically sounds similar to an episode of The X-Files Dourif was in), and the only major alteration was changing the set of the disturbed ward cell to look more like a modern one, as opposed to the medieval torture chamber-esque look they went for in the initial shoot. Jason Miller was also suffering from alcoholism and wasn't able to remember his long lines of dialogue, so they brought Dourif back in, switching between Father Karras (Miller) and the Gemini Killer (Dourif) to give the film even more of a Surreal Horror tone. They also added a completely new character called Father Morning, who is somewhat clumsily inserted into the film to show up in the climax, both to provide an actual exorcism (since they obviously couldn't call it an Exorcist movie without an exorcism) and to add some gore shots with horrific hellish visions. The ending was also changed; the original ending was rather anti-climactic, with Lt. Kinderman simply shooting Karras after the attempt on his daughter's life, while the reshot version made it a much more horrific and disturbing, with the demonic force putting up much more of a fight and also adding a bit more to the end of Kinderman's character arc. The ending burial of Karras was used with a scene that was originally earlier in the film, where they excavated Karras' grave to discover the body within was not his own. While the original cut has a scene that elaborates on who the body is, it's only briefly addressed in the final film. Blatty also didn't get along too well with star George C. Scott, though for the most part, they were able to put their differences aside and work together without too much trouble.
• Exorcist: The Beginning may have had the most troubled production of the entire franchise:
  • The screenplay had a long and painful gestation process; Blatty refused to get involved, resulting in over a decade being spent trying to get a screenplay together, with the producers eventually settling on a draft by Caleb Carr, which incorporated elements from an earlier screenplay by William Wisher Jr.
  • John Frankenheimer was initially hired as director, but suddenly died just a few weeks before shooting was due to start. This led to Paul Schrader taking over the project, and significantly rewriting Carr's script, which he heavily disliked, leading to a public spat between the two, and Carr going so far as to endorse the eventual reshot version over Schrader's.
  • Filming was relatively smooth, though the studio pushed Schrader into adding more gore than he really wanted to. Matters came to a head after Schrader turned in his first edit, however — the studio promptly fired him, as they thought the finished product was too slow, too talky and still wasn't gory enough for their liking.
  • Renny Harlin was then brought in and asked to film a few new scenes and re-edit the movie to make it closer to what they wanted. Harlin told them that Schrader's version was complete crap and unsalvageable, and without any intention of actually signing onto the project, said that they'd be better off reshooting the project from scratch. Much to his shock, the producers agreed to this and offered Harlin an even bigger budget and paycheck than they had given Schrader. Harlin accepted the offer and rewrote the screenplay alongside new writer Alexi Hawley.
  • Immediately, Harlin ran into the problem of nearly the entire cast (barring only lead actor Stellan Skarsgård) either being unavailable for the reshoots or refusing to return out of loyalty to Schrader. Filming again went relatively smoothly, though this time there was a lot more press attention, leading to the studio having to step up security.
  • Eventually, Harlin's version was released in the summer of 2004... and got torn apart by critics and barely broke even at the box-office. This led to the studio eventually releasing Schrader's version (now called Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist) the following year, without any real effort at marketing it, though it did at least get some positive reviews, in particular from Roger Ebert, and was even endorsed by William Peter Blatty himself.

Ghostbusters

• Ghostbusters became one of the biggest smash hits of The '80s, breaking box-office records and spawning a franchise that has continued for decades afterward. Yet, the journey from script to screen was fraught with production difficulties, cost overruns and a production team that was completely unprepared for a project of that size, as this Vanity Fair feature explains:
  • The script was a labor of love for Dan Aykroyd, who was inspired by his family's history conducting spirit channeling and seances in their northern Ontario home. The project was originally envisioned as a buddy comedy with Aykroyd and John Belushi, but things immediately hit a snag early on when Belushi died midway through the scripting process, throwing Aykroyd's original idea out the door. In response, Aykroyd asked fellow Saturday Night Live cast member Bill Murray to come onboard with the project, suggesting that he could get a studio to greenlight his dream project, The Razor's Edge, in exchange for appearing in Ghostbusters. (It was also noted by sources that Murray refused to commit to the project officially until the 11th hour, a trend which would manifest itself later on down the line with the sequels.)
  • Soon after, Ivan Reitman came onboard to direct, while Harold Ramis agreed to not only act as the third member of the group, but also help Aykroyd rewrite the script. When the idea and production team were pitched to Columbia Pictures chairman Frank Price in 1983, Ivan threw out a pie-in-the-sky budget of $25 million — and Price agreed. Reitman came to realize immediately after that this would mean they would need to re-write, shoot and edit the film in roughly a year so it could hit its projected summer 1984 release date.
  • The script rewrites got underway immediately, with the group (sans Murray, who was filming The Razors Edge) decamping to Martha's Vineyard and working around the clock to get the plot hammered out. Aykroyd's script, as originally written, was an effects-heavy script that Reitman estimated to cost $300 million to produce. Aykroyd and Raimis reworked the concept into a "going into business" story set in contemporary New York. Large chunks of the plot (which Reitman later admitted were too shocking) were chopped out. The team soon realized that they would need more than 200 effects shots to see their vision brought to the screen, and most of the other major effects houses with busy with tentpole films. In response, Reitman got visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund to create his own FX house, Boss Film Studios. The only problem was that by the time all the necessary arrangements were completed, the team was ten months out from a release date without a single frame of footage to show for it. Designers began creating creatures and ghosts for a script that hadn't been fully completed at that point.
  • Filming got underway in October 1983 and everything began to run smoothly, though the team soon hit a snag when they realized that the "Ghostbusters" trademark had been used by a similar property, Filmation's Ghostbusters. The team attempted to work around this by having different logos bearing the names Ghostbreakers and Ghoststoppers, though Columbia eventually negotiated the rights to the name. The rest of the shoot was trouble-free.
  • Shutting down the streets outside the location of Dana’s building for the climax created a horrific chain reaction of traffic jams until about half of Manhattan was completely gridlocked. On the commentary Reitman recounts that none other than Isaac Asimov, who just happened to be at the location, berated him over the mess, with the first words spoken to him by one of the greatest science fiction writers in history being “Are you the ones responsible for this?”
  • Production hitches reared their head again once shooting was completed. Edlund's FX studio, which was already working around the clock with multiple effects teams, was ordered by Reitman to require an additional 100 FX shots (which prompted him to, as the featurette explains, "meet [Reitman] in the parking lot with my samurai sword"), though this number was eventually trimmed down. The first industry screening was an unmitigated disaster, with Price being met with long stares and regrets after he found himself laughing alone in a screening room. Several of the Stay-Puft Marshmellow Man suits caught on-fire, and the FX takes were barely edited in to the final print just before it went to theaters.^note The line “Nobody steps on a church in my town” was added to try to cover for a shot where the Marshmellow Man very noticeably clips through a church, which there was no time to redo. Yet the final film was a smash hit, grossing nearly $300 million worldwide and igniting a wave of Expanded Universe offerings including an action figure line and animated series.
• Ghostbusters II was fraught with its own set of issues, and indirectly led to a series of stallouts and delays that led the film series to be put on ice for more than two decades.
  • At first, nearly all of the parties involved in the making of the first film had no interest in doing a sequel, as they thought the original should be considered a standalone work. After a meeting with CAA agent Michael Ovitz in Los Angeles, however, Reitman, Murray, Ramis and Aykroyd all realized they could do it. This was also the meeting in which a formative agreement, in which Aykroyd, Ramis and Murray all needed to be on the same page to greenlight any further sequels, was signed, which would come into play in later years.
  • Filming began in November 1988 in New York with a scant 67-day shooting schedule. While filming of the live-action material progressed, Industrial Light and Magic (the FX studio hired for the sequel) found itself running into significant problems with many of the effects. The design for the Scoleri Brothers had to be adapted several times when the concept changed. Vigo the Carpathian saw his design shift multple times over the course of production, with his final look being worked on right up until the last minute. Much like the first film, ILM had nine units working overtime to try to get their original shots done, and eventually gave up and admitted that they couldn't do any more, and several planned scenes (including one where ghosts pour out of the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House) were scrapped.
  • While principal photography was completed on time, the production crew realized they needed to go back for additional reshoots after test audiences complained that several of the concepts in the film (including "good and bad slime", Vigo and some of the ghosts) needed better explanations. With only three months before the film was set to hit theatres, Reitman and the crew went back for additional location shooting. According to the Ghostbusters: The Complete Visual History book, the final confrontation with Vigo was changed, literally at the last minute - the Art Museum set had already been 3/4 struck, necessitating some very complex shooting around the gaps in the set.
  • Not helping matters was a release date change to June 16th, 1989 — a week before the hotly-anticipated Batman (1989) was set to premiere. The final film was a box-office success (netting $215 million against a $37 million budget), but was later criticized by various groups, including Murray and Ernie Hudson, complaining that the material had been watered down and taken over via Executive Meddling to force more special effects and kid-related humor into the product. The film franchise would then go into a state of Development Hell, with various attempts at getting the franchise off the ground stalling out until...
• Ghostbusters (2016):
  • More than 20 years of false starts, rejected pitches and casting announcements went nowhere after the release of the second film, with attempts by Columbia (and later, Sony Pictures) to push development forward stalling out due to Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis having long-standing veto contracts, which were put in place during the meeting with Ovitz in Los Angeles in 1989. As chronicled by Midnight's Edge, the death of Ramis on February 24, 2014 caused the power balance between the original trio of himself, Reitman and Murray to shift completely, and as detailed in leaked emails from the Sony hack, studio chief Amy Pascal pushed Reitman out of the production process by courting Paul Feig in secret. Feig gave Pascal a pitch focusing on an all-female Ghostbusters team in a world where ghosts aren't fully known to the public, and Pascal agreed to start development.
  • Pre-production was officially announced in October 2014, and Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon were announced as the main stars, alongside a production slate that was intended to jumpstart a cinematic universe called Ghost Corps, similar to what Marvel had done with their comic properties. It was revealed soon after that Tom Rothman (who took over from Amy Pascal in the wake of the Sony hack) had cut the film's budget by $15 million just before the start of production. Further e-mail leaks showed that the original film's surviving cast were being aggressively courted by Sony, to the point of threatening to sue Murray if he didn't appear in a cameo role.
  • Although the progress of production was seemingly peaceful for a few months and filming was held through the summer of 2015, a series of leaks followed that shed light on the frustrations of both the studio and its stars. In February 2016, an anonymous production assistant (posting on the Encyclopedia Dramatica forums) wrote a post alleging that there were significant production problems occurring behind the scenes. The poster alleged that McCarthy was getting into fights on-set with Feig, largely because she was a huge fan of the source material and wanted something that was in-line with The Real Ghostbusters. In turn, one of the (unnamed) lead actresses was getting into arguments with McCarthy, and the production crew had to pacify them by giving them equal screentime and lines. The anonymous poster also alleged that the script was reportedly terrible, that the cast and crew were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements to avoid a repeat of the Fantastic Four (2015) situation, and that Wiig and Feig were lamenting the situation they found themselves in.
  • All of this was a prelude to the release of the first trailer, which didn't go over well, causing it to become the most downvoted movie trailer in YouTube's history. As a back-and-forth battle began in the press between representatives from the production and fans, Feig (who was prone to encouraging the cast members to ad-lib their lines) went back for reshoots. According to Aykroyd in an interview after the film's release, Feig didn't shoot connecting scenes that were suggested to him and was forced to go back and shoot these scenes once principal photography was complete, adding an additional $30-40 million in reshoots to the budget.
  • The resulting product was a Box Office Bomb, making $229 million worldwide against a $144 million budget. While the movie did make back its budget in the international box office, it struggled to recoup the money spent on advertising, resulting in a $70 million loss for Sony.
• Ghostbusters: Afterlife was an attempt by Sony to Win Back the Crowd with a Distant Sequel to the original films. While its filming process was ultimately trouble-free, development and post-production were marred by delays, not helped by the COVID-19 Pandemic.
  • The idea of a Ghostbusters III was batted around for nearly three decades, with stories dating back to the '90s (buoyed by comments made by Aykroyd) about bringing on actors such as Chris Farley and Adam Sandler as new members of the team. The unused script, Hellfire, had elements transposed into Ghostbusters: The Video Game, and was treated by the surviving cast members as the closest thing to a proper third film up to that point. Plans by Aykroyd and Ivan Reitman wouldn't hit their stride until 2019, where Jason Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan wrote a script that everyone (including the notoriously gun-shy Murray, who was one of the last to sign on to the project) thought honored the history of the franchise.
  • The film ultimately completed its filming in Calgary, Alberta from July-October 2019, but the global pandemic pushed its release from July 2020 to November 2021, along with a mixed-at-best response to what was revealed so far in promotional materials. In January 2021, a clip from the Spanish version of MasterChef Junior (!) revealing the new Ghost Muncher went viral for all the wrong reasons as fans criticized its design. Luckily, the final product (despite receiving criticism over its screenplay and excessive fanservice) ultimately was a box-office success, earning nearly $200 million against a $75 million budget (half that of the 2016 film) before home media sales.

Godzilla

• Godzilla (1954): Haruo Nakajima, one of the actors inside the Godzilla suit, could barely move the first suit at all, as the latex materials used for its construction weighed over 200 pounds. When he was able to move it, he would collapse from heat exhaustion within minutes. A lighter suit was made, but both Nakajima and fellow Godzilla suit wearer Katsumi Tezuka continued to have problems with heat exhaustion and breathing difficulties, and they also got blisters from the costumes' rough interiors. Even putting air holes in the costumes did not solve the problem due to the low air quality in the studio. Despite these problems, Nakajima greatly enjoyed the role, and continued to perform inside the Godzilla suit until 1972's Godzilla vs. Gigan.
• Godzilla vs. Gigan had a very long and complex production compared to most of the other films in the series, going through at least three distinct phases which each would have resulted in a very different finished product. From the beginning, the Toho Company planned for the movie to be a return to form after the extremely experimental and disturbing Godzilla vs. Hedorah baffled moviegoers and got its director banned from the series. The initial script, labeled Godzilla vs. the Space Monsters: Earth Defense Directive, was going to be epic in scale, featuring three established monsters (Godzilla, Anguirus, and King Ghidorah) alongside three brand new monsters (Gigan, Megalon, and Majin Tuol). Likely for budgetary reasons (making three new suits would have been extremely expensive), the Space Monsters script was thrown out and the project underwent huge changes to become The Return of King Ghidorah. This second draft again featured six monsters: Godzilla, Rodan, Ghidorah, and Varan, who were all established, as well as Gigan and Mogu, who were new. However, there was no longer a usable Varan suit, so this would have also required three new suits. The script underwent another huge revision, becoming Godzilla vs. Gigan, which featured Godzilla, Anguirus, Ghidorah, and Gigan, meaning only one new suit needed to be made. The movie relied heavily on monster footage from previous films in order to pad out its climax, and in general, it features low production values that do not hint at how much Toho had initially had planned for it. Megalon later showed up in the following film, which was actually even worse, but none of the other new monsters planned ever made it to the screen.
• Godzilla vs. Biollante: After The Return of Godzilla, Tomoyuki Tanaka wanted a direct sequel to be made. However, after King Kong Lives bombed at the box office, Tanaka was cautious on how the series would be handled. Kazuki Omori, who became director of the film, had a Teeth-Clenched Teamwork relationship with him (he blamed Tanaka for the quality of the series in the 70s, as Ishiro Honda did, but Honda was more respectful about it. Akira Ifukube on the other hand...). They both settled on making a contest with five entries, and Omori then decided to modify the screenplay (which took three years) until the film became what it is.
• A recurring problem from throughout the series concerns the fact that working with the monster suit was never not difficult. This article by Daniel Dockery for Cracked, detailing various production quirks from throughout the series, notes that, during the shots where Godzilla rises out of the sea, the actor inside the Godzilla suit was always at risk of drowning if they pulled him out too slow (in which case he ran out of air) or too fast (in which case his breathing apparatus might've gotten pulled out of his mouth). The water also made the 200-pound suit that much heavier. Furthermore, the suits were frequently stolen; this is why Godzilla had to be redesigned after The Return of Godzilla, and another suit was stolen during production of Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth and remained missing for several weeks before turning up at the bottom of a lake; fortunately, it was able to be repaired in time for use in the film.

Halloween

• Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers took six years to get made after the tepid reception of the last film in the Halloween series, The Revenge of Michael Myers in 1989. Its tribulations almost killed the series.
  • Series producer Moustapha Akkad had been intending to make a sixth Halloween film despite the tepid reception of Revenge, meeting with screenwriter and series super-fan Daniel Farrands in 1990. Farrands' ideas stoked Akkad's interest; he had compiled a notebook filled with research on the series, including a timeline, bios for every character, a "family tree" of the Myers and Strode families, and research on the runic symbol of Thorn that had appeared in Revenge. His intent was to bridge the first two films with the fourth and fifth^note For those wondering where the third film fits in: that film, Season of the Witch, was a non-canon spinoff that featured none of the series' characters and was subsequently ignored, viewed as something of an oddball in the series today., and also to explain why series villain Michael Myers keeps coming back: he had been put under an ancient Celtic curse that compelled him to murder his entire family, one that would be passed on to another young child after he completed his task.
  • Farrands was brought on to write the film, but a series of complicated legal battles held up production for years until Miramax Films (via Dimension Films) bought the rights to Halloween. Writing finally began in 1994; several screenplays by different writers were gone through and deemed insufficient until Farrands' final draft, dubbed Halloween 666, was finalized after eleven drafts. From there came casting. While Donald Pleasence reprised his role as Dr. Loomis, Danielle Harris did not return as Jamie Lloyd due to both salary disagreements and Creative Differences, namely how Harris resented the fact that Jamie was to be killed off in the opening, feeling that her character was no longer important to the series.^note This was in stark contrast to Revenge, where Harris' returning as Jamie was mandated by Akkad, to the point where he fired the original screenwriter for refusing to heed this instruction and writing Jamie as being far older than Harris could credibly have played. As a result, Jamie was recast. Fred Walton was tapped to direct, but dropped out and was replaced with Joe Chappelle.
  • Then production began, and the real problems hit. Shooting in Salt Lake City proved challenging due to an early winter that frequently interrupted production, and Chappelle and producer Paul Freeman had to rewrite the ending on the fly to meet deadlines. Furthermore, Freeman frequently inserted himself into production, rewriting dialogue and action scenes, removing a number of scenes from the script, taking it upon himself to direct second-unit shots, and sending the crew home when important scenes needed to be shot. Freeman's handling of the production was so inept that Miramax eventually stepped in, kicked him off the film, and ordered reshoots. Chappelle, meanwhile, had never been too enthusiastic about the project to begin with, as he found the Halloween series dull and had actually wanted to direct Hellraiser: Bloodline (which, in a twist of fate, he got to finish up after original director Kevin Yagher quit), leading to him making the reshoots much Bloodier and Gorier.
  • Post-production went no better. Lead actress Marianne Hagan described the test screenings in early 1995 as "consist[ing] primarily of 14-year-old boys" who disliked the ending and the Cult of Thorn storyline. This led to another round of reshoots to craft a new ending, but there was a big problem: Donald Pleasence could not be present for them on account of having died in February. Not only was a new ending shot anyway, but over twenty minutes of other footage was changed as well, leaving gaping Plot Holes that rendered the film nearly incomprehensible.
  • When it was released that September, Curse had the largest opening weekend out of the entire series but was ravaged by critics and fans, and plunged fast. One of its fiercest critics was Farrands, who hated the final film's deviations from his script. The film's failure resulted in the series getting a partial Continuity Reboot three years later in 1998 with Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, which took only the first two films as canon.
  • Eventually, when the film was shown on TV, someone unearthed the original Producer's Cut from before the reshoots. While it cuts the violence and profanity for TV airing, it otherwise retains most of the original content, and Farrands has given it his tepid (if still disappointed) approval. The full, uncensored, remastered Producer's Cut was finally released on home video (after having been a popular bootleg for years) in 2014 as part of the collector's edition box set of the entire series, with a standalone release the following year. The general reception of the Producer's Cut is that, while the film remains very uneven (mostly due to the Curse of Thorn storyline being divisive among fans), it's still at least somewhat redeemed from the incomprehensible theatrical cut.
• Halloween II (2009) was also a stressful and torturous production for everyone involved, and sent the franchise back to the grave for almost a decade:
  • After the success of the 2007 reboot, The Weinstein Company wanted to quickly greenlight a sequel, but Rob Zombie wasn't interested in returning, citing the stress and Executive Meddling of the first film, and wanted to move on with his career. The studio went through about ten scripts and seven directors before he begrudgingly agreed to sign on again, assuming it would be a quicker and easier production than the first film, and worried about what another filmmaker would do to his version of the characters. He also saw the project as an opportunity to create something very different for the series, and wanted it to be the final film in the franchise.
  • While location scouting for the film in Atlanta, Zombie learned that the studio had commissioned another script with another writer behind his back, and he quit the production in anger, but they eventually convinced him to return. Then the day before the first day of shooting, they cut two weeks from the schedule. Since Zombie refused to cut anything from his script, filming was extremely rushed, usually with about twelve pages being shot every day, with the local crew unprepared to handle it, and the film ended up going over budget. Some scenes from the script ultimately couldn't be filmed, and countless scenes were written and rewritten during the course of production. At the very end of filming, Zombie even kept shooting into an extra day in secret without the studio's permission.
  • The film ran into difficulties with securing Malcolm McDowell to reprise his role of Dr. Loomis. His deal to return wasn't finalized until filming was well under way, and most of his scenes were rewritten and shot in a single day at a hotel. Daeg Faerch was also supposed to reprise his role of young Michael Myers, but it was obvious when he got to set that he had outgrown the role, so Chase Wright Vanek was brought in as a last minute recast. The studio also vehemently disagreed with Zombie's choice to cast Mary Birdsong as Loomis' assistant, feeling that the role should've gone to a better-known actress, despite the character being a small role. She was ultimately cast and flown in hours before filming her scenes.
  • Making everything worse was the winter weather in Atlanta, which was so rainy, the crew had to bring in rain machines to keep it consistent. At least one outdoor set was washed away by the rain, and one day a blizzard came through Georgia, forcing the crew to accommodate the foot of snow on the ground. The sequence of Laurie running outside the hospital was especially challenging for Scout Taylor-Compton, who was wearing little more than a hospital gown in the freezing rain, while Tyler Mane was wearing a wetsuit.
  • One entire day's worth of film stock was accidentally x-rayed at the airport, ruining the footage, and Zombie had no choice but to reshoot all of it with no extra time. This included all of Richard Brake's scenes, and he had to quickly fly back from London with just a few hours' notice.
  • The studio insisted on adding more gore at the last minute, and inserts were quickly filmed in Los Angeles during the editing process, in some cases just a couple weeks before the film opened. They also found the ending (where Laurie is fatally shot by the police) too downbeat, so they ordered it reshot to resemble a more traditional slasher ending (where Laurie surrenders to police and is confined to a mental institution). Because of the short schedule, Zombie could not complete his cut on time as intended, forcing the theatrical release to go out with a shorter cut and an almost incomprehensible story.
  • The film was panned by critics and polarized fans of the series. Some praised Zombie's ambition and fresh take on the franchise. Others found the film to be pretentious, excessively violent, nihilistic, and all around confusing, as well as too much of a departure for the franchise. The film disappointed at the box office, grossing only $33 million in the US and $39 million worldwide (on a $15 million budget). Fortunately, Zombie was able to finish a director's cut for the DVD and Blu-ray release, which was considerably better received for its improved character development, more coherent story, and more powerful ending, and it has amassed a cult following.^note Zombie has ultimately disowned the theatrical cut, and it's increasingly difficult to find. However, Zombie was denied permission to include his four hour documentary on the film's production (a staple of his films, including his first Halloween) because it reflected negatively of The Weinstein Company. While a sequel was greenlit a few years later, Zombie once again refused to return, and it ultimately fell into Development Hell. The Weinstein Company lost the rights to the franchise in 2015 because it took too long to put a new film into production. Blumhouse ended up taking over, and produced a direct sequel to the orignal film in 2018.

Hellraiser

The original Hellraiser (adapted from the novella The Hellbound Heart) was a surprise smash hit at the box office and came to be seen as a classic of the horror genre, spawning a wave of sequels in the process. However, as time went on, Executive Meddling and a Money, Dear Boy mentality crept their way into the production cycle, leading the series to be sent straight-to-video for many years. Needless to say, many of the productions ran headlong into this trope.

• The original film's problems were largely caused by the fact that the production had No Budget and series creator Clive Barker had to find creative methods of dealing with issues. Shooting in a house with only a single camera to spare, Barker was forced to rely on overhead and zoom shots due to shooting constraints and limited areas to move in. Several of the effects (including Larry's blood being sucked into the floor and Frank's rebirth) were either reshot due to looking unconvincing or required additional funding from New World Pictures to complete because of cost overruns. Barker himself has said that the dodgy nature of the FX can be traced to him completing the majority of the work over a single weekend (while getting drunk with a Greek animator) after filming wrapped. The original soundtrack by industrial band Coil was also thrown out, with Barker commenting that it made "my bowels churn", and replaced with an orchestral score by Christopher Young. Barker also had to deal with the MPAA to get the rating down from an X to an R. Despite the hardships, the film was a major success, earning more than $14 million against a $1 million budget.
• Hellbound: Hellraiser II fared marginally better from a production standpoint, but still had to deal with initial funding boosts from New World Pictures drying up and their initial screenplay (which would have seen Larry return in a major role) thrown out after Andrew Robinson declined to reprise his role. Some minor incidents (including the actor who played the Chatterer being injured by one of the flying hooks during the climactic confrontation, and the MPAA once again forcing cuts) also occurred, but the film was once again a success, bringing in $12 million against a $3 million budget. New World's funding problems led the production to transfer to the Weinstein-owned Dimension Films, which led to...
• Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth:
  • The film was stuck in Development Hell for several years, largely due to the underperformance of Barker's then-recent film Nightbreed, New World's financial problems, and the actress who played Julia (who was set up to be the franchise's Big Bad) deciding not to reprise her role. It took former New World executives establishing new production company Trans-Atlantic Pictures before a deal could be struck, and even then, the executives initially refused Barker's asking fee for the project, claiming that they wanted a "cheap and nasty" film.
  • While Hellbound director Tony Randel was originally intended to direct the film, he was replaced after his vision was deemed "too bleak" (it would have ended with lead character Joey making a Deal with the Devil to become Pinhead's bride in exchange for getting her "star reporter" dream). He was replaced with Anthony Hickox, who had to deal with a breakneck six-week shooting schedule, cast concerns (Doug Bradley has gone on-record as saying the makeup used on the film was irritating and his least favorite in the franchise, while actress Aimee Leigh complained about having to go topless in a sex scene, requiring the production team to work around it by having another character cup her breasts during shooting). Hickox also had to deal with the cast pushing back against the "Black Mass" scene, with them complaining that it was sacrilege due to being shot in North Carolina (which runs socially-conservative).
  • After filming wrapped, Miramax agreed to distribute the film in the U.S., but ran into problems during the editing process. Depending on which source is to be believed, Hickox either received rave reviews from Bob Weinstein and gave additional money for him to reshoot the ending, or Weinstein was swayed by Barker (who was approached to give his opinion on the film) to fix the film, via suggesting additional scenes like the extended gore shots in the nightclub massacre scene, and Terri's "bondage" during the finale. It was enough to get Barker an executive producer credit for the film. In a repeat of what happened with the original film, the first version of the soundtrack (which was heavily rock-influenced) was thrown out after test screenings and replaced with another orchestral score, which was hurriedly put together in just three weeks.
• Described by Doug Bradley as "the shoot from Hell", Hellraiser: Bloodline's production was so fraught with difficulties that it became the last theatrically-released film in the series for over two decades:
  • Originally intended to be an anthology film that would be set in three time periods, the script was greenlit by Miramax (who were now firmly in charge of the franchise) without needing an online. Soon after, though, the company refused to provide a budget to help realize the scope of the film, which would have included more special effects and violent encounters between new character Angelique and Pinhead. Just about the only thing that was problem-free were the makeup and character design provided by Gary J. Tunnicliffe, who worked on the previous film and began to take a larger role in the production, helping streamline Bradley's makeup for easier use and creating the design for Angelique's appearance as a Cenobite.
  • Despite shooting being completed on-time and within budget, the production was fraught with issues, including key personnel either leaving or unable to work due to personal emergencies, sets being damaged by sprinkler malfunctions, several crew members falling sick and (according to Bradley) the camera crew and art department all being replaced within the first week. Director Kevin Yagher (who had success with films like Child's Play and the Tales from the Crypt' series) was called in to direct — according to Tunnicliffe, despite his love for the outline and vision for the film, he ran afoul of executives due to his behavior and shooting style.
  • According to a documentary produced by Youtube creator Midnight's Edge, tensions boiled over after filming wrapped, with Yagher refusing to show footage from the film to Bob Weinstein, citing Director's Guild of America guidelines over a clause that allowed him to take up to 12 weeks to edit the film before showing his work to the production company. This caused no end of strife, with Weinstein reportedly planning to can him and seemingly getting into at least one physical altercation over the disagreement (which was an open secret on-set).
  • Miramax executives asked for several script changes, including Pinhead being introduced earlier in the film and a Framing Device where third-act protagonist Paul Merchant narrates his ancestors' tales. Additional reshoots were scheduled, and Yagher walked away from the production, claiming he was burned out. In his stead, Joe Chapelle (of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers fame, which is also an example of this trope) was brought in to helm reshoots. In all, what was originally intended to be a six-week shoot ballooned to twice that amount, via three additional sets of two-week shoots that occurred over the next three months. Large swaths of the past and future segments of the film (including more focus on Angelique, a greater explanation of Paul Merchant's identity and philosophy and a different ending) were excised from the final cut. Incensed over the situation, Yagher removed his name from the film and an Alan Smithee credit was used in his place.
  • The film was Not Screened for Critics and only made $9 million against a $4 million budget (not counting reshoots). The experience led to the franchise going Direct to Video for many years and started the trend of the franchise's budgets being slashed for each film.
• While Hellraiser: Inferno didn't have anywhere near the kind of contentious problems Bloodline had faced, it still faced funding problems that led Tunnicliffe (who had rejoined the prodution team after being asked) to forego payment for his services in favor of paying his staff members, after he learned that the project only had a scant $50,000 for special effects (leading to plenty of issues designing and implementing FX shots). While filming did run smoothly otherwise, Barker had a falling-out with director Scott Derrickson over the film's tone.

Jaws

• The first film became Hollywood's first true Summer Blockbuster and the Trope Codifier for the Threatening Shark trope, but its production is legendary for its many troubles.
  • Richard Dreyfuss summed it up as follows: "We started the film without a script, without a cast and without a shark." Principal photography began without a completed script or shark props, and Carl Gottlieb frequently wrote script pages on the night before shooting. Steven Spielberg, inexperienced with large-scale filmmaking at the time, insisted on shooting in open waters. This decision created many of the headaches experienced during shooting.
  • The problems from shooting in open waters included soaked cameras, ruined takes because unwanted sailboats drifted into frame, cast and crew having to make long journeys to and from the sea, and at one point the ship began sinking with the actors aboard. Out of a 12-hour working day, only four hours would be spent actually filming... and that was on a good day. On a bad day there would be no filming at all.
  • Many days of filming were ruined by problems with the shark props. Three full-size mechanical sharks were built for the film at great expense, and one sank to the bottom of the ocean on its first day, forcing a team of divers to retrieve it. All three models frequently malfunctioned due to exposure to salt water, forcing Spielberg (who had initially considered the shark effects to be the film's true star) to work around the issues and only hint at the shark in many scenes. He latered credited the shark problems for the film's suspense, saying "It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen.".
  • Robert Shaw had taken the role of Quint mainly to pay off his tax debts, and he frequently flew back and forth to Canada from Martha's Vineyard during filming to avoid further attention from the IRS. While said to be pleasant while sober, his drinking on the set brought out his irascible and competitive worst, and he quickly found an enemy in Richard Dreyfuss; Shaw regularly taunted Dreyfuss as cowardly (at one point he dared Dreyfuss to climb to the top of the ship's mast and jump from it) and once sprayed him down with a firehose. Meanwhile, Dreyfuss threw Shaw's drinking glass into the ocean between takes.
  • Jaws had been assigned a budget of $4 million, but wound up $5 million over budget for a total of $9 million (that was a lot back in 1974). Filming had fallen over 100 days behind schedule - what was initially meant to be a 55-day shoot ended up at 159 days. Spielberg thought he would never work again, and refused to show up to the final day of filming as he felt that the exhausted and disgruntled crew would throw him in the water as payback for the miserable shoot^note how miserable? The scene where Quint, Hooper, and Brody drunkenly sing on the ship made many crew members start crying too, because the song - "show me the way to go home, I'm tired and I want to go to bed" - reflected how they felt.
• Jaws 2 was only less troubled by comparison:
  • Spielberg refused to return for the sequel, at first because he was completely against the idea, and later because he (along with Richard Dreyfuss) was busy with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. John D. Hancock was hired as director, but Universal executives disliked his character-driven take on the film and the slow pace of filming. One month in, Hancock was fired and production shut down for weeks while a new director could be found and the script could be rewritten. The obvious choices for director were blocked by the Director's Guild of America due to their rules regarding promoting crew members to director^note the studio considered promoting second unit director Joe Alves to full director, but this violated the DGA's newly-enacted "Eastwood Rule", made after Clint Eastwood fired and replaced a DGA director with himself while starring in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Verna Fields, the first film's editor, also fell afoul of another DGA requirement where the replacement has to be a full DGA member with at least one film or TV directorial credit. They eventually settled on Jeannot Szwarc.
  • With the Chief Brody character returning through rewrites, Roy Scheider was asked to reprise the role. He had recently backed out of a role in The Deer Hunter at the last second due to Creative Differences, putting him in a contract dispute with Universal. He bitterly fought against being cast in Jaws 2; His biographer claimed he even tried to plead insanity by trashing a Beverly Hills hotel room, but ultimately agreed to the film when Universal offered a $500.000 paycheck^note four times his base salary from the first film and to count Jaws 2 as his final contractual obligation to the studio.
  • Nevertheless, Scheider's distaste for the film led to a tense shoot. He got into heated arguments with Szwarc, claiming that Szwarc was spending more time directing the child actors and effects than the leads, and he threatened to walk out of the film multiple times. Things became so sour between the two that Producer David Brown and Verna Fields tried to get them to air out their differences privately, only for a fistfight between Scheider and Szwarc to break out.
  • And the film ran into many of the same troubles the first one had with the mechanical sharks frequently breaking down. And there were protests by locals that forced the production to move from Martha's Vineyard to Florida. And there was the rough weather and winds that regularly held up filming. And while filming the finale, the actors found themselves menaced by real sharks. The final budget was $30 million, more than three times that of the first film. It still made a tidy profit.
• Jaws 3-D proved less troublesome than the two prior films, but still had its share of problems.
  • David Brown and Richard Zanuck, who had produced the first two films, originally pitched it as a National Lampoon spoof named Jaws 3, People 0. John Hughes was attached as writer and Joe Dante as director, but Steven Spielberg vocally denounced the idea as disrespectful and Universal nixed it before it got to production. The 3D film resurgence in the early 1980s convinced Universal to revisit the film to take advantage of the trend.
  • The script was a messy affair. Richard Matheson was asked to write the script, but while he was given a co-credit in the final film, Matheson later said that a slew of uncredited script doctors had their way with the script and his contributions were rewritten under murky circumstances, and he would disapprove of the final film. The story was credited to Guerdon Trueblood, who had reportedly written an outline for a different film about a shark that was bought out and refitted for this film.
  • Most of filming was a fairly smooth process, aside from Dennis Quaid's behavior where he tried to pick a fight with an extra and later claimed he was strung out on cocaine during the shoot. The first days of shooting were done using obsolete 3D cameras from the 1950s, though director Joe Alves had anticipated this and stuck to filming shots that could easily be redone. The 3D shots proved to be complicated even with modern technology, with some scenes like the shark's death requiring many reshoots to get right — something not helped by executive producer Alan Landsburg's constantly demanding that Alves get no more than two takes of any given scene, with no regard for the complexities of the 3D filming process.
  • It took a turn for the worse in post-production, however, as the initial effects company had tried creating all the 3D effects shots using video. The results were so poor that the producers to hired another company to hastily redo the effects using the then-traditional optical printing technique... only for the new shots to turn out hardly any better than the originals. By this point they had no choice but to release the film as it was, resulting in the film being heavily derided for its clunky 3D effects and general Special Effect Failure.
• Surprisingly enough, Jaws: The Revenge almost managed to avert this trope... almost.
  • Universal was in a financial rough patch after a disastrous slate of films during 1986, headlined by Howard the Duck. CEO Sid Sheinberg, who noted the strong box office of Jaws 3D despite tepid reviews, ordered a new Jaws film fast-tracked into production to hopefully give a boost to the company's financial position. However, the originally-assigned producer, Frank Price, was forced to resign from Universal in September 1986 due to having been one of the main advocates for Howard the Duck. This in turn caused the film's original writer-director, Steve De Jarnatt, to quit in favor of trying to get his passion project, Miracle Mile, off the ground.
  • Following the departures of Price and De Jarnatt, Joseph Sargent took over as producer and director, and was only given ten months from the day he was hired to the film's release date. This resulted in a hastily written, hastily filmed production that Sargent later described as "a ticking time-bomb". Michael de Guzman, who was hired to write the screenplay, had all of five weeks to get the shooting script together, having to juggle not only a list of constantly changing plot elements but also Executive Meddling from Sheinberg, who mandated that de Guzman had to write a romantic comedy with a shark attack subplot. While the process of filming was mostly free of trouble (and unlike prior films, within the budget), it still went over the allotted time due to storms and prevented Michael Caine from accepting an Oscar he won for Hannah and Her Sisters.
  • Then the studio demanded the ending be reshot for international releases and home video due to test audiences having a negative reaction to the original US theatrical ending, allegedly refusing to give the production money to do so properly. This resulted in the infamous and widely mocked exploding shark ending, along with a big case of Not Quite Dead from a character last seen being chewed on by the shark.

Mission Impossible

Their mission, should they choose to accept it... is to avoid the production problems that plagued the earlier entries in the series.

• While the first film's development was relatively tame by the standard set by the series later on, it was a project that spent years in development hell.
  • The film went into production with a script that wasn't finalized. Writing by the Seat of Your Pants was in full effect — Brian De Palma designed the action sequences but neither David Koepp nor Robert Towne were satisfied with the story that would make these sequences take place. Towne ended up helping organize a beginning, middle and end while De Palma and Koepp worked on the plot. Towne rewrote scenes between takes during filming. And that's not how Koepp got fired before being brought back on.
  • There were controversies when cast members of the original series (most notably Peter Graves) vented to the press about early plans regarding characters from the original series. Graves was due to have a Remake Cameo, but refused on the grounds of the way his character was treated (Phelps is revealed to have pulled a Face–Heel Turn and become The Mole). According to Martin Landau, there was allegedly an early treatment which brought back the entire original team from the 1960s series^note presumably the most well-known iteration of the team, including Graves, Landau, Barbara Bain, Greg Morris and Peter Lupus and killed them all in the first act to set up the new team. This was presumably vetoed once the original actors refused to come back, instead changing to a new team that appeared just for the Impossible Mission Collapse.
  • There were also rumors that lead star Tom Cruise and director Brian De Palma didn't get along during filming, fuelled by De Palma excusing himself from media interviews prior the film's release.
• Mission: Impossible II was beset with delays which ran filming overbudget and overschedule, causing Dougray Scott to lose the role of Wolverine in X-Men and Cruise having to pay for production overruns out of his own pocket. Hostility on the Set was also an issue between Cruise and Thandiwe Newton, with Cruise being stressed out over the quality of the script. Then a battle took place between director John Woo and Paramount executives over Woo's initial cut, which was reportedly over three hours long and had content that wouldn't pass a PG-13 rating, leading to allegations that Cruise locked Woo out of the editing room (though Woo denied this happened) and Stuart Baird being brought in for uncredited editing work that helped earn him the director's chair on Star Trek: Nemesis.
• Mission: Impossible III went through 15 months of pre-production helmed by Joe Carnahan, focusing on a different version of the script (including Kenneth Branagh, Carrie-Anne Moss and Scarlett Johansson in supporting roles) before getting into battles with executives over the film's tone, leading him to quit in 2004 (and filming his departure on-camera). Production was then delayed another year because J. J. Abrams had to fulfill contractual obligations on Alias and Lost before working on the film, leading the aforementioned actors to drop out. And while filming itself went relatively smoothly, the ensuing controversies caused by Cruise hyping up Scientology (running afoul of talk-show hosts in the process) put a damper on the film's reception, leading to Cruise functionally being fired from the franchise until cooler heads prevailed, resulting in his return five years later.
• As noted by Christopher McQuarrie during an interview promoting Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol's production was marred with delays and Executive Meddling. McQuarrie himself noted that he was "parachuted" into the franchise to rewrite the film more than midway through the production. At that point, a large number of second unit/exterior shots had been completed, and dialogue and setpieces had to be substantially rewritten to fit in with a new plotline for the film and to cut down on the runtime due to budget overages. (Benji's glib line, "Blue is glue, red is dead," in reference to the climbing gloves, was suggested by McQuarrie on his first day of involvement in order to functionally avoid a lengthy (and costly) expository sequence.) As a result, major swaths of the plot had to be rewritten to accommodate the participation of the supporting cast. Significant chunks of content involving Brandt (Jeremy Renner) had to be thrown out to accommodate the new plot. Benji's rescue of Brandt during the climax of the film was only added in after McQuarrie promised Simon Pegg that he would find something exciting for the actor to do, after having to cut down part of the team's scenes during the second act of the film due to budget cuts, and was only accomplished through McQuarrie convincing Paramount executives (who were extremely reluctant to give the Benji character any focus) to have the scene added in.
• Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning:
  • The COVID-19 Pandemic has caused major delays in the production several times in a row. It got so bad that Tom Cruise went on a rant against crew members who didn't comply with pandemic time production guidelines, insisting that it was also about ensuring the livelihood of everyone involved. As producer, it was important to Cruise that the production went as smoothly as possible, as a successful shoot could show other studios they could film even under protocols (Cruise even rented a cruise liner — no pun intended — for the crew to quarantine in relative comfort). That rant was recorded and leaked in mid-December 2020. Even after the rant, though, production still wound up pausing due to additional positive COVID tests in the ensuing months.
  • The production was looking for a train bridge that would be scheduled for destruction to blow it up onscreen. They found one in Poland... until it turned out it had historical value after all, there was a misunderstanding about it being destined to be destroyed as well as strong opposition to the idea from the locals. So they headed back to the US and built one from scratch.

A Nightmare On Elm Street

The A Nightmare on Elm Street films are famous for Robert Englund's master class performance as its lead villain Freddy Krueger... and also having some pretty troubled production histories, at the time being an actual nightmare to experience.

• During production of the first film, a major investor pulled out two days before filming began, and Robert Shaye had to raise the money elsewhere. Two weeks into production, they had no money to pay anyone - and the Line Producer had to use his credit card. Eventually, Robert Shaye cut a deal with the original investor to supply about $200,000. What's more, is that the processing lab wasn't paid and threatened to keep the film until they were.
• Freddy's Revenge, the second film in the franchise, had it even worse.
  • It started with the fact that the movie was greenlit the very weekend the first Nightmare came out. This may seem like standard procedure for sequel greenlighting nowadays, but back then, it was virtually unheard of, especially if this was an R-rated horror film.
  • Then there was Wes Craven not wanting to return, admitting to never wanting to direct a sequel of the first movie. He did at least agree to consider directing the second film, but eventually backed out after hating the script that had been written without his involvement (for good measure, returning production designer Gregg Fonseca quit with Craven, and wasn't replaced, leading to an art director being hastily promoted to take his role); he was replaced by Jack Sholder, who had acted as the de facto second unit director on the first film.
  • Heather Langenkamp was never asked to return to this sequel, and according to the producers, they had not even considered bringing Nancy Thompson back to this movie at any point in pre-production. She would finally return to the franchise in parts 3 and 7.
  • Sholder nearly got fired before filming even began, after producer Robert Shaye decided he wanted to play the main character's father despite having no acting experience, and Sholder understandably balked. Eventually, Sholder resorted to claiming that he had already offered the role to Clu Gulager (who he actually did have in mind for the part, but hadn't yet approached) and half-jokingly suggested that Shaye play the role of the bartender in a leather bar. Much to his shock, Shaye agreed — just so long as Sholder accompanied him on a trip to buy some S&M gear so that he'd look the part. This ended up starting a tradition of Shaye making a Creator Cameo in each film.
  • Not making matters better was that Robert Englund also wasn't even asked to return as Freddy. A random extra was hired... But within a week of filming, it was clear that the stuntman in question was not up to the task; his movements have been described as more akin to Frankenstein's Monster than Freddy, and absolutely lifeless. He was fired and replaced with Englund, but a small bit of his footage remains in the shower scene. Englund also admitted that although he liked some parts of the movie, he also had problems with the script.
  • Actual filming went smoothly for the most part, although Mark Patton had large objections to the infamous "Touch Me" dance scene. While Patton was himself gay, he thought the scene was too gay even for him. He did his own choreography, which was far less campy than originally planned. Additionally, the climactic pool party massacre had actors not knowing when explosions were to go off — nobody was acting in that scene, their scared reactions were absolutely real.
  • Fortunately, the film was a box office success and managed to gross more than its predecessor, but wasn't anywhere near as well received, with fans claiming the film broke a lot of what was set as rules in the first, namely that Freddy spent too much time in the outside world and that Freddy using others to kill for him went against the idea of his character. Fortunately, this forced Wes Craven to return for the next film, albeit as a writer.
• Dream Warriors was much smoother but still wasn't completely trouble-free. The film began as a satirical meta-film about Freddy haunting the lives of people who worked on the film, but the studio didn't like it (Ironically, this ended up being the basis for Wes Craven's New Nightmare). Wes Craven was hesitant to return as a writer, as he had vowed never to do another sequel after his thoroughly miserable experience working on The Hills Have Eyes Part II. Additionally, people weren't fond of the newer cast in the previous film, requiring Heather Langenkamp and John Saxon to return in side roles. Fortunately, when it came to finalizing the script and shooting, things went well for the most part. Producer Robert Shaye also found it hard to supervise filming, due to New Line having expanded into a bona fide studio by this point, eventually forcing him to acknowledge that he was being too much of a control freak and hand most of his producer's duties over to production manager Rachel Talalay. Chuck Russel the director was described by several people as "not knowing how to talk to people" and it even lead to some tension to the point a crew member gave a speech basically saying "this shit needs to stop." The film thankfully did well at the box office, keeping the franchise running strong and was even seen as the second best of the series. Patricia Arquette became a star thanks to the film.
• The Dream Master wasn't quite as angsty as the first movie or Freddy's Revenge, but getting it made still wasn't an easy feat.
  • For unspecified reasons, Patricia Arquette decided not to return. To this day, nobody knows why exactly.^note According to Dream Master producer Rachel Talalay, Arquette wasn't approached by New Line to reprise the role. There were also speculation that Arquette's pregnancy at the time of the film's shooting might've factored into it. Arquette herself would later state in 2017 that she declined to return because she wanted to expand her acting repertoire while also mentioning that Dream Warriors director Chuck Russell was controlling of the cast (though apologized) and the DP of the film was "really horribly mean".This led to Tuesday Knight being cast in her role. This proved to be a problem, given the film continued the previous entry's story: Few reviewers (if any) knew who she was, and they weren't fans of her acting style. Many of them also complained that because of the recasting, when Kirsten, Kincade, and Joey all reunite in the film's opening nightmare scene, the emotion wasn't quite as palpable as it should've been (and that even Dull Surprise reactions could be seen from the actors).
  • Renny Harlin, then an unknown director from Finland, was incredibly enthusiastic about directing and wanted the job so badly - mainly because he was so impoverished and had a hard time adjusting to life in the US, but also because he was a huge fan of the series. Bob Shaye, on the other hand, didn't want him directing, and was also iffy about a Finnish director getting the job. This may seem like petty xenophobia, but when one considers the first movie was banned in Finland for a number of years, this was more reasonable. Harlin was so passionate that he absolutely refused to take no for an answer. He went so far as to show up to New Line's office every day and chill with a number of employees just to annoy him into letting him direct. This worked, but considering Shaye had a number of people he wanted to direct the film over Harlin, he let him begrudgingly. Even when Shaye finally did decide to hire Harlin, it was only because Shaye was unable to find a director and just chose Harlin because he felt that he would be able to handle the long hours of shooting due to his youth and large frame. He also admits it was also partially out of pity since by the time of hire, everyone at New Line Pictures noticed Harlin kept wearing the same clothes and started to noticeably smell bad - Shay felt at the very least Harlin would be able to bathe after getting the job. Shaye's attitude toward hiring Harlin amounted to hoping that if worse came to worse, they could simply fix whatever mistakes he would make in post-production.
  • Getting a screenplay proved a big challenge for various reasons. William Kotzwinkle was the first writer to try his hand, but only managed to turn in a rough story outline before being forced to bow out for personal reasons, resulting in Shaye turning instead to future Oscar-winning screenwriter Brian Helgeland, who had a very short deadline to avoid an impending writer's strike. Against all odds, the inexperienced Helgeland managed to get a completed script submitted the day before the strike began... and then Shaye and Harlin found themselves in the nightmare scenario of having a script that, while workable story-wise, would have been far too expensive to produce on the budget typically afforded to the series. Because the writer's strike effectively precluded them from hiring any professional writers, Shaye, Harlin, co-producer Rachel Talalay and damn near everyone else at New Line had a part in throwing the script together — some reports also claim that the duo of Jim and Ken Wheat broke the WGA strike and got the final draft thrown together right before shooting — with the end product being credited to Helgeland and the fictitious "Scott Pierce".
  • Shooting was mostly smooth, but the tensions between the two did complicate things. Shaye was more heavily involved in shooting than he was on previous films in the series. He would show up to set every day to monitor Harlin. Harlin was extremely stressed because of this - he showed up to set every day "expecting to get fired at any given moment". When it came time to film Shaye's obligatory Creator Cameo, the two were barely even speaking to each other, thus making a small few seconds of film extremely difficult to shoot. Shaye in his brief cameo looks noticeably agitated.
  • When it came time to film Rick's death scene, the production had already run out of money, and since they had already filmed his funeral scene they had to kill him off somehow. This led to the infamous sequence of Rick fighting and getting murdered by an invisible Freddy (represented only by a disembodied finger-knife glove) in a tacky-looking dojo.
  • Fortunately, things did get easier during post-production. Shaye liked what he saw during editing and relented his control over the final product. Additionally, when he saw the final product, he liked it enough to admit he was wrong. Harlin even told a story that on the day of the premier, Shaye actually saw Harlin talking to his mom on the phone and asked to speak to her; all so he could praise how well Harlin did on the movie to her which even got her to cry tears of joy. The two have since made up and are on good terms. The film itself did very well at the box office and helped launch Harlin's career in the US, even earning him the job of directing Die Hard 2.
• The Dream Child, on the other hand, was just as stressful to make as Freddy's Revenge, if maybe even worse.
  • With Harlin being gone due to having become the first in the revolving door of directors on Alien³, Robert Shaye and co had less than a year to make the film. The title was the first thing thought up for the film, as was the poster. Nobody had any idea what a "dream child" was, or why the poster had Freddy levitating a crystal ball with a foetus inside - this was because the story hadn't fully taken shape yet.
  • The idea of Freddy using someone's to-be-born child to get into the real world was an idea that was considered for the third film, which they decided to go with this time simply for the lack of any better ideas. Two writers, John Skipp and Craig Spector were brought in to write a story that had Alice and Dan's unborn child being taken over by Freddy. Producer Rachel Talalay hated their script and brought in writer Leslie Bohem, who ended up rewriting almost all of it. The only thing from Skipp's and Spector's script that made it into the final version was Freddy's infamous line "It's a booooooy!!!". The two have since come to regret wasting their time.
  • It then turned out that Bohem's screenplay wasn't entirely to Shaye's liking either, and with the writer unavailable for rewrites, William Wisher Jr. came along and did a further draft, which Shaye also didn't like. Yet another writer, David J. Schow, was hired and managed to create a screenplay that most of the key players were happy with, though a few further last-minute revisions were done by co-producer Michael de Luca due to Schow having been assigned to work on the screenplay that would eventually become Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III.^note (And just to indicate how torturous the writing process was, the first teaser trailer credited Bohem and Wisher for the story and Schow and de Luca for the screenplay; the finished film, thanks to a combination of legal spats and WGA arbitration, credited Skipp and Spector for the story, and Bohem for the screenplay)
  • The character of Greta was originally to be played by a different actress, but like the character herself, she was bulimic, and was horrified by how tasteless her death was, and left.
  • The infamous scene where Freddy's amputated arm turns into a number of red and green tarantulas became a literal nightmare to shoot; the tarantulas used for the scene were painted red and green, and trained to move in certain ways. Problem was, only one take was filmed because the tarantulas became angry and aggressive. It doesn't help that nobody knows what happened to the spiders after because they soon disappeared, with some even believing that they disappeared into the studio office.
  • Shooting itself was a stressful mess. Director Stephen Hopkins had only four weeks to film, and a further four weeks to edit, with only two stages to do it on. Although he did get everything done on time, the experience left him so stressed and burnt out that he almost turned down directing Predator 2, despite the higher pay and more relaxed shooting schedule.
  • During post-production, test screenings had scenes that were considered so disgusting that they had large chunks of them left on the cutting room floor. The Freddy Bike scene had even more shots of Dan's skin being ripped off, and the infamous scene where Freddy force feeds Greta tons of disgusting food made of her innards had a shot that panned down to reveal Freddy ripping her insides out as she ate. The scenes still haven't shown up on Blu-ray or DVD today. Heavy cutting was needed to keep the film from receiving the then-new NC-17 rating.
  • When the film was released, though the bad critical reviews were expected, fans bashed the film for being needlessly mean-spirited and downright cruel in an attempt to be Darker and Edgier - for starters, the movie begins by showing how Amanda Kruger, Freddy's mom, was gang-raped in the asylum she worked at, Dan is killed off in a violent and cruel fashion 25 minutes into the film (which wouldn't have mattered as much had he not been the father of Alice's unborn child), and Freddy kills a bulimic girl by force-feeding her her own innards. Others found it boring and not nearly as fun as the other films. The film was a box office failure as a result - it opened at #3 and disappeared soon after. Despite this, the film still performed better than the other two slasher film instalments that came out that year, but it still was bad enough to make the producers decide to kill Freddy for good in the next one.
• Downplayed, almost to the point of complete aversion, by Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. Once again they had trouble with the screenplay; a young Peter Jackson was sounded out about writing the film, but disagreements between him and New Line caused him to back out in favor of writing and directing BrainDead. Michael Almereyda wrote the first actual screenplay, but it was rejected almost immediately — Robert Shaye later claimed to have thrown the script in his trash can after reading the first thirty pages — due to its fan fiction-esque storyline, effects sequences that were far beyond the scope of the budget, and the fact that they'd have needed to track down the entire cast of the third through fifth films, most of whom would just have gotten small cameos. Eventually, Michael de Luca, who had done a last minute rewrite on the previous film, stepped in at short notice and created a screenplay everyone was happy with, causing Shaye to admit to de Luca that they should have just hired him from the get-go. After that, production flew by largely without any problems thanks to long-standing producer Rachel Talalay — who knew from personal experience all the things that could go wrong in a shoot — stepping up to direct, with the only major problem coming up near the end of filming when she was taken ill with pneumonia, forcing co-producer Aron Warner to step in for the final day or so of filming.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) is rumored to have had some production issues. Samuel Bayer, a music video director, was hired as director despite (by his own admission) not being a fan of the source material. He only agreed to the project after Platinum Dunes told him, after he had turned down several of their previous offers, that this would be the last job they would be willing to give him. As the production proceeded, Bayer clashed with the producers over Creative Differences.
  • Eric Heisserer's script was constantly being changed to the point where he stated upon noticing the changes he knew it would not turn out well. He has also claimed that Platinum Dunes was trying to rush out the film ahead the 25th anniversary of the original Elm Street release, which they ultimately failed to do.
  • Rooney Mara revealed that she didn't want to be in the movie and openly admitted to phoning in her performance, something that the critics didn't fail to notice, and stated that her experience almost caused her to quit acting.
  • Unlike other Elm Street movies that were rushed out but still performed well, negative feedback from critics and fans turned this into a Franchise Killer for this series. Bayer himself didn't exactly take the backlash well and has yet to direct another movie.

Scream

Every film in the Scream franchise had some sort of problems making it to the big screen.

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• The original Scream had a smoother production compared to its two sequels, though that's not to say it was entirely rosy.
  • Wes Craven was often at odds with the Weinsteins and the MPAA. Among other things, Bob Weinstein felt that the Ghostface mask wasn't scary, and that Drew Barrymore's wig in the opening looked terrible. At various points, the Weinsteins considered replacing Craven, forcing him and editor Patrick Lussier to assemble a workprint version of the opening scene to prove that they were on the right track. After seeing the footage, the Weinsteins came around.
  • Speaking of the Ghostface mask, it was a lucky break that it was used at all. On top of Bob Weinstein not liking it, there were initially legal questions concerning whether it could be used in the film, as it was a mass-produced Halloween mask and the producers were having trouble tracing the mask's origins. In order to avoid a licensing dispute, Craven had KNB Effects create their own, slightly modified version. He didn't like the look of it, but it wound up being used in a few scenes before the producers finally found the company that had made the original mask and secured the rights.
  • Craven was adamant about filming in the US, as he wanted the setting to look like an all-American, suburban small town. Locations in North Carolina were initially considered, but rejected because the only sites that looked promising would've required costly modification and repairs to be usable for a film production.
  • They eventually settled on the Wine Country in northern California, but even there, unforeseen problems cropped up. Plans to film the school scenes in Santa Rosa High School provoked a firestorm of controversy in Santa Rosa, as the nearby town of Petaluma had been the site of the Polly Klaas murder just three years prior, with the killer's trial slated to begin while Scream was in production. A fierce, three-hour town hall debate, scheduled for the day after filming was to begin, ended with the production being denied permission to film in the high school, forcing them to shoot the school scenes at the nearby Sonoma Community Center instead. Knowing that there would likely be delays due to the controversy, Craven began production by filming scenes at locations outside Santa Rosa. The credits to the film contain a Take That! towards the Santa Rosa school board as a result, though Craven later regretted putting it in once he came to realize just how touchy a subject it was in the town.
  • At one point during the filming of the opening scene, somebody forgot to unplug the phone that Casey used to try and call the cops. This resulted in real, puzzled 911 operators hearing Drew Barrymore screaming for her life on the other end.
  • The third act of the film (known as Scene 118) was difficult to film since it took place entirely at night, and the hours were limited. Furthermore, it all took place at a single location, yet featured the stories and deaths of nearly all the main characters. It took 21 days to film. It was so exhausting, the production crew was given T-shirts that read "I Survived Scene 118!"
  • Mark Irwin, the director of photography, was fired a week before shooting was to end. Craven, upon reviewing the dailies, found that the footage was out of focus and unusable, and Irwin was ordered to fire and replace his camera crew. When Irwin responded that they'd have to fire him too, they did just that.
• Scream 2 ran into issues after one of the extras leaked its script to the internet (one of the first major film leaks in the digital age). As a result, the film's script was almost entirely rewritten, with pages often being completed the day they were to be filmed. Security was tightened, with everyone required to sign non-disclosure agreements, and the film underwent many reshoots.
• Scream 3 had it the worst of the original trilogy:
  • The Columbine High School massacre had recently occurred, and the producers were pressured into not only toning down the violence but also abandoning writer Kevin Williamson's original idea for the film. Williamson's outline would have had one of the killers from the first film turn out to be alive and in prison, where he leads a group of obsessive fans of the Stab films (the Scream series' in-universe version of itself) to carry out a new Ghostface killing spree. (Williamson would later recycle this idea for the TV series The Following.) Given how violent media was being widely scapegoated at the time for warping the minds of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and turning them into murderers, a film like that was never going to fly, and so Scream 3 was turned into a Hollywood satire with less violence and a greater focus on comedy — a decision that conveniently allowed them to shoot on their own backlot without having to take time to schedule new locations. Dimension originally didn't want to make it a horror movie at all, and wanted Wes Craven to do it as a straight comedy with no blood or violence; Craven put his foot down and said that it would either be an R-rated horror movie or it wouldn't be called Scream.
  • Series creator Kevin Williamson was unavailable to return to writing duties and write a new script, as he was working on Teaching Mrs. Tingle and the short-lived ABC series Wasteland at the time. As a result, Ehren Kruger was brought in as a replacement with only a few weeks to put together a brand-new script. As a result, his script was written mostly on the fly, with pages usually completed the day they were to be filmed. The characters bore so little resemblance to their appearances in the prior films that Craven himself did rewrites. Kruger himself later admitted that not having worked with the actors on the previous two films hurt his ability to get the characterization right.
  • The actual filming was difficult since Neve Campbell (who played lead character Sidney Prescott) was only available for a handful of days, resulting in her role being greatly reduced and more emphasis put on the supporting characters. Nobody was sure about the direction some scenes were to take, and a few were shot several times to allow for multiple possibilities later in the editing room.
  • The film once again ran into issues with the MPAA, and it almost resulted in Wes Craven leaving the horror genre. The resulting film had a tepid reception and only decent box office (in contrast to the critical acclaim and massive commercial success of the previous two films).
• Scream 4 was stuck in Development Hell for a long time, and Williamson had repeated clashes with the Weinsteins, resulting in them once again hiring Kruger and Craven for rewrites, and the script varied heavily from the original drafts. Also, Cathy Konrad (who produced the first three films) sued the Weinsteins over not approaching her for the film. Filming itself went relatively smoothly, though it ran on a couple of weeks longer than planned, and there was tension on set between David Arquette and Courteney Cox, whose real-life relationship (which had ironically started as a Romance on the Set of the first two films) was falling apart (and subsequently ended in divorce). The film was released to mixed reception and disappointing box office, putting Williamson's plans for a new trilogy on hold and leading to the franchise being rebooted as a television series on MTV.
• Scream (2022) got off relatively easy, though like many films shot in 2020, it was impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic, which delayed the start of filming by four months from May 2020 to September. The film's red carpet premiere also had to be canceled due to the spread of the Omicron variant of the virus. Fortunately, it didn't affect the film itself, which was praised as a return to form and made almost as much money in its opening weekend as Scream 4 did in its entire North American theatrical run.
• Scream VI was the first film in the franchise to not star Neve Campbell, as she felt that she was being underpaid and felt undervalued, especially as a woman. Conflicting reports exist regarding just how much this affected the film. In December 2022, the film's directors, the Radio Silence team of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, claimed that her departure had "greatly" affected the film, but they would backtrack a few months later, saying that she left early enough in production that it was easy to rewrite the script around her absence. In any case, production after that went smoothly, and the resulting film was an even bigger box-office hit than the last movie.
• After two relatively smooth productions, the series' good luck ran out on November 21, 2023, when the currently-in-preproduction Scream VII ran into headwinds at least as bad as the Columbine massacre's impact on the third movie and is now in jeopardy of being outright cancelled.
  • It started when, amidst the war between Israel and Hamas that had erupted the prior month, Melissa Barrera, who had played the protagonist Sam Carpenter in the last two films and was expected to reprise her role here in a film that would conclude the character's arc, became an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian side in the conflict. Spyglass Media Group, the production company behind the series since the fifth film, felt that her comments crossed the line into antisemitism, and fired her from the film for it.
  • The blowback was immediate, both from fans and cast alike. Early the next day, Jenna Ortega, Barrera's co-star who had played Sam's sister Tara, also left the film, and while she officially cited scheduling conflicts surrounding her commitment to filming season two of Wednesday, the timing of the announcement led to widespread suspicion that she had quit out of solidarity with Barrera. A month later, Christopher Landon, who had been announced as the film's director (replacing the Radio Silence team), revealed that he was no longer attached to the project either, describing it as "a dream job that turned into a nightmare." Without its two lead actresses or a director, the film's future is currently in severe doubt.
  • Fortunately, it's been recently stated that Neve Campbell has billed her return as Sidney, and Corteney Cox followed suit not long afterwards, giving at least some hope.

Terminator

The Terminator franchise may have spawned some of the most memorable sci-fi scenes in cinema, but it was also fraught with issues that just might have made its creators beg for a time-travelling robot to erase it.

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• The Terminator may be an enduring sci-fi classic, but it's clear that until it was actually released, very few people had faith in it:
  • After a famously-awful experience making Piranha Part Two: The Spawning, director James Cameron had a vivid fever dream while sick in Italy, and imagined a robotic being dragging itself out of an explosion while carrying kitchen knives. Convinced he had a winning idea for a new film, he brought the idea to his agent... who told him to forget it and write something else, leading Cameron to sack him. Heading back to California, he hashed out a rough draft of the idea, dubbed The Terminator, and worked with writer William Wisher (despite some distance from each other - they had to convey their ideas through spoken tapes played through the telephone) to turn the draft into a script. After being introduced to Gale Anne Hurd, who worked at New World Pictures as an assistant and was interested in the product, Cameron sold the rights to her for a dollar on the condition that she help produce the film if he directed (a detail that would become critical in later years). The project was picked up by Hemdale Film Corporation, and was taken to Orion Pictures, who agreed to back the film as well.
  • When casting went underway, many actors scouted didn't have faith in the movie. Potential leads such as Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone turned down the role of the Terminator. At first, Cameron wanted to force Arnold Schwarzenegger off the project because Orion co-founder had initially suggested him for the role of Kyle Reese, and he felt he'd need an even bigger name to play the Terminator — but their in-person meeting went so well that Cameron cast him as the killer robot in human skin.
    
    Michael Biehn, who was eventually cast as Reese, needed to be convinced into taking the project. Schwarzenegger, for his part, cared even less, offhandedly calling The Terminator "some shit movie I'm doing" while doing interviews for Conan the Destroyer. In his autobiography Total Recall, Schwarzenegger admitted that the movie was so low-profile that it wouldn't have hurt his career if it bombed.
  • The project was initially planned to begin filming in early 1983 in Toronto, Canada, but filming was pushed back nine months when producer Dino De Laurentis exercised a clause in Schwarzenegger's contract to have him film Conan. During the interim, Cameron would work on other scripts and bat ideas around with Orion before filming commenced in 1984. A week before filming was set to begin, Linda Hamilton (playing Sarah Connor) sprained her ankle, requiring that she spend the entirety of the shoot walking with a taped ankle and dealing with constant pain. Additionally, Schwarzenegger allegedly held up the start of production by a further two days by complaining that the leather jacket the character wears wasn't "manly enough".
  • Terminator is the project where Cameron's Control Freak tendencies started to show, leading to T-shirts being printed with the iconic in-joke, "I work for James Cameron. You can't scare me." An early example of this is when Schwarzenegger, who was struggling with the pronounciation of some lines, wanted to change the character's iconic catchphrase to "I will be back", seemingly because he thought it was too feminine and would be more "machine-like" without an contraction ("I'll be back"). In response to this, Cameron reportedly told him, "I don't tell you how to act, so don't tell me how to write."
  • Filming went relatively smoothly, though hampered by the fact that the crew were unused to night shoots and Cameron's perfectionist tendencies. The blue tinge the film has wasn't a stylistic choice, they couldn't afford lights and only shot in locations where the street lights were strong enough to act as a replacement. Several critical scenes, including the Terminator breaking into a station wagon, the Terminator jumping on a motorbike to pursue Kyle and Sarah as the third act begins, and the final scene in the desert(!) were filmed with a skeleton crew, as there was either No Budget left or they couldn't afford a permit to film the scene. They were constantly on the lookout for cops and often had to lie about being film school students working on a class assignment and occasionally just had to make a run for it.
  • The Terminator endoskeleton ended up being heavy and hard for Stan Winston's team to carry. They found out the hard way that while building a prop robot out of metal is realistic, it's not practical.
  • Post-production is where a number of problems reared their head. John Daly, the producer, tried to shorten the film by insisting it end when the truck the Terminator is driving blows up, eliminating the whole scene with the now-skeletal Terminator chasing Sarah and Reese through the factory. Cameron physically threw him out of the editing suite. Additionally, Cameron and Hurd had to fork out $40,000 of their own money to finish a number of insert shots in a scant few days before the film could be screened. Tellingly, Cameron admits that "every other shot or every third shot" of the last reel of the film was an insert.
  • But you would think Orion would be amazed at the end result, right? To quote the Terminator, Wrong. The test screening was a disaster, with Orion executives realizing it was what they didn't want — an exploitation-style film in the vein of Roger Corman. They initially refused to screen the film for critics and did little press to promote it, and may have gone even further had certain Hollywood agents not called the studio to voice their support for it. Mike Medavoy (an executive at Orion who'd initially fought for it) thought the project would be a flop, though he quickly changed his tune in later years. Even after the film was released, Orion refused to give it additional funding for publicity campaigns, which led to Hemdale funding it themselves (and leading Schwarzenegger to harbor resentment for them permanently afterward).^note Though he remained on good terms with Medavoy, who produced The 6th Day.
  • Despite the challenges, the film was a box-office smash, grossing $78.3 million on a $6.4 million budget, and being hailed by many as one of the top films of the year. Despite that, the problems didn't end there — Harlan Ellison, who watched the film at release, noticed similarities between the subject matter and a story he wrote for The Outer Limits (1963) titled "Soldier". Ellison then learned from a source at Starlog magazine that Cameron had given them an interview where he admitted that he "took a couple of Outer Limits segments" for inspiration, and threatened to sue Hemdale and Orion for copyright infringement. While the exact amount of the resulting deal isn't known, Ellison and Hemdale settled the matter out of court, and Ellison was given a special credit in the home video releases of the film acknowledging his contribution.
• While the actual filming of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines went off without a hitch and the film was a resultant success, it only occurred after a decade-plus wait, with the franchise languishing in Development Hell as various parties vied for control of both the franchise and sequel rights. Though Cameron was initially interested in pursuing a third film, a number of factors including the technology not being where he wanted to be, Carolco Pictures (the studio that picked up the sequel rights from Hemdale) going bankrupt in 1995, 20th Century Fox vying for franchise rights, a botched liquidation auction and Cameron's involvement on Titanic (1997) led him to abandon the franchise. Co-producers Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar eventually purchased the sequel rights and Gale Anne Hurd's share of the franchise rights (which were now worth $8 million) to gain control over the franchise, but it would still take another two years in pre-production before the film would finally be greenlit, with Schwarzenegger only deciding to reprise his role (which he was paid very handsomely for) after speaking with Cameron, who urged him to go for as much money as he could.
• Terminator Salvation aimed to finally show fans what the Future War was like, but it took a beating getting to theatres:
  • The film was stalled out for several years as Vajna and Kassar (the franchise rights holder) originally planned to create a sequel to Rise of the Machines (with Nick Stahl and Claire Danes reprising their roles as John Connor and Catherine Brewster) before shopping the franchise to prospective buyers, eventually culminating in the rights being sold to The Halcyon Company in 2007. Warner Bros. agreed to distribute stateside while Sony Pictures handled international distribution.
  • The writing process was muddled and confused, with various parties contributing additions in the weeks leading up to filming (and even on-set). Though the original script treatment was written by T3 writers Michael Ferris and John Brancato, later revisions were made by Anthony Zuiker and Shawn Ryan. Screenwriter Jonathan Nolan (the brother of Christopher Nolan) reportedly contributed heavy rewrites to the script and was characterized more than once as the "lead writer", up to and including dialogue written on-set, but had to leave the project for another commitment after the 2007-08 Writers' Guild of America strike. Things were so confusing that novelization author Alan Dean Foster had to rewrite his entire book after learning that the final shooting script was completely different from the script he was given in early production.
  • Christian Bale, who would later refer to the production of the film as "troubled" was the first actor hired for the film — but it took multiple attempts for him to agree. He later admitted in an interview that he took the role of John Connor to get back at a number of people who insisted he wasn't the right fit for the part, and told McG he would only do so if the John Connor role was beefed up, bringing in Nolan to help write as a result.
  • An early script summary, which would have seen the half-human/half-Terminator Marcus Wright switch faces with a mortally-wounded Connor to keep his legend alive, before massacring the leadership of the Resistance (including Kyle, Star, Marcus and Kate), was leaked online to vehemently-negative feedback, prompting additional script changes.
  • Filming was no walk in the park, either. Shooting was delayed by four months after cast member Helena Bonham Carter lost members of her family in a car crash, and had to go back to England to tend to her relatives, thus necessitating major changes to her role (as Serena and the human avatar shown by Skynet). Stan Winston (who was also contributing Terminator designs) was originally intended to have a cameo, but his worsening health prevented this, and he died during production — the film would be dedicated to his memory. Bale's clashes with the crew led to other storylines, like those of General Ashdown (Michael Ironside) and Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) being trimmed down. Most infamously, Bale lost his temper after the film's director of photography, Shane Hurlbut, walked into his field of view during shooting of a scene with Bryce Dallas Howard, causing Bale to dress him down and swear repeatedly in front of the crew. Unfortunately, someone on the crew recorded and posted audio of the rant online, to scathing critical reaction, and forcing Bale to pen a lengthy apology for his remarks.
  • The resulting film debuted to mediocre reviews and middling box office, coming in second in its opening weekend and grossing $371 million against a $200 million budget (not counting advertising). Despite Brancato and Ferris alleging that elements of the production team deliberately made the film a Springtime for Hitler-esque Failure Gambit to bankrupt the production company so they could swoop in and scoop up the company's assets for cheap, McG largely enjoyed the experience making the film, and wanted to make a T5, though he would eventually go on to blame the Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles TV series for impacting the film's financial performance. What happened next, however, made Salvation's production look like small beans...
• Terminator Genisys, a film so mired in difficulties and such an open secret in Hollywood that the production team of Fantastic Four (2015) (itself an infamous example of this phenomenon) wore t-shirts which claimed "At Least We're Not On Terminator 5". While the full details still aren't fully known, enough information has leaked to paint a damning snapshot of the chaos:
  • Production of a sequel to Salvation was stalled out after The Halcyon Company went bankrupt in late 2009. The rights were once again put up for auction, but failed to elicit any serious offers^note Joss Whedon went public with an insultingly low offer of $10,000 — yes, that's ten thousand dollars, though the asking price of $60-70 million was a definite stumbling block. Pacificor, a hedge fund which had driven Halcyon into bankruptcy, purchased the rights for $29.5 million. Confusion and speculation followed, with one studio's (Hannover House) plan to create an animated reboot of the franchise being shot down by Pacificor and Universal considering a fifth film directed by Justin Lin and brining back Schwarzenegger. Finally, in May 2011, Annapurna Pictures (led by Megan Ellison) was rumored to have paid $20 million for the rights to make a fifth and sixth film.
  • Further changes followed. Lin dropped out of production to helm Fast & Furious 6, while Annapurna dropped their financing deal after Paramount Pictures (which had a distribution and financing deal with Skydance Entertainment, owned by Ellison's brother, David) agreed to provide funding and distribution. Casting quickly followed, with Emilia Clarke, being cast in the lead role of Sarah Connor, Jai Courtney playing Kyle Reese and Schwarzenegger playing a new Terminator named "Pops".
  • The reveal of a handful of character portraits, shot in early production and featuring Clarke, Jason Clarke (as John Connor), Courtney and Matt Smith, elicited laughter from viewers online, while production began with different departments having different ideas about the various timelines that made up the film's plot (which saw Sarah and Kyle encounter more-advanced Terminators in their timeline, and jump forward through time from 1984 to 2015, in an attempt to stop a new version of Skynet, called "Genisys", from being activated).
  • While the film was completed on time, marketing efforts led to a case of Trailers Always Spoil, where The Reveal that John Connor is a Terminator was played up in the second trailer, causing no end of complaints from fans and leading director Alan Taylor, to speak out about the poor planning.
  • The film became the second-highest grossing film in the franchise ($441 million), but was a domestic dud, only earning $90 million stateside. In an interview conducted years later, Clarke claimed that she was "relieved" that she wouldn't have to do any more sequels, claiming that "no one had a good time" and suggesting that Paramount subjected Taylor to Executive Meddling.
• Sadly, the same can be said for Terminator: Dark Fate, which also became a Box Office Bomb and led to even more uncertainty over the franchise's future, not helped by an acrimonious production process and battles between its director and executive producer. Various stories have covered the production problems:
  • Skydance Productions had originally planned to shoot a trilogy of films, with Genisys being the first in the new timeline, but re-adjustments and market research eventually led them to cancel the planned installments, despite the overall solid box office. David Ellison (who founded Skydance) got in touch with Tim Miller, who had just stepped away from directing Deadpool 2, while James Cameron, who had a clause in his contract that the rights would revert back to him in 2019, rejoined the franchise, but this time as only an executive producer. Together, they intended to create a new trilogy of films, with Schwarzenegger returning to reprise his role at least once more and a new cast of characters being introduced.
  • Tensions arose in the writing process, with various contributors coming in to try and polish a script treatment. In total, five writers (Cameron, Josh Friedman, Charles Eglee, David Goyer and Justin Rhodes) were credited with story contributions — Goyer walked early in the writing process to take on other projects, while Cameron suggested that Miller integrate a list of ideas for action scenes he had compiled over the years into the film, including a fight at a dam. Miller and Cameron would start butting heads at this point, along with Miller getting into disagreements with Ellison.
  • Both Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton agreed to reprise their roles, while actor Jude Collie appeared as a stand-in for Edward Furlong as John Connor (with a younger Furlong's face digitally edited over Collie's). Filming was also delayed three months over casting concerns and roles not being filled yet.
  • Despite eventual speculation that Miller was to blame for making the decision to kill off John Connor, it was actually Cameron's idea, who subsequently promoted Furlong as returning to the film, causing confusion and uncertainty when Furlong later tried to dial down expectations by saying his part was small. After the film's release, Furlong revealed that he only appeared for a day of work, and lamented his role being played up when it was small in the film.
  • While media reports suggested Cameron was on-set overseeing production, he later admitted that he never stepped foot on-set. Despite that, Cameron ran into Creative Differences with Miller, using his producer role to make further changes to the script, even when it was only a day before filming was to take place.
  • The marketing effort also ran into problems. Much like Genisys, the reveal of a cast photo showing the three principal female leads led to widespread backlash, with Miller later claiming that the negative response was caused by "misogynistic internet trolls", which only provoked the fanbase even more.
  • Things didn't get much better in post-production, with Miller and Cameron battling over final cut of the film. Cameron mostly believed the initial cut of the film was far too long and tried to use his editing experience to give advice, which was typically ignored. When asked later if he would work with Cameron again, Miller said he would not. A series of leaks regarding script details along with the reveal that John Connor would be killed in the opening scene also led to uncertainty and negativity from some fans.
  • Despite the vastly improved reception of this film at release by critics when compared to its three predecessors, Dark Fate suffered a miserable $29 million opening weekend (against a rumored $325 million budget with advertising), the incredible hold of Joker not helping matters. And because the movie made only 7 to low 8-figures in every country (only barely making back its production budget, not counting advertising costs, by the time of its second week of screening), it lost around $100-130 million at the end of its run.

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