How do you follow up three Grammy wins? If you’re SZA, whose 2023 hit “Kill Bill” sent her star-status soaring, you scrap your next project that’s just percolating and start over from scratch. After three tracks from the R&B artist’s planned new album leaked back in January, she announced last month that those songs will now go on a deluxe version of her previous record while she reconceives her next one from the ground up. If this fresh approach ends up sparking some creativity that might have otherwise remained unignited, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Whether you’re making an album, a movie, or designing a new product, creative projects are seldom forged on wide-open Google docs where an eager public can devour every misstep and tweak along the way. Instead, the vast majority of albums, films, and products tend to emerge, fully formed, with audiences possibly later getting a taste of the R&D that went into them, via demos and alternate endings. This is as it should be. When it comes to a creator’s vision, better to see the finished product before learning what it had almost become instead. It’s amazing, though, when peeking into the development process on certain projects, which straight-up classics nearly went in far different directions.
Hindsight being what it is, every little decision that went into helping make something a smash appears obvious . . . eventually. (Of course, Robert Zemeckis was right to fire Eric Stoltz from Back to the Future six weeks into production and replace him with Michael J. Fox!) But in real time, it takes guts to veer off-course at the 11th hour—or humility, if the decision comes from upstairs. Anyone dreading a heavy revamp on a project of their own can take comfort in knowing that many massive hits went through major overhauls deep into the process—and perhaps learn something from the reasons why.
Changing one thing can change everything
As the first Shrek was coming together, in the late ’90s, Mike Myers was among the hottest comedy stars in the world. He was less than a decade out from Wayne’s World when his 1999 Austin Powers sequel became the rare franchise film that earned more in its opening weekend than its predecessor’s entire theatrical run. At that moment, Myers had enough clout that when he asked to rerecord his vocal performance as Shrek—this time, using the Scottish accent now inextricable from the role—executive producer Steven Spielberg was willing to hear him out.
The film had already burned through a lot of money at that point. Prior to casting Myers, the titular role belonged to Chris Farley, who sadly died during production, forcing a long delay. Spielberg and his fellow Dreamworks cohort Jeffrey Katzenberg were understandably hesitant to spend the money it would take to rerecord Myers’ entire part. (Katzenberg claims it ultimately cost $4 million more; Myers disputes that figure.) But they let him try it anyway and were bowled over by the results. It’s debatable whether the accent actually does lend the character the “working class” vibe Myers has said he wanted. What is beyond dispute, though, is that the accent makes Shrek sound like a full-fledged character, rather than a slightly gruffer Mike Myers (which is how early footage of the original recording comes across).
When it doesn’t feel finished, it probably isn’t
Similar to Myers, Bruce Springsteen was unhappy with the sound of his new album in 1979, late into the process of recording it. Earlier that March, he’d started working on his fifth LP, the follow-up to Darkness on the Edge of Town, and finished up recording in August. A month later, he settled on 10 songs and was all set for a Christmas release of the album he intended to call The Ties That Bind. Then he changed his mind, calling off the launch date. Something was wrong—and unlike the voice of Shrek, there was no simple, if expensive, fix for it.
“When I listened to it later on, I felt that it just wasn’t good enough,” the Boss later wrote about the album that would become The River. “The songs lacked the kind of unity and conceptual intensity I liked my music to have.” According to Marc Dolan’s biography, Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock ‘n’ Roll, Springsteen was inspired to reconceptualize the album after performing at the No Nukes benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden that September. During those shows, he debuted his song, “The River,” and subsequently decided he wanted more material on his next album to explore similarly dark themes.
What followed was nearly another year of writing and recording with the E Street Band. The crew put together more than 50 songs, with three permutations of a track list, before Springsteen whittled it down to the final 20-song version of his double LP, The River. The album finally hit store shelves in October 1980. By Christmas, it had sold more than 1.6 million copies and been hailed by Rolling Stone as the year’s best album. Is it an improvement over the original? That version is available to hear on 2015’s deluxe box set, The Ties That Bind: The River Collection, so fans can judge for themselves. But the important thing is that Springsteen thought it was better.
Sometimes you need another perspective
Of course, it isn’t always an inspired perfectionist with a head full of steam who decides their project needs a shake-up. Sometimes, it’s just obvious.
After a famously troubled production, Brad Pitt’s zombie-action-thriller, World War Z, first screened for executives at Paramount in February 2012. This early cut was a disaster. Even Pitt later acknowledged this version of the film was “atrocious.” A planned Christmas 2012 release date was promptly scuttled to the following summer, and director Marc Forster was given $20 million—on top of an already-exorbitant $170 million budget—to fix his movie. His first step toward that goal? Bringing in Lost cocreator Damon Lindelof to rewrite the film’s third act.
“‘The thing we really need right now,’” Lindelof recalls Pitt telling him, early into their collaboration, “‘is someone who is not burdened by all the history that this thing is inheriting, who can see what we’ve got, and tell us how to get to where we need to get.’”
Put into practice, that creative brief meant tossing out an expensive, already-filmed battle scene—accounting for 12 minutes of footage—and crafting a whole new ending. Lindelof landed on a satisfyingly tense, climactic set piece, which takes place in an office building rather than a Russian battlefield. You can read all about the original concept here, or just trust that this one sounds much stronger. The film ended up winning over a majority of critics and delivering what remains the biggest hit of Brad Pitt’s entire career, at $540 million worldwide.
All it took was some perspective. Well, some perspective and an additional $20 million.
Listen to feedback—especially if it’s negative
From the moment Paramount unveiled a first (darkly obscured) glimpse of its film Sonic the Hedgehog, in late 2018, fans of the video game were displeased. “The first Sonic the Hedgehog live-action movie poster is creepy as hell,” declared a PC Gamer headline. Things would only devolve from there. The following March, the game’s cocreator, Yuji Naka, suggested on Twitter that the much-derided promo images trickling out after the initial poster might be fan-made, not official. If only that had been the case.
Naka hadn’t even seen the set of pearly human teeth Sonic flashes in the trailer Paramount released the following month at the time he attempted to quell the outrage. By the point, he had seen it, the negative feedback reached a fever pitch Naka couldn’t have assuaged even if he tried. (He didn’t.) Sonic’s creepiness, in the film’s initial iteration, was only matched by its divergence from the beloved character’s video-game look. The sneakers were wrong, the eyes and fur were weird, the body shape was unspeakable. (And again: those teeth!) The message from fans was unmistakable: We will not stand for this.
Instead of ignoring the outcry, Paramount leaned into it. Director Jeff Fowler released a statement on Twitter, pledging to fix Sonic, and do it fast. The film was moved out of its November 2019 release date to February 2020, and the studio brought on video-game artist Tyson Hesse, who had high credibility with Sonic fans, to lead the redesign. For an estimated additional $5 million, and with the aid of a shop called Marza Animation Planet, the studio did indeed fix Sonic fast enough to meet its new release date. The film went on to gross $320 million worldwide, even as the pandemic was beginning—something that might have been unthinkable without the redesign. This instance of listening to feedback was so successful, in fact, Fast Company made Marza one of its Most Innovative Companies for 2021.
Perhaps the most daunting part of deciding to scrap finished work is that it doesn’t always pay off. As much as these success stories might be inspiring, counterexamples are everywhere. Many movies that have undergone extensive reshoots or high-level personnel changes have limped into theaters as preordained flops. Anyone considering a costly do-over could be accused of throwing good money after bad—the dreaded sunk-cost fallacy—and even worse, the accusers might be proven right. Why pour fresh funds into retooling a project when it could be more cost-effective to just scrap it altogether, or change nothing?
There are no one-size-fits-all answers here. The decision comes down to a calculus of gut instinct and number-crunching unique to each situation. Spending the extra time or money won’t always be worth it, but when an elegant solution to a creative problem materializes, it could be more expensive in the long run to not pursue it—no matter how difficult the pursuit.