In a world full of franchises, it’s sometimes difficult to find an original idea in a sea of sequels, prequels, and re-quels. Sometimes it seems like everything is a reboot or a third or fourth installment of something that already exists, retelling the same general stories with the same general characters over and over again. The good news is there are still plenty of original ideas floating around out there in Hollywood. The bad news is that a lot of them are turned into sequels anyway.
That’s not always such a terrible thing. Some would argue that building a film franchise from disparate parts instead of trying to connect everything right off the bat leads to more interesting, more dynamic, more out-there stories. We’d certainly rather see a film series constructed from a lot of different ideas, rather than one that simply replays the hits. Sometimes an idea for a sequel isn’t readily available, and studios have to look elsewhere for new concepts. When they find them, they’re rewritten to fit inside the universe — sometimes only a little bit, sometimes to the point where they’re unrecognizable.
We would have trouble imagining any of these movies as anything other than what they eventually became, but the fact remains that their origins were very, very different from the end product. It’s always fun to look back and see what a beloved classic used to look like, or imagine what could have been if an unproduced original screenplay was made exactly as it was written.
10 Original Ideas That Were Turned Into Franchise Movies
These movies first started out as very different stories.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
