When you see a slate of summer blockbusters that is almost entirely made up of sequels and reboots, it's easy to assume that Hollywood is just incapable of saying no to a profitable franchise. Oh, if only you knew.
As it turns out, the most disastrous, laughable sequels in history never actually made it to theaters. So let's take a moment and congratulate Hollywood for getting it right:
#5. Indiana Jones and the Monkey King Makes The Crystal Skull Look Amazing
Lucasfilm
Movie fans really don't grasp how close their favorite films came to being unwatchable piles of shit. Every great movie exists because a series of terrible ideas were shot down at some point, sometimes against the creators' wishes ("Bad news, guys, Burt Reynolds has turned down the role of Han Solo"). That's how the same creators and cast can produce both genius and dreck even when working in the same franchise. So, we watch a movie like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and wonder how it was possible to screw up such a perfect formula. But then you find out about Indiana Jones and the Monkey King.
Written by Chris Columbus (who had previously been commissioned by the Queen of Spain to write family friendly comedies for Steven Spielberg), this was to be the third film in the franchise, instead of The Last Crusade. And it would have opened with Indy battling a ghost in a haunted Scottish castle, and that alone sounds sufficiently terrible to sink the franchise:
Lucasfilm
"The MANICAL LAUGH came from OLD MAN MCINTYRE, who is SECRETLY trying to claim the LAND DEED."
But the Scooby-Doo hijinks were just the prologue. Back at Indy's school, a student half his age slaps the shit out of him for cheating on her with her mother in her own bed. Oh, and we're also introduced to the actual plot, which would have involved Indy teaming up with a sexy zoologist and a 200-year-old pygmy to save an ancient city full of immortality granting peaches from Lieutenant Mephisto, who, even by the standards of cinematic Nazis, sounds cartoonishly evil.
Secretly stowing away on the journey is Indy's teaching assistant, the young Betsy, who has a huge lady boner for her prof. In a wacky gag, Betsy keeps trying to kill herself when her advances are rebuffed. In her first attempt, she tries hanging herself with Indy's whip, prompting Indy to chastise her for damaging it, because Indy is kind of a dickhole in this draft. Later she accidentally makes out with both a chimpanzee and a dead fish because ha ha, bitches be crazy. Between all that and the stereotypical African natives, we'd be praising Willie Scott and Short Round as complex, nuanced characters.
Lucasfilm
Teaching teens that suicide is the answer, and that it's OK to waste bourbon? How irresponsible can you get?
But back to Indy's heroic efforts to keep the Nazis from making Fruit Reich Salad. Had this movie been made, "Nuke the fridge" would have been replaced in the pop culture lexicon by "Ride the rhino," which sounds like a masturbation euphemism but refers to a scene where Indiana Jones rides a goddamn rhinoceros.
Lucasfilm
The number of AUDIENCE MEMBERS enjoying the MOVIE becomes SMALLER ... SMALLER ...
But even though Indy would ride his rhino long and hard, that wouldn't be enough to save him. He's killed by Mephisto, which was presumably meant to surprise audiences but would instead have probably made them think, "Great, that douchebag teacher who sleeps around and mocks suicide attempts got what he deserved." It's cool, though, because the natives take him to the Garden of Immortal Peaches so he can join the long list of movie characters who are stand-ins for Jesus.
Lucasfilm
It would actually sound less lame if they just took him to Olive Garden.
The skeletal Monkey King brings Indy back to life, and the hot zoologist, hot suicidal TA, and hot native all immediately jump him while he's still trying to figure out what the hell happened. Look, we and our topless poster of Harrison Ford get that Indy is hot, but this is just ridiculous.
Lucasfilm
It's weird that the script predicted Harrison Ford's ad-lib.
Producers chose wisely and discarded this script for having too many supernatural elements, and also presumably for being way, way too stupid. Spielberg spoke for everyone when he said, "I don't think any of us wanted to go to Africa for four months and try to get Indy to ride a rhinoceros in a multi-vehicular chase," although now that there are rumors of yet another Indy movie, we do kind of want to see grumpy old man Harrison Ford take a stab at it.
#4. Back to the Future II: Marty Makes His Hippy Parents Screw
Universal Studios
The first draft of Back to the Future Part II starts out how we all know and love, with Marty and Doc travelling to the bizarre and unfathomable future of 2015 before returning to a dystopian 1985. But then, instead of returning to 1955 to stop Biff, Marty instead tracks him to 1967. He immediately retrieves the Sports Almanac, but gets hassled by a cop because he's dressed like a hippy. Since Marty has no ID and no draft card, he gets tossed in jail, giving us a look at a dark yet thankfully long-gone part of America's history where someone could get into trouble with the law for trivial reasons.
Universal Studios
Actually bothering to take the suspect the jail? That's unheard of these days.
Marty gets bailed out by his mom, who, like most moms, went through a hippy phase. She doesn't recognize him, even though he's the same guy who took her to prom and is still using the same goddamn first name. No, she's bailing him out because she heard about his incarceration in the paper and apparently had nothing better to do that day.
Universal Studios
"Fuck literally everything about time travel."
Lorraine does mention that he kind of looks like a guy she used to know, but her inability to connect the dots makes her seem stupider than if she had just forgotten.
Universal Studios
"Lorraine, have you considered doing fewer drugs? For the sake of your children?"
This leads to the thrust of the story, if you catch our unfortunate drift. Lorraine's bail money was supposed to pay for a trip to visit George in San Francisco (San Francisco being the land of bitter contract disputes). Marty was supposed to have been conceived on that trip, so now he has to raise $500 or he'll cease to exist because ... their marriage then immediately became sexless, we guess.
The premise of Back to the Future was kind of icky even when Marty was just trying to get his parents to fall in PG-13 love. Getting them to have unprotected sex in an almost certainly filthy San Francisco hotel room is just flat-out creepy, especially since Marty does everything short of buying his mom a Marvin Gaye record and telling her that guys love a girl who will go bareback. When Doc refers to Marty's parents' sex life as "biological reproductive mating behavior," you may just start rooting for Biff.
Universal Studios
"Doc, will you help me be a time pimp?"
The big climax (heh) finds Marty giving a speech at an anti-war rally. Fortunately, we're spared a scene where Jane Fonda is telephoned by her cousin and given some bold ideas. Instead, Marty gets everyone in the crowd to chip in some money so Lorraine can become a sex tourist. Oh, and Biff rushes the stage and tries to beat up Marty -- not because he knows about the long-forgotten Sports Almanac, but just because he hates hippies. The whole movie is like 50 percent hippy jokes, so there's another reason to be thankful it was never made.
#3. An Unmade The Planet of the Apes Reboot Features Humans Having Sex, While Apes Watch
20th Century Fox
Before Tim Burton got his damn pale, angst-filled hands on the Planet of the Apes remake, Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm took a lunatic stab at it in the mid-1990s. His script opens on Earth, where a spaceship piloted by an ape has crashed and brought a plague that kills babies. Every newborn ages and dies almost immediately, like some kind of fucked up Benjamin Button disease. More popcorn and soda, anyone?
20th Century Fox
Planet of the Horrible Birth Defects, guest-starring Charlton Heston as the ancient, wizened infant.
The origins of the ape ship are traced, and three scientists travel to their planet, where they are of course captured. The movie becomes both horrifyingly violent and broadly comedic -- a scene where one of the scientists' throat is slit is soon followed a parade of terrible puns where we see ads for the cartoon The Simians and fast-food restaurants like Banana King. Get it?!
20th Century Fox
Wait, why would Mickey Mouse become a monkey?
Faced with overwhelming despair regarding the future of their species, the two surviving captive astronauts naturally have sex while a gorilla cover of "Stayin' Alive" plays, because apparently disco is a universal, interspecies constant for getting it on.
20th Century Fox
"Can you believe we agreed to be in this?"
The video makes one of the apes horny ...
20th Century Fox
Yes, that says "exploring erotic possibilities undreamt of on the Planet of the Apes." No, this isn't unofficial fanfiction.
... And later another watches their boning with "a warm, almost motherly smile." That's a phrase we never want to associate with lovemaking, Bee Gees-aided or otherwise.
20th Century Fox
"INT SAM HAMM's OFFICE -- THAT MOMENT WHEN THE WRITER REALIZES HE HAS SERIOUS OEDIPAL ISSUES."
We all owe Burton an apology. We haven't even mentioned that a climactic chase scene includes Ape Sinatra and Ape Bono sharing a duet in a strip club featuring "topless GORILLA DANCERS."
20th Century Fox
"The TOPLESS DANCERS start GOBBLING BANANAS if you know what I mean."
We don't want to come right out and accuse Hamm of having an unhealthy fascination with ape sex, but we will say that his script features a lot more of it than we'd expect or hope from a Planet of the Apes movie. At least from an official one.
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