Hey, have you ever tried watching Game of Thrones with hard-core fans of the books? Did you notice how enraged they get with all of the little (and often arbitrary) changes the producers made? Whether the original was a beloved novel or popular comic, Hollywood seems to take a perverse kind of pleasure in butchering it. But in the name of fairness, we should take a moment to celebrate all those times they got it right. Here are some bizarrely dark scenes that got left on the cutting room floor:
#6. Die Hard: John McClane And Al Turn Into Psychopaths
20th Century Fox
Die Hard tells the story of wisecracking New York police detective John McClane justice-murdering his way through a group of sophisticated European master thieves and their king, Hans Gruber. They take the headquarters of the Nakatomi corporation hostage, intending to crack the building's hidden safe and make off with a fortune in untraceable bearer bonds. McClane shoots them all until they knock it off, rescues his wife from the clutches of the villainous Gruber, and staggers out of the building as a triumphant hero.
But They Cut ...
Part of Die Hard's appeal is how perfectly its villains embodied the essence of sleazy-slick 1980s greed. They're basically a bunch of Gordon Gekkos, masquerading as freedom fighters in order to cover their billion dollar heist. However, in Roderick Thorp's Nothing Lasts Forever, which Die Hard was based on (what, you didn't know Die Hard was a novel first?), Gruber and co. really are gun-toting political activists. And they're also sort of the good guys.
20th Century Fox
"Who said we were terrorists? No, seriously, you're rewriting history."
The book opens with the John McClane character (Joe Leland in the book), heading to L.A. to visit his daughter Stephanie for Christmas. But when a group of terrorists, headed by Anton "Little Tony The Red" Gruber, seize the Klaxon Oil Building, where Stephanie works, a shoe-less Leland has to fight them to save her. However, it turns out that Klaxon Oil is secretly making millions of dollars illegally selling arms to the fascist Chilean government, and Gruber plans to steal documents to expose them before cracking their safe and literally throwing their blood money out the damn window. Also, Stephanie is a coked-out space cadet in a relationship with Ellis, whom you may remember from Die Hard as the most legendary douchebag in film history.
But hey, so what if the book had a little more moral complexity than the film -- what else would you expect? But everything finally goes batshit at the book's climax. Gruber falls out of the window holding onto Stephanie's bracelet, which is pretty much exactly what happens in the movie. However, unlike the movie, both Gruber and Stephanie plummet to their deaths.
20th Century Fox
"Stephanie originally killed Dumbledooooooore!"
Watching his daughter die in front of him drives Leland totally bonkers, and he starts wandering the building "crying like a child" and ruthlessly killing the rest of Gruber's fellow activists, including loads of women. When he comes across a young terrorist in her early 20s with "rosy cheeks", Leland "[shoots] this bitch in the forehead" and continues on his way.
Oh, and remember the scene in the movie where Karl, Hans Gruber's second in command, suddenly reappears after his apparent death and tries to kill John McClane, only to be shot by Al Powell?
20th Century Fox
"It's Al over now."
Well, the same scene happens in the book, but instead of triumphing over his fear of drawing his weapon and shooting Karl to save McClane, Al pulls his boss Dwayne Robinson in front of the gunfire, killing him in the process. After spending most of the movie as a saintly, heroic character, we can understand why the filmmakers decided not to have Al Powell suddenly turn into a goddamned sociopath and yank the asinine-yet-comedic Dwayne T. Robinson into a storm of life-ending bullets.
#5. Cheaper By The Dozen: The Dad Dies Of A Heart Attack
20th Century Fox
2003's Cheaper by the Dozen features Steve Martin as a man who refuses to stop fucking his wife. The couple have 12 children, which results in a kaleidoscope of hijinks all related to the struggles of trying to share a house with 13 other human beings, such as "Boy, we sure do have a lot of kids!" and "Holy shit, look at all these children!" There is also a scene wherein the kids stuff Ashton Kutcher's underwear full of meat and try to get their dog to bite his ass off, which we think should've placed it solidly in the running for Best Picture of 2003.
20th Century Fox
It lost to The Return of the King, where the Fellowship stuffs Kutcher's
britches full of meat and sends him to meet some orcs.
But They Cut ...
Because Hollywood ran out of original ideas in the 2000s, Cheaper by the Dozen was actually a loose remake of a movie from 1950, and an even looser adaption of an autobiography written by two of the children in 1948. In the Cheaper by the Dozen book, Steve Martin's character was an industrial efficiency expert who believed that his methodology for factory management could be applied to everyday life, specifically raising his kids. This notably, and creepily, included having four of his children's tonsils removed in a makeshift assembly line in their own home. He then dies suddenly of a heart attack at age 55, which admittedly is the more realistic outcome of a middle-aged man trying to raise 12 goddamned children.
Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
He named his middle kids "Neglect," "Resentment," "Bitter" and "Whatshisface."
Since having Steve Martin leave a widow with 12 kids would have kind of torpedoed the wacky tone of the movie, the ending was changed to Martin deciding to change jobs to spend more time with his kids. This also would've dramatically changed the tone of Cheaper by the Dozen 2 from "continuation of lighthearted family antics" to "unofficial sequel to Ghost Dad."
#4. The Natural: Roy Hobbs Strikes Out And Is Disgraced
TriStar Pictures
In The Natural, the greatest baseball movie not featuring Kevin Costner, middle-aged rookie Roy Hobbs, played by Robert Redford, is offered a bribe to throw the biggest game of the season. Hobbs refuses and instead hits a homerun to win his team the pennant, which is pretty much the opposite of what he was asked to do. It all turns out for the best, and everyone lives happily ever after, except for those people who were incinerated when Hobbs' homerun ball hit the overhead lights and everything exploded.
TriStar Pictures
You better run faster than that when the police show up.
But They Cut ...
Bernard Malamud was apparently in a super bad mood when he wrote his novel, The Natural. Either that or someone named Roy Hobbs had dinged his Altima. First of all, in Malamud's story, Hobbs actually accepts the bribe. It isn't until he finds out, in the middle of the game, that he's going to be a father that he changes his mind and tries to win. Now possessed with the singular desire to be an honorable man and do right by his family, Hobbs strikes the hell out, and his team loses.
Not only that, but a journalist eventually discovers that he was paid to throw the game, which means that on top of everything else, Hobbs is going to be banned from the game and have all his records wiped out.
Dell Publishing
Hear that, Peggy? You're going to be a virgin again!
Malamud's original novel was written as a King Arthur allegory, where a noble hero is eventually undone by his own misdeeds. However, the movie came out in the early 1980s, a decade in which nobody was interested in feeling bad about themselves, so they changed the ending to pretty much the exact opposite of what Malamud had written. After seeing the movie, the author supposedly said, "At last, I'm an American writer." Considering that his later novels touched on such cheery subjects like the hard lives of American immigrants and anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia, we're going to say that comment probably wasn't a compliment.
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