10 Classic Movies Made Out of Terrible Ideas

It’s tough to imagine our favorite movies as anything other than what they are, but the truth is that any movie, no matter how iconic and beloved it’s destined to be, goes through a lot of rewrites before production kicks off. There are those lucky few whose original ideas are more or less how they end up by the time they make their debut, but there are many more whose early versions are almost unrecognizable.

Again, this is far from unheard of, but sometimes it’s fun to see what our favorite movies would have looked like if the studio and the filmmakers had stuck doggedly with Plan A. Sometimes a great idea is whittled down to its bare bones and we’re left mourning what could have been, scrolling through interviews with the creatives bemoaning a wonderful idea lost to rewrites. More often, a truly bizarre idea is tweaked and molded into the shape of a movie that can actually be made. In some of these cases, an out-there notion becomes an immortal cinema classic.

Some of these early versions of our favorite classic movies sound, let’s face it, downright terrible. What do you mean everyone’s favorite alien pal was once a cattle-mutilating fiend? What were the writers thinking, trying to base a kids’ movie around a middle-aged man’s deepest, darkest fears? What ... was even going on with the first draft of Being John Malkovich? These details make up the movies that could have been, but we’re kinda glad they never were.