The Real Reason These Movies Were Finished By Another Director

Films by their nature are a collaborative effort involving the skills of anywhere from a handful of people to hundreds of people, each proficient in a different craft or area of technical expertise necessary to get the picture done. But atop all of it is the director, who commands this army (or squad) of artisans and provides the vision and roadmap needed to bring the movie into focus — no pun intended.

Sometimes, however, the person leading the mission — whether they be a visionary or a journeyman — can end up being the wrong commander for the task at hand, or at least not someone that the producers or backers of the project feel is capable of landing the plane. In these cases, a replacement is sought, sometimes resulting in a classic film and other times in a project that deteriorates into shambles.

In many of the examples below, everyone ostensibly started out with the best of intentions, but the director was deemed unsuitable for the material or unable to work with the others involved and did not see the final version of the film through. In a few instances, the official director allegedly stayed in place while others shaped the film behind the scenes. Either way, the films on this list demonstrate that with so much money on the line, no one is irreplaceable — not even the director.

As noted above, director Victor Fleming had to quit "The Wizard of Oz" and take over "Gone with the Wind" at the behest of producer David O. Selznick and the studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which was behind both films. But Fleming himself was not even the first director assigned to bring L. Frank Baum's fantasy classic about Dorothy's adventures in the Land of Oz to life. That task initially fell to veteran MGM director Richard Thorpe, who was let go after two weeks.

Producer Mervyn LeRoy allegedly did not like the footage he got from Thorpe, so director George Cukor temporarily took over — although Cukor did not shoot anything and was merely involved in reorganizing and redesigning aspects of the production before he left to begin work on "Gone with the Wind." Enter Victor Fleming, who shot most of the movie between late fall of 1938 and the early months of 1939, including all the scenes rendered in Technicolor. It was at that point that MGM asked Fleming to take over "Gone with the Wind" after Cukor had been let go.

King Vidor, a journeyman director with dozens of credits to his name, completed "The Wizard of Oz." He shot all the black-and-white scenes set in Kansas, including Dorothy's (Judy Garland) for-the-ages performance of "Over the Rainbow."

This 1960 historical epic starring Kirk Douglas (whose production company was also behind the film) as the title slave who becomes a gladiator for the entertainment of his corrupt Roman masters and ultimately leads an uprising against them. Co-star Laurence Olivier was originally slated to direct before the job was offered to David Lean of "Lawrence of Arabia" fame. After he passed on it, director Anthony Mann ("Winchester '73") was handed the gig.

But Mann was fired by Douglas after just one week of shooting, allegedly because the project was simply too massive for him to handle. Douglas turned to Stanley Kubrick, a young director he had worked with recently on the war film "Paths of Glory." Kubrick came aboard and quickly took control of the picture and added his distinct visual style to the film. But even though Kubrick successfully completed "Spartacus," he fought with Douglas and members of the crew and later disowned it as the one film in his career on which he did not have complete creative freedom.

Back in 1977, producers Alexander and Ilya Salkind decided to shoot their live-action, big-screen version of "Superman" at the same time as "Superman II," much as they had done with their earlier hits, "The Three Musketeers" and "The Four Musketeers: Milady's Revenge." But they didn't count on the incredibly difficult production challenges that director Richard Donner and his cast and crew would face. With tensions between the producers and Donner rising, and "Superman" falling behind schedule and going over budget, it was decided to complete the first film for its December 1978 release date and return to the follow-up later.

When shooting resumed on "Superman II" in September 1979, however, Richard Donner was no longer behind the camera. His replacement was "Musketeers" director Richard Lester, who said that legal issues between Donner and the Salkinds led to Donner's departure. Yet Donner stated in interviews that he wanted full creative control and would not work with the Salkinds' line producer, Pierre Spengler, again if he were to return — so the Salkinds fired him. Although Donner had completed around 75% of "Superman II" and some of his footage remained, Lester reshot and added several sequences. 

"Superman II" was a success with both critics and audiences, but years later, armed with some rough test footage, other scenes that had been completed but excised, and footage of Marlon Brando as Jor-El that the actor had previously blocked the Salkinds from using, editor Michael Thau completed "The Richard Donner Cut" for home video release. So, in a way, Donner got to finish the movie after all.

In 1983's "WarGames," a teenage nerd named David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) hacks into an online computer system thinking he's playing a yet-to-be-released war strategy game. What he soon realizes, however, is that he's broken into a U.S. military computer that cannot tell the difference between what's real and what's simulation, and the launch of actual nuclear weapons hangs in the balance.

Eerily ahead of its time in some ways, "WarGames" began filming under the direction of Martin Brest, who was a few years away from scoring major hits with "Beverly Hills Cop" and "Midnight Run." But Brest was fired after more than a year of preparation and less than three weeks into shooting. He was replaced by John Badham, director of "Saturday Night Fever" and "Blue Thunder." Badham claimed that Brest's initial footage pointed toward a darker version of the story and that his mandate was to lighten it up; Brest later said that he clashed with an executive producer on the movie, which led to his dismissal.

Badham continued to direct movies until 1997, when he switched to working in television for the next 20 years, while Brest withdrew from the industry entirely after helming 2003's notorious "Gigli," starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. That film impacted Brest's career pretty much like ... a nuclear missile.

This is one of only two examples on this list that resulted in each director completing their own versions of the film, with both eventually released to the public. Morgan Creek Productions — which owned the film rights to "The Exorcist" — recruited Paul Schrader ("American Gigolo," "First Reformed") to direct a prequel to the horror classic following the failing health of original director John Frankenheimer. But when producer James G. Robinson viewed the finished project, he was disappointed to watch a cerebral film with little or no scares, gore, or action.

Schrader re-edited the film, but Robinson still wasn't pleased and brought in his own editor, only for Schrader to dismiss the latter and do another edit himself. When that cut failed to impress Robinson, the studio fired him rather than let him reshoot the film and began meeting with other directors. Based on a pitch by "Cliffhanger" director Renny Harlin, an almost entirely new movie was created, with only star Stellan Skarsgård remaining from the first version as a new plot and cast was fashioned around him.

Harlin's "Exorcist: The Beginning" was released in August 2004 to brutal reviews. Shortly thereafter, Morgan Creek approached Schrader about completing his version of the film and provided him with a very small budget to work with. Titled "Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist," Schrader's film was given a limited release in March 2005. It performed somewhat better with critics than the Harlin version — and is considered the better of two seriously flawed approaches to the same material.

Lucasfilm's reputation with directors — that is, the company's penchant for removing or sidelining them before and during the development and filming of projects — began right here with 2016's "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story," the first of what was supposed to be a continuous stream of "Star Wars" spinoff films following Disney's purchase of Lucasfilm. The story of the plot to steal the Death Star plans and the doomed, ragtag crew of rebels who pull it off was handed to British director Gareth Edwards, who was coming off the success of his second theatrical film, 2014's "Godzilla."

But after Edwards finished shooting "Rogue One," Tony Gilroy (later the creator of "Andor") was brought in by Disney to perform additional rewrites on the script and helm five weeks of reshoots. Edwards' role at the time was not completely clear; as recently as this year, he's insisted that he was involved all the way through. But Tony Gilroy was more candid about the situation in 2018: "They were in so much terrible, terrible trouble that all you could do was improve their position." Gilroy seemed to indicate that several major characters needed retooling, saying, "[It's] a movie about sacrifice ... It's all a question about, why are all these people going to sacrifice? And you need to motivate them with a purity throughout the way."

Whatever Gilroy did, it worked: "Rogue One" grossed over $1 billion worldwide and is generally considered one of the best films in the "Star Wars" canon.

Filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller probably began shooting "Solo: A Star Wars Story" — an origin story about everyone's favorite space smuggler — with all the confidence in the world, coming off writing and directing movies like "The Lego Movie" and "21 Jump Street." But in June 2017, after Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy and screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan reviewed months of footage, Lord and Miller were fired when it became clear that they had major disagreements with the studio over the film's tone and direction. "Tone is everything to me. That's what movies are made of," Kasdan told E! Online.

The directors apparently wanted to make the film in the improvisatory, more comedic style of their earlier work, while the Lucasfilm team, particularly Kasdan, was more interested in sticking to the script as it was written. One source told the Hollywood Reporter, "People need to understand that Han Solo is not a comedic personality. He's sarcastic and selfish."

Lucasfilm brought in veteran director Ron Howard to complete the project, with Howard reshooting an estimated 70% of the movie in addition to filming new scenes. But despite all the drama surrounding its production, audiences just didn't seem to care in the end: "Solo" grossed less than $400 million worldwide, making it the franchise's one theatrical money-loser to date.