15. Several Films Started Life as Completely Different Projects

It’s estimated that any Hollywood studio owns about ten times as many film scripts as they actually produce.

That means there are entire libraries in Hollywood loaded floor to ceiling with fantastic scripts that will never see the light of day.

Sometimes it’s crafty strategy, with studios buying scripts with similar subject matter to one of their main productions to avoid the competition.

Sometimes it’s purely for the sake of cannibalism. Many successful films were cobbled together on the fly, creating big Frankenstein amalgamations of scripts that might have been much better on their own.

Case in point, 2004’s “I, Robot” was originally a completely separate action script entitled “Hardwired”. Film rights to Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi novel were set to expire, so it was decided that the “Hardwired” script would bear the name and a few plot details.

The more recent “World War Z” was a similar affair, with many fans bemoaning how the film took its source material’s title and little else.

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All of the “Die Hard” sequels started life unaffiliated to the franchise but were gradually absorbed by producers mining old scripts for ideas. It’s a depressingly common practice in a Hollywood where the big budgets are saved for the special effects department and the writers are left out in the cold.