Verbal Diorama

Horror icon Chucky was originally created by UCLA student Don Mancini, evolving from a script originally titled ' Batteries Not Included ' which then became ' Blood Buddy ', where the character was named Buddy. Potential lawsuit with Hasbro aside, Buddy would eventually become Chucky; the movie was eventually renamed Child's Play , and would become a ground-breaking horror film that successfully c...

Bill & Ted creators Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, along with stars Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves, always assumed Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey would be the last time anyone would see Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan together on the big screen ever again. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey hadn't done the business of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure , and so all four men went the...

Verbal Diorama: It’s hip, it’s now , it’s wow and how?! After the huge success of both Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 , Sam Raimi wanted to finish his Spider-Man trilogy with a bang. Originally planning to have Sandman and the Vulture, along with a non-New Goblin Harry Osborn against Peter Parker's newly adored Spider-Man, plans would evolve somewhat as time passed, with Avi Arad instead wanting fan...

Batman Forever , for all its neon grandiose spectacle, was purely created as the anthesis to Batman Returns . While retrospectively, Batman Returns is seen as one of the best Batman movies, the backlash around the movie's dark, violent and sexual nature led to parents revolting, and Warner Bros scrambling to make Batman family-friendly again. Enter Joel Schumacher, a guy with a strong movie making...

After Steven Spielberg took the reins for both Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic World , it was time for some fresh meat for Jurassic Park III , which was the first to not be directed by Spielberg and not be based on a Michael Crichton novel. Jurassic Park III would start to have problems early, though. The original script was thrown out five weeks before filming was due to start, with th...

Bong Joon-ho’s dedication to making Snowpiercer , and making it his way, is as always a true testament to his greatness as a director, and a visionary director at that. You don’t start something in 2005 and take seven years to develop it if you don’t have that passion for the project. In many ways the scale and scope of Snowpiercer led Bong to want to make smaller films - his next film would be Ok...

Hollywood cinema has often featured Native American men in Westerns as brutal, hypermasculine barbarian warriors, and Native American women as hyper-sexualised or a quiet subservient. They'd also often be portrayed by white actors in brownface. How remarkable that a Predator prequel aimed to set this injustice right? Despite not being of Native American descent, director Dan Trachtenberg and write...

From the depths of the Mexican jungle, an elite team of special forces are sent in to rescue hostages, but unbeknownst to them, they're the ones who are being hunted. Predator , originally known as Hunter, was a spec script by brothers Jim and John Thomas that was slid under the door at 20th Century Fox, and ended up being sold without an agent or a lawyer. While its premise changed slightly from...

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is beloved by fans of the franchise, and lauded as the best Star Trek movie, with Khan himself as one of the standout villains, and Spock's sacrifice and resulting death as an emotional high point. That wasn't always the case though. In fact, Spock's death was leaked to fans during production, and fans were not happy, even resorting to sending death threats to produ...

Starting life as a skit for the VH1 Fashion awards, Derek Zoolander would become an international sensation, and be vying for his fourth consecutive VH1 Male Model of the Year. It's an impressive feat for a man as ridiculously good-looking as he is. Inspired by the success of Austin Powers , the idea was to make a feature length movie out of Derek's life and successes, but filming during the 2000...

Cloverfield , or one of its many other names, was greenlit in a shroud of secrecy, and that secrecy continued throughout production. Actors were auditioned without even being told what they were auditioning for, just that it was a new untitled J.J. Abrams project, and the Abrams name was enough to whet the appetites of not only the actors involved, but also the general public. After a teaser trail...

Remember when action movie heroes didn’t have to think and just beat up a load of bad guys? Jason Bourne heralded the change when The Bourne Identity came out in 2002, and heroes became as vulnerable as they could be dangerous. It was a troubled production, led by Doug Liman, who fought for years to get the rights to the material, and get the movie made in his own chaotic and frenetic directorial...

Roland Emmerich is not known for being an auteur director, but he is known for his disaster movies; the most defining and well-known of which is Independence Day . A movie that was almost called Doomsday . Can you imagine celebrating our Doomsday every 4th of July? A movie called Independence Day , released around Independence Day 1996, was never going to be anything other than a spectacle of Amer...

Last year, Super Mario Bros celebrated its 30th anniversary. It was a fairly muted celebration, but its acknowledgement for the most part came with the release of the new Super Mario Bros Movie , an Illumination animation starring Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy & Jack Black, with many websites also acknowledging the movie that came thirty years before. It's well documented that this is a movie w...

As a movie about movie making, Bowfinger leaves no stone unturned in its ruthless attempt to expose filmmaking in Hollywood, and just like this podcast, how difficult it is to get any movie actually made. Granted, it is slightly harder when your action hero doesn't know he's in it... It mocks the range of cliched Hollywood personas, from the waning diva to naïve ingenue turned sexy starlet. It pok...

Star Trek ran for three seasons on NBC before being cancelled in 1969 due to low ratings. It was after this that the show went into syndication, that its popularity started growing, and it developed a cult following. Due to the original series' popularity in syndication, Paramount Pictures began to consider making a Star Trek film as early as 1972 and by 1975, a film version of Star Trek was annou...

After finishing Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi , director Rian Johnson had a brief window of opportunity to make another movie, and decided to go back to an old idea from the mid 2000s, based on the Agatha Christie's murder mysteries and the Choose Your Own Adventure books he loved reading as a child. Wait a minute - I read a tweet about a New Yorker article about this episode... Taking cue...

West Side Story's origins as a Tony award-winning stage musical based on Romeo and Juliet meant it was ripe for a film adaptation. Stage director and choreographer Jerome Robbins was set to co-direct with Oscar-winning director Robert Wise; it would be written for the screen by Ernest Lehman, retaining the beautiful score, songs and lyrics by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. Wise would dire...

The Italian Job (1969) is the epitome of what would become Cool Britannia. It celebrates its 55th anniversary this year, and has lost none of its Britishness. In fact, for the quintessentially British cult classic, they had to have the cool car of the 1960s youth - the Mini - for the quintessential British heist. Setting the film in Turin also gave them the bonus of having access to Fiat's locatio...

After Night of the Living Dead , George Romero branched out, not wanting to be typecast as a zombie movie director. It was a tour of the Monroeville Mall that put the idea in his head, of a satire about consumerism. He would quickly have a rough idea in his head, a follow-up venture into the world of the undead. Romero and his producer Richard P. Rubinstein started the process of procuring US inve...

Release the Kraken! Twice! Clash of the Titans had been an idea since the late 1950s, with writer Beverley Cross writing a treatment in 1969 called Perseus and the Gorgon's Head . At the time, producer Charles H. Schneer and legendary animator Ray Harryhausen were working on other films, and so what became Clash of the Titans would have to wait until 1977 to start pre-production. It would eventual...

64 years ago, The Flintstones became the first ever animated prime time sitcom in the US, and 30 years ago, the live-action film was released. A live action adaptation of The Flintstones first came about in 1985, but it wouldn't be 'til Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment acquired the rights in 1992 that the project started moving forward, but by that point eight writers had already had a crac...

The history and legacy of Shakespeare in Love is long-winded and complicated, but how is it that a movie can be wholly and completely tarnished by one man? I don't know. It's a mystery. From its beginnings as a project for Universal starring Julia Roberts, to it being shut down after spending $6 million and losing Julia Roberts, to being resurrected in the worst possible way by actual real-life vi...

After making The Mummy and The Mummy Returns , Stephen Sommers wanted to make a small movie; no monsters, no action, no visual effects, just something simple, but then he started thinking about all the Universal monster movies he loved as a child, and came up with a collective story of three monsters, connected by one man - Van Helsing - but not the Abraham Van Helsing you knew.... Gabriel Van Hel...

Great Scott, it’s the 250th episode! Where we’re going, we don’t need roads, and if my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're going to get the history and legacy of Back to the Future ! It's a story of how Romancing the Stone , Coca-Cola's takeover of Columbia and Double Indemnity came together to make Back to the Future a possibility. Back in the days when Ronald...