Hancock isn’t the first movie to suffer from the deteriorating hand of Hollywood’s ass-backwards marketability-over-quality system. Hell, it’s not even the first Will Smith movie. Just last year, the equally bastardized I Am Legend met a startlingly similar fate. It was one half of a good movie, with the rest of it being unable to overcome the onslaught of script rewrites, studio interference, and the deadly touch of writer/producer Akiva Goldsman. This is even more true of Hancock, and the resulting film is nothing short of puzzling. I’d even go as far as to say the movie is practically unreleasable in its current state. But before I get into why exactly that is, let us examine the movie that could have been.
Hancock - Pic 1
In 1996, screenwriter Vincent Ngo wrote a spec script titled Tonight, He Comes. (And yes, the sexual implications of that title are very much intentional.) The script was a Hollywood favorite, floating to numerous potential directors, such as Tony Scott (True Romance, Déjà Vu) and Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral). After sitting on the table for five years and hopping between studios, one thing became clear: as much as everyone loved the script, the only way to get the movie made was to completely butcher everything that made it unique. (I believe the Hollywood term for this is “to make it more marketable.”) The script suffered massive rewrites, with even producer Akiva Goldsman at one point getting a chance to put his uncredited but very noticeable stamp on it.
Eventually, production finally got underway, with Jonathan Mostow (Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) in the director chair. Had all the problems been finally taken care of? Nope. Mostow later dropped out of the project due to creative differences. Then Italian director Gabriele Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness) got on board. Now? Still no. Muccino also dropped out with regards to creative differences.
Hancock - Pic 2
The burden of directing would later fall to Peter Berg, who along with the studio agreed that the film still needed to be “lightened up.” To again refer back to my mastery of Hollywood terminology, this can be translated to, “Will Smith attracts teen audiences, so we wanted to go with a comfortable PG-13 rating, regardless of there being R-rated elements in the film that were pivotal to the storyline.”
So, anyway, that’s what it took to get the movie made, but what about the script itself? How similar is Ngo’s spec script compared to what we actually saw in Hancock? Well, having read the original script (you can too, thanks to Hollywood Elsewhere, or just get the gist of it over at Latino Review), I can safely say: not a whole fucking lot.
Literally the only semblance of Ngo’s draft to be found in the final film is the fact that there’s a drunken superhero named Hancock and a family (man, wife, son). That’s it. The characters act and talk entirely different, and just about every plot point has been altered significantly. What was once a harsh, bitter, intelligent, and thought-provoking character study of a washed-up, borderline-psychotic superhero became something else entirely. It became two halves of two very different films. And while that first half of Hancock proves that not all of the changes made by the studio-hired writers were necessarily bad, the second shows the obvious effects of having way too many cooks in the kitchen. Particularly when those cooks are fucking idiots.
In order to elaborate on that, I need to venture into spoiler territory, so if you’re not interested in having an already ruined movie ruined for you, don’t read any further.
Originally Posted by CalvnHobs6;333273;
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