15 Marvel Movies And Shows That Were Supposed To Be Way, Way Different Than What Ended Up Onscreen
Just like their comic book storylines get reimagined over the years, Marvel's movie plans continuously evolve throughout their development.
Marvel Studios / Via giphy.com
Sometimes, it takes years for a planned project to make it on screen, and even then, it might look completely different than what the studio originally had in mind.
Marvel Studios / Via giphy.com
Here are 15 Marvel movies and TV shows that were originally supposed to be way different:
1.At a 2006 Comic-Con, the Blade: The Series producers teased their plans to introduce Moon Knight into their show.
They mentioned Marc Spector in the pilot, but the show was canceled after only one season.
A few months later, Marvel Studios and No Equal Entertainment announced their plans to produce a Moon Knight TV series.
The only detail they shared was that it would be live-action.
However, no other announcements regarding the series with No Equal Entertainment were ever made, and in 2022, Moon Knight premiered on Disney+.
2.Originally, Spider-Man: No Way Home was supposed to come out after Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, so screenwriters Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna planned for Doctor Strange to already know "the dangers of screwing with [the multiverse]."
However, after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed the Multiverse of Madness release way back, the Spider-Man screenwriters "changed it so [Strange] was a person who doesn’t know that much about the multiverse."
McKenna told Variety, "That makes it even more frightening, to start fooling around with these things, because it’s the fear of the unknown. Either way, he was the voice of reason going, ‘You don’t mess with the fate of an individual’ — and Peter Parker being naive enough to go, ‘Why not? Why can’t we save these people?'"
3.She-Hulk was supposed to make her live-action debut in 1990's The Death of the Incredible Hulk, but she never made it into the movie.
The character had made her comic debut a decade before. She appeared in the animated series The Incredible Hulk as well.
However, in the early '90s, director Larry Cohen planned to make a She-Hulk movie starring Brigitte Nielsen.
Unfortunately, those plans fell through for unknown reasons, but a She-Hulk series starring Tatiana Maslany is set to premiere soon on Disney+.
4.In 2001, Dreamworks procured the rights to produce The Hands of Shang-Chi and tagged in director Stephen Norrington.
However, after those plans fell through, the film rights reverted to Marvel — who announced plans for their own Shang-Chi movie in 2005.
Shang-Chi was one of 10 superhero properties that the studio included in its early MCU Phase One plans.
Marvel initially wanted to introduce the hero in a The Avengers post-credits scene in a bid to gain traction with audiences in China.
The studio asked DMG Entertainment Motion Picture Group, which is based in China, to co-produce The Avengers. Introducing a Chinese character — either Shang-Chi or the Mandarin — in a post-credits scene would've been part of their partnership. However, DMG turned down the offer.
Plans for a Shang-Chi movie didn't come to fruition until 2021 with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
5.In the early '90s, Marvel and Full Moon Entertainment worked out a deal to create a Doctor Strange movie.
However, their plans fell through painstakingly close to the scheduled production, and Full Moon Entertainment lost the film rights.
Rather than completely scrap the project, they decided to rewrite the script just enough to shield themselves from copyright infringement, resulting in 1992's Doctor Mordrid.
In the movie, Doctor Mordrid is a sorcerer who must protect the world from the Dark Dimension. He also dresses similarly to Doctor Strange, lives in a New York City brownstone that's similar to the Sanctum Sanctorum, and battles a Dormammu-like other-dimensional villain named Kabal.
Marvel eventually brought Doctor Strange to the silver screen in 2016.
6.In 2004, Lionsgate partnered with Marvel Studios to make a Black Widow movie written and directed by X-Men co-writer, David Hayter.
It was also going to be produced by Avi Arad, the co-founder of Marvel Studios.
In an interview with FemPop, Hayter described the script: "She’s a freelance mercenary, and she’s called back to where she was brought up to face her past. What I tried to do was use the backdrop of the splintered Soviet Empire — a lawless insane asylum with four hundred some odd nuclear missile silos. It was all about loose nukes, and I felt it was very timely and very cool."
He spent an entire year working on his screenplay, and he was so invested in the project that he named his newborn daughter Natasha.
However, as he began working on the final draft, several movies about female vigilantes were released. Three days after the abysmal release of Aeon Flux, the studio told Hayter, "We don’t think it’s time to do this movie."
Natasha Romanoff eventually made her MCU debut in 2010's Iron Man 2, and she finally got her own Black Widow movie in 2021.
7.Early in the drafting process, The Avengers screenplay writer/director, Joss Whedon, wasn't sure if Scarlett Johansson was going to return for the movie, so he planned to replace her.
He told Thrillist, "I wrote a huge bunch of pages starring The Wasp. That was not useful."
Johansson, of course, did reprise her Iron Man 2 role, solidifying Black Widow's status as an original Avenger.
8.In 1990, Universal acquired the film rights for Iron Man and planned to produce a low-budget movie with director Stuart Gordon and writer Ed Neumeier. The storyline was rumored to follow an older version of Tony Stark as he came out of retirement.
However, due to the failure of other Marvel movies released around the same time, the project never made it beyond pre-production.
In 1996, Universal sold the film rights to Fox, who had Stan Lee and Jeff Vintar draft a script where MODAK — who's a giant evil head — was the main villain.
Both Nicolas Cage and Tom Cruise expressed interest in playing Tony Stark, but the film was stuck in pre-production for years.
In 2000, Fox sold the film rights to New Line Cinema, who put the story through multiple rewrites that bear some similarities to the eventual storyline that made it onscreen.
Tim McCanlies, Ted Elliott, and Terry Rossio's draft included a Nick Fury cameo that was meant to set up the character's solo movie. [Now, Nick Fury is getting his own Disney+ series.]
Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, and Jeff Vintar's revision introduced the Mandarin as the main villain. [A fake version of the Mandarin was the villain in Iron Man 3, but the real Mandarin appeared in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.]
Finally, in David Hayter's rewrite, Tony Stark decided that Stark Industries should stop producing weapons, which angered his still-living father, Howard Stark. So Howard teamed up with his son's biggest rival, Justin Hammer, and became a villainous version of War Machine. [Justin Hammer appeared in Iron Man 2.]
New Line Cinema expressed interest in having Joss Whedon as director before deciding to pursue Nick Cassavetes.
However, New Line Cinema's film rights expired right before they could finalize a deal with director Nick Cassavetes, so the film rights went back to Marvel Studios — who finally released Iron Man with Paramount Pictures in 2008.
9.An early draft of the Iron Man 3 script had a different villain — Maya Hansen.
"I liked the idea, like Remington Steele, you think it’s the man but at the end, the woman has been running the whole show," screenwriter Shane Black told Uproxx.
However, the screenwriters "were given a no-holds-barred memo saying that cannot stand and [Marvel corporate] changed [their] minds because, after consulting, [they've] decided that toy won’t sell as well if it’s a female."
Black said, "We had to change the entire script because of toy making."
So they rewrote the script to make Aldrich Killian the main villain instead and reduced Maya's role.
10.The version of Thor: The Dark World that director Alan Taylor wanted had "a slightly more magical quality" and "weird stuff going on back on Earth because of the convergence that allowed for some of these magical realism things."
He told the Hollywood Reporter, "The version I had started off with had more childlike wonder; there was this imagery of children, which started the whole thing."
However, "there were major plot differences that were inverted in the cutting room and with additional photography" — resulting in a much different movie than the one he envisioned.
"People [such as Loki] who had died were not dead, [and] people who had broken up were back together again," Taylor said.
11.Originally, Thor: Ragnarok was supposed to be much darker in tone — in fact, it was supposed to be the darkest Marvel movie yet.
However, during the movie's development stage, Marvel Studios separated from the overarching Marvel Entertainment, which gave Kevin Feige and the filmmakers a lot more creative freedom.
This newfound creative freedom enabled director, Taika Waititi, to inject comedic energy into the film. He told Entertainment Weekly, "A lot of what we’re doing with the film is, in a way, kind of dismantling and destroying the old idea and rebuilding it in a new way that’s fresh."
"Everyone’s got a slightly new take on their characters, so in that way, it feels like [this is] the first Thor," he said.
12.The original Eternals edit had a "really bleak" ending "with everybody back on the ship, minds erased and just going on to another planet, like The Twilight Zone."
Director Chloé Zhao told Empire, "I remember when it goes to black, everyone was like, 'I don't know what to do.'"
However, that ending didn't go down well with test audiences, so it was reworked.
"Also, it's the MCU, and you want to be excited for what's next," Zhao said.
13.Captain America: The Winter Soldier cowriter, Christopher Markus, pushed to make MODOK the film's main villain. He also wanted to cast Peter Dinklage in the role.
“In [the first movie], the great thing is [the visual effects and makeup team] really pulled off the Red Skull. It doesn’t look like a mask. it looks like it’s fully integrated into his flesh. And I want to see what they can do with MODOK," he told the LA Times.
However, no one else at Marvel seemed "to be on [his] side."
"There are the favorites I'm always trying to wedge in, but the problem is you can't wedge in a giant, flying head. It's not like MODOK can pop up in one scene," Markus told Nerdist.
Eventually, the movie's villain title went to Alexander Pierce. MODOK has yet to make his MCU debut.
14.In 2011, Jessica Jones was slated to premiere on ABC — featuring Carol Danvers (who wasn't Captain Marvel) as the lead's best friend.
At the time, the comic book version of Carol was Jessica's best friend as well as a hero called Ms. Marvel.
However, ABC passed on the show, and before Netflix picked it up, Carol became Captain Marvel in the comics and got her own movie — forcing showrunner, Melissa Rosenberg, to abandon the character altogether.
Rosenberg told IGN, "In the book, the powers are very out in the open and the themes of that are about ‘the other,’ and in the cinematic universe that’s not the mythology. So there was a lot that I had to move away from, just in terms of sheer plot, and Carol Danvers got her own movie."
So Rosenberg replaced her with Trish Walker, and Carol Danvers made her MCU debut in 2019's Captain Marvel.
15.And finally, in the early '90s, Marvel partnered with Wesley Snipes to bring Black Panther to the silver screen.
Snipes had three different versions of the script written.
However, the kind of technology that could accurately recreate Wakanda onscreen didn't exist yet.
Snipes told Collider, "We didn't have the technology we have now. Pixar didn't exist. None of the things, the CGI capabilities that we have now existed."
Snipes went on to star in Blade instead, and Chadwick Boseman starred in Black Panther in 2018.
