Five movies intentionally sabotaged by the people who made them
In the movie business, there are a mind-boggling number of factors that go into making any film a success. Writers, directors, actors, producers, and countless crew members can all work their hardest on a production in the hope that it gives the movie the best platform for exceeding expectations. However, so much is out of their control that sometimes it seems innumerable outside factors sabotaged their work.
What about the times when a movie is intentionally sabotaged by someone involved with the production, though? Those occasions are comparatively rare, but they have been known to happen. After all, films aren’t made by one or two people – they’re made by hundreds of people on the production side and even more on the studio side. What if one of these people didn’t want to see the movie succeed?
In truth, moviemaking is an industry filled to the brim with creative people boasting sizeable egos and different motives driving their behaviour. Sometimes, these egos clash over a creative vision or a perceived lack of support for a film – and this has led to several people purposefully trying to tank their own films.
From a director who went mildly insane when other voices tried to meddle with his debut feature to an actor who derailed an entire film because he was sad, these stories of self-sabotage are fascinating, eye-opening, and often borderline insane. Here are five movies that were intentionally sabotaged by the people who made them.
Five movies that were sabotaged by their creators:
American History X (Tony Kaye, 1998)
American History X is one of the most acclaimed films of the 1990s. It’s also the movie that landed Edward Norton his second Oscar nomination. However, it was also not the film director Tony Kaye wanted to make, and he torched his own promising directing career by attempting to sabotage its release. Perhaps it should have been a red flag that things were about to go pear-shaped when Kaye reacted so poorly to being asked by New Line Cinema to make minor cuts after the film’s first test screening. He admitted to saying, “I’m fully aware that I’m a first-time director, but I need the same autonomy and respect that Stanley Kubrick gets”.
To Kaye’s horror, Norton—another noted control freak—soon muscled his way into the editing process, and he and Kaye were fighting over their visions for the movie. Kaye reportedly became so incensed on one occasion that he punched a wall and needed stitches in his hand. Even though Kaye was eventually given eight weeks to re-cut the film again, he paid $100,000 of his own money to print bizarre adverts in the press condemning Norton and the studio while invoking John Lennon and Abraham Lincoln.
Kaye next attended a meeting with New Line alongside a priest, a rabbi, and a Buddhist monk before proceeding to video-record the whole thing. He bragged about creating a radical new vision of the movie, but after eight weeks, he had nothing to hand into the studio. So, it released Norton’s cut, which Kaye decried as a “total abuse of creativity.” In the end, Kaye didn’t direct again until 2006, when he confessed, “My ego got in the way. That was entirely my fault. Whenever I can, I take the opportunity to apologise.”
Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967)
In 1966, it was announced that hot young leading man Warren Beatty would star in and produce Bonnie and Clyde, a movie about the notorious Great Depression outlaw couple. Beatty felt a lot of pressure to make the film a success, as so much of it fell on his shoulders, but there was one person he had a tough time impressing from day one: Warner Brothers president Jack Warner. In fact, Warner was so down on the film that he scheduled it for release in August – then seen as the worst time to release a film – and refused to commit the proper funds to promote it.
Beatty revealed to Life magazine that Warner gave him an earful when he turned up to watch rushes on the day director Arthur Penn had shot an important scene repeatedly from different angles. A disgusted Warner told Beatty, “Hey, kid, Bogart wouldn’t do that. You think Errol Flynn would put up with that many takes? For Christ’s sake, kid!”
Then, when Warner was shown the uncut version of the movie, he groused, “This is the longest goddamn movie I’ve ever seen.” He also unceremoniously dubbed it a “three-piss picture” – meaning he went to the toilet three times during the screening because he was so unimpressed.
Ultimately, Beatty saved Bonnie and Clyde from Warner’s repeated sabotage attempts. He “got out and sold the picture” for eight long months, travelling all over the US to speak with exhibitors and beg them to keep the movie in their theatres longer. Soon, a groundswell of positivity grew for the movie, both critically and commercially, and Beatty saw his opportunity. He threatened to sue Warner Brothers if it didn’t re-release the film – and by the end of 1968, it had become Warner Bros’ second highest-grossing movie in history.
The Fantastic Four (Oley Sassone, 1994)
This cheap and cheerful Marvel movie was meant to be released in 1994, a far cry from the all-conquering, big-budget MCU films audiences have been devouring since the 2000s. Produced by low-budget B-movie icon Roger Corman and Resident Evil’s Bernd Eichinger, the $1 million film was announced in 1993. It even featured on the cover of Film Threat, with a premiere date set for 19th January 1994—then, it vanished without a trace.
To their horror, the cast—which included Charmed’s Michael Bailey Smith and Hallmark Channel regular Rebecca Staab—were served with cease-and-desist letters. The premiere was cancelled, and the film’s negatives were seized. Rumours quickly gained traction that the producers had never actually intended to release the movie. Instead, the entire project was allegedly an exercise in retaining the IP rights to Marvel’s First Family. This theory was supported by none other than Stan Lee himself, who stated bluntly in 2005, “That movie was never supposed to be shown to anybody.”
Both Corman and Eichinger denied Lee’s claims of producorial sabotage and insisted that they always intended to release the film. However, Eichinger claimed that Marvel executive Avi Arad approached him with a proposition—he’d pay “a couple of million dollars in cash” for the film so that Eichinger wouldn’t lose any money. Arad supposedly planned to destroy all prints, as he was worried the corny, low-rent film would damage Marvel’s brand. Whether this is true or not is up for debate, but the efforts to bury the film were ultimately in vain – a bootleg recording began circling conventions in the ’90s. These days, it can be viewed on YouTube for free.
Broadway Brawler (Lee Grant, 1997)
This romantic comedy was so thoroughly sabotaged by its own star that the production was abandoned entirely. After two years of excruciating pre-production, Broadway Brawler finally began shooting in 1997, with Bruce Willis playing a retired ice hockey player who strikes up a romance with a woman played by Liar Liar’s Maura Tierney. The next 20 days were a disaster, though, and it all came to a head when Willis abruptly sacked multiple crew members, including cinematographer William A Fraker, director Lee Grant, and her producer husband, Joe Feury.
The movie was a Disney production, and the House of Mouse quickly hit the pause button to sort out the mess. Willis hired director Dennis Dugan to take over for Grant, but he was unable to shoot anything because Disney made the shocking call to scuttle the production. It turned out that more than half the budget had already been spent, and studio chiefs Andy Vajna and Joe Roth decided it was beyond saving. This is highly unusual in Hollywood, as it’s incredibly rare for a studio to let millions of dollars go to waste.
The situation was potentially sticky for Willis, too, as it was found that his controlling behaviour, which kept undermining Grant’s authority, was primarily responsible for the shutdown. Disney could have sued him for $17.5m, but they decided to take a different approach. Willis agreed to a three-picture deal at a greatly reduced rate, and for the first film – Michael Bay’s Armageddon – he was only paid $3m instead of his usual $20m.
Ghost In The Noonday Sun (Peter Medak, 1974)
In 1973, Peter Sellers touched down in Kyrenia, Cyprus, to begin work on a pirate comedy called Ghost in the Noonday Sun. He’d convinced his buddy Peter Medak to direct the picture, but from the second Sellers arrived on location, Medak knew something was wrong. Sellers began behaving extremely erratically, which was later put down to him being depressed after breaking up with Liza Minnelli, and his behaviour soon got so bad that he tried to shut the whole production down.
When Medak refused to abandon the entire film because Sellers wasn’t feeling it anymore, the iconic comedy star upped the ante on his antics. He repeatedly pretended to be sick, which delayed shooting and was once taken to hospital after a suspected heart attack. Medak was suspicious, and two days later, it was proven that he had every right to be. You see, to his horror, he saw photographs in the newspaper of Sellers eating at a restaurant with Princess Margaret.
After a production that can only be described as hellish, director Peter Medak admitted that he, writer Spike Milligan, and Peter Sellers attended a screening of the first cut. Medak confessed, “We all just wanted to kill ourselves.” Columbia Pictures was no more impressed with the film than its director or sabotaging star—in fact, the studio pulled it from the 1974 release schedule entirely. It finally saw the light of day 11 years later when it was quietly released on VHS. Reflecting on Sellers in 2004, Medak remarked, “As an artist, he was a genius. As a person, he was insane… He destroyed the whole film.”
