History ExecutiveMeddling / Film

* ''{{Airplane}}!'': The studio wouldn't let the producers use a propeller plane as the airliner, so the producers [[JustPlaneWrong gave the jet a propeller plane sound instead]].

** And possibly due to Jon Peters' ridiculous request for Brainiac to fight a polar bear, the miniseries ''Superman: Kryptonite'' has perhaps a ''very'' subtle joke where Superman is outside his Fortress of Solitude, talking about his relationship problems with Lois Lane. His lone listener, as it turns out, is a resting polar bear. Strangely enough Jon Peters produced Tim Burton's Batman which ironically has neither a giant spider,nor any exceutive meddling beyond the Prince songs/

** ...and has now managed to obliterate Del Toro's adaptation of ''[[HPLovecraft At the Mountains of Madness]]'' before filming even started. The reason? ''TheWolfman'' got poor reviews, and executives assumed this meant there was [[WallBanger no market at all for gothic horror films.]]

* Gwen Stacy's role was originally going to have been played by a random woman, but she too was shoehorned into the film against Raimi's wishes.

* Disney [[strike: has had a few cases]] may be the MostTriumphantExample of this. One of the most notorious victims was ''TheBlackCauldron''. [[{{Satan}} Michael Eisner]] axed nearly twenty minutes off the ''finished film'' before it hit theaters. The film certainly has other problems -- movies in DevelopmentHell for twelve years tend to accumulate them. But anyone with even a vague knowledge of animation production can see how insane this decision was.

* ''[[LogansRun Logan's Run]]'' had [[http://www.snowcrest.net/fox/loganmovie/index.htm loads of important scenes cut]]. The reason? The studio suddenly decided it had to be a PG movie. ''[[WallBanger A PG-rated movie based on Logan's Run.]]''

* The ''[[FridayTheThirteenth Friday the 13th]]'' series has suffered a number of WallBanger moments due to this. One particularly glaring example was in ''Part VIII'', which was supposed to be one-third on the boat, and two-thirds in New York, and the studio forced the director to reverse the ratio.

* Averted with ''{{Gremlins}}'', in a similar case to ''BackToTheFuture''. WarnerBrothers thought that the movie [[CompletelyMissingthePoint focused too heavily on the gremlins]] and [[WallBanger wanted most of their scenes cut]]. StevenSpielberg, the movie's producer, asked the studio why they didn't just cut every scene with a gremlin in it and call the movie ''People'', and they wisely backed down.

** One has to consider, though that even if Venom hadn't been put in, the Vulture was going to serve Venom's role anyway. Therefore, ''Spider-Man 3'' may have just simply been doomed anyway.

** Keep in mind that [[spoiler: it's very possible that he'll die in the final battle in Part Two]], as Timothy Spall implied in a brief EW interview late 2010.

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* Shusuke Kaneko originally wanted to use Varan and Anguirus for a ''{{Godzilla}}'' film he was directing. However, the Executives at Toho Studios made him use two more popular monsters instead. And, thus, we ended up with ''Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack''. Though, this is a case of Executive Meddling being a good thing since GMK is one of the better films of the franchise.
** Although the weird thing is that King Ghidorah is the ''villain'' in all other films that he appears in.

* After almost finishing production on ''[[Comicbook/{{Superman}} Superman II]]'', director Richard Donner was fired by producer Alexander Salkind, who wanted a lower-budget movie with more {{camp}}. The result on the franchise was disastrous -- many of the stars, including MarlonBrando and GeneHackman, refused to work with new director Richard Lester, and the third and fourth movies in the series were so critically disliked that ''Superman Returns'' [[CanonDiscontinuity ignores them entirely]].
** The production of what would eventually become ''Superman Returns'' was similarly fraught with meddling from above. When KevinSmith was recruited to write a screenplay for the film in 1997, he eventually gave up after being ordered by producer Jon Peters to write a scene where Brainiac fights a ''polar bear''; [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgYhLIThTvk listen to him talking about it here]]. JJAbrams, also at Peters' instruction, created a treatment featuring Superman as an ordinary human being who got his powers from his suit, a living creature that crawled out of a tennis ball tube. (It is said that Peters is not a fan of comic books, which may explain his apparent unawareness that he had ordered Superman to be turned into [[Comicbook/SpiderMan Venom]].) It wasn't until Bryan Singer was handed the project in 2003, and steadfastly refused to make any alterations to the mythos, that production actually got underway.

** YourMileageMayVary

* After four years of work on his dream project, ''Film/{{TheIslandofDoctorMoreau}}'', up-and-coming director Richard Stanley had attracted enough star power (Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer) to make his picture... only for star Kilmer, going through a divorce at the time, to request a role swap with Rob Morrow (playing the part of Montgomery), so as to make his load a little easier. To make matters worse, Kilmer ended up coming on set two days late, right in the middle of filming scenes ''his'' character was required for, and due to all this pressure, the dailies the studio received were abysmal; as a result, Stanley ''was fired from his own project''.

* After four years of work on his dream project, ''Film/{{The Island of Doctor Moreau}}'', up-and-coming director Richard Stanley had attracted enough star power (Marlon Brando, Val Kilmer) to make his picture... only for star Kilmer, going through a divorce at the time, to request a role swap with Rob Morrow (playing the part of Montgomery), so as to make his load a little easier. To make matters worse, Kilmer ended up coming on set two days late, right in the middle of filming scenes ''his'' character was required for, and due to all this pressure, the dailies the studio received were abysmal; as a result, Stanley ''was fired from his own project''.

** And possibly due to Jon Peters' ridiculous request for Brainiac to fight a polar bear, the miniseries ''Superman: Kryptonite'' has perhaps a ''very'' subtle joke where Superman is outside his Fortress of Solitude, talking about his relationship problems with Lois Lane. His lone listener, as it turns out, is a resting polar bear. Strangely enough Jon Peters produced Tim Burton's Batman which ironically has neither a giant spider,nor any exceutive meddling beyond the Prince Songs

** And possibly due to Jon Peters' ridiculous request for Brainiac to fight a polar bear, the miniseries ''Superman: Kryptonite'' has perhaps a ''very'' subtle joke where Superman is outside his Fortress of Solitude, talking about his relationship problems with Lois Lane. His lone listener, as it turns out, is a resting polar bear.

** It's worse than that. The first cut of the film was ''nine and a half hours!''

* ''ToyStory'' was almost the victim of this thanks to (you guessed it) MichaelEisner. Eisner continually pushed for a more [[DarkerAndEdgier more adult, cynical]] ''ToyStory'', making Woody even more of a jerkass and relying heavily on insult humor. The result backfired horribly; at a screening for the Disney execs, Roy Disney declared it the worst thing he'd ever seen, and Disney was ready to scrap the whole project until the writers were finally left alone to write the story they wanted to write. The rest is history.
** Actually, it wasn't Michael Eisner but instead Jeffrey Katzenberger who pushed the "edginess" of ''Toy Story''. This eventually led to his resignation, and Disney replaced him with Michael Eisner. However, during the Disney v. Pixar negotiations, Eisner did create Circle 7, which would have churned out horrible Disney Brand Cheapquels to Pixar films including ''ToyStory 3''. Thankfully, he was fired, the studio got shut down, and Pixar retained the rights to their characters.

* ''{{Kingdom of Heaven}}''... one of the biggest examples on how ExecutiveMeddling can ruin a film. Originally more than 3 hours, the studio forced RidleyScott to cut the running time, cutting out complete elements of the story. Many characters and much of the plot was altered with this move, none more than the character of Sibylla. King Baldwin V, Sibylla's son, was cut completely from the movie. Depth for many characters were cut, such as much of Balian's backstory. When this movie opened in theaters, it was met with mostly poor reviews.