00:00 are alive you're coming with me. Welcome to WatchMojo and today we're counting down our picks
00:05 for the most notable instances where films were made worse by additional photography. We're bad
00:10 guys, it's what we do. Number 10, Dark Phoenix. To be fair, this superhero flick is far from the
00:19 first blockbuster to need a few extra days of filming. But instead of rising from the ashes,
00:24 Dark Phoenix sank into them. When I lose control, things happen, bad things. What started as a
00:34 routine two weeks of pickups became an extensive three-month process that completely reworked the
00:40 third act. So after all that blood, sweat, and tears, what did they have to show for it? One of
00:46 the biggest bombs of the entire X-Men franchise, that's what. The shoehorn climax made the messy
00:52 film even harder to follow, not to mention the lackluster special effects. In the end,
00:57 the only thing these reshoots accomplished was making Dark Phoenix an even costlier embarrassment.
01:03 I don't know who I am. Yes you do. You're the girl who everyone abandons. Number nine, Hellraiser
01:12 Bloodline. Ironically, the only things raising hell in this horror flick were the distributors.
01:18 What the hell is this? The remnants of a most unsatisfying victim. Still,
01:25 you're here to change all that, aren't you? Despite having reservations on the script,
01:34 the studio waited until Hellraiser Bloodline had completed production to voice their concerns and
01:41 cue the reshoots. Although calling them reshoots is pretty generous, considering it was all
01:46 completely new material. Things seem to have changed. Hell is more ordered since your time,
01:54 princess, and much less amusing. The original two-hour cut was spliced, rearranged, and butchered
02:03 into an 85-minute snooze fest. As if to prove it, the original director swore off the final cut
02:10 and went credited under a pseudonym. There's no way of knowing if the first edit was any good,
02:15 but it couldn't have been any worse than the movie we got. No more games. Number eight,
02:23 Nightbreed. It's painfully apparent that 20th Century Fox had no idea what to do with Nightbreed.
02:29 He's not Nightbreed. He's natural. They let writer-director Clive Barker make an unapologetically
02:35 weird monster movie and then immediately backtracked when they saw the final cut.
02:40 Their big solution? Add more exposition and a lot of it. To make room, they had to trim nearly an
02:48 hour from Barker's original edit, turning the movie into an uneven mishmash of ideas. Too safe
02:54 to stand out, yet too quirky to sell tickets, Nightbreed failed to impress anyone in theaters.
03:00 Thankfully, this horror story has a happy ending. Barker reassembled his work into a massively
03:06 popular director's cut, giving Nightbreed the legacy it's always deserved. He hasn't saved us.
03:12 He's destroyed us. Number seven, Robocop. Don't get too excited. This 2014 remake is pretty much
03:21 Robocop in name alone. Nah, Daniels. Bad cop, Robocop. While it definitely has glimmers of the
03:29 bloodstained action fans know and love, that's clearly not the movie the studio wanted to make.
03:34 No, they wanted their murderous, cybertronic heroes to be family-friendly. It went about as
03:40 well as you'd expect. The clashing visions forced a series of revisions that watered down everything
03:46 that makes Robocop, Robocop. It's maddening to see it unfold on screen. If the studio had just
03:56 stuck to their guns, this remake could have been genuinely great. Instead, the distributors were
04:01 saddled with a box office dud that killed a planned trilogy before it ever really started.
04:06 Dead or alive, you're coming with me. Number six, Cursed. Despite the name, Cursed was anything but
04:13 during filming. The script was done, the makeup was next level, and everyone was happy with the
04:19 shot footage. Well, everyone except distributor Miramax. With just six days of filming left to go,
04:25 they put Cursed through a massive creative overhaul. Oh, you are asking for it, Abercrombie.
04:31 Oh, come on. Oh, you're really becoming transparent. What happened to a little
04:33 identity intervention, okay? Including, you guessed it, a whole lot of reshoots of the hour
04:39 and a half already shot. Only a meager 12 minutes made the theatrical cut. At that point, Miramax
04:46 could have just made a whole other movie. Based on the horrible reviews, this new vision seems
04:51 like it was doomed anyways. It's just a shame that Cursed had to go down with it. Monster.
04:57 Number five, I Am Legend. The most depressing part of this movie is just how close it was to
05:05 greatness. Taking cues from the original novel, I Am Legend was supposed to end with the reveal
05:11 that the mutant Darkseekers are sentient too. It's a bold twist that adds a whole new dimension to
05:17 the story's exploration of humanity and prejudice. Unfortunately, test audiences didn't like it,
05:24 so the studio demanded a round of reshoots to completely rework the story's climax.
05:29 Nothing happened the way it was supposed to happen. Nothing worked the way it was supposed
05:33 to work. Just like that, I Am Legend lost its twist ending and much of its rich subtext too.
05:39 It was such a mistake that the upcoming sequel will actually disregard the theatrical cut,
05:45 continuing the story based on the conclusion that was originally intended.
05:49 Number four, Suicide Squad. Supervillains or not, Harley Quinn, Deadshot, and the others
06:01 were not the biggest threats here. No, that belongs to distributor Warner Brothers. In an
06:07 attempt to make the movie more quote unquote "lighthearted," they insisted Suicide Squad go
06:12 through a metric ton of additional photography. And boy does it show. Rather than ironing out the
06:20 movie's kinks, these muddled addendums turned Suicide Squad into an incomprehensible train wreck.
06:27 In fact, the theatrical cut is such a mess of tones and characters that you can practically
06:32 see where the first edit ends and the reshoots begin. Given Suicide Squad's toxic reviews,
06:38 it's clear that Warner Brothers should have just left good enough alone.
06:42 "We're bad guys. It's what we do."
06:44 Number three, Solo, A Star Wars Story. Most of the time, creative differences are worked out
06:51 before cameras start rolling. But not with Solo. "I'll tell you what happened. They double crossed
06:56 you and tried to kill me." Original directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller clashed with the studio so
07:01 much that four months into filming, the two parties went through a very messy, very public breakup.
07:08 Without a director, a vision, or a plan, director Ron Howard stepped in to salvage the film,
07:14 aka reshooting and reworking nearly three quarters of Solo's story. Not that it mattered.
07:20 By the time the movie came out, audiences agreed there was more drama behind the scenes than in
07:25 front of it, turning Solo into the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars film ever. And it's not
07:31 even close. "I hate you." "I know."
07:34 Number two, Fantastic Four. Put aside the reshoots. It's amazing this movie finished
07:39 filming in the first place. "We want to support you, Franklin, but you put a lot of faith in these
07:44 kids." "I put all my faith in them." Allegedly, director Josh Trank wanted a much darker superhero
07:50 tale than 20th Century Fox was comfortable with. Their opposing views continued well into production
07:56 until, finally, it all boiled over. Trank never did get to finish his cut of the movie. Actually,
08:03 he never even got a vote on the final edit. Fed up with the feuding, 20th Century Fox went over
08:09 Trank's head to get the reshoots they wanted. But their meddling only turned things from bad
08:14 to worse. Without any coherent vision to pull it all together, 2015's Fantastic Four is rightfully
08:21 considered one of the worst superhero movies ever made. "There is only doom."
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08:40 Number 1. Justice League. Where are the heroes when you need them?
08:47 In 2016, Warner Bros. got major cold feet about the direction of Zack Snyder's DC Universe.
08:58 Part of their course correction included hiring Joss Whedon to spruce up the in-production Justice
09:04 League. He reshot key scenes, injected a ton of misplaced humor, and turned in a Frankenstein
09:10 edit that no one wanted to see. But in 2021, Snyder vindicated his fans by releasing his own
09:17 edit of Justice League. While not a total slam dunk, Snyder's cut is almost universally considered
09:24 to be the superior version. If Warner Bros. had realized that a few years sooner,
09:33 they could have saved their movie, their brand, and their wallets all in one.
09:38 What movie do you want to see a director's cut of? Let us know in the comments below.
09:44 "Oh, no tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering."
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09:58 [Music]
