Sometimes creative endeavors don’t always go as planned and ideas are lost in translation, sometimes even being translated into a different media language. Here are just four movies or television shows that started out as something different

A Spec Script for an X-files Episode Became the Final Destination

What if Death was secretly Rube Goldberg? That’s the idea behind the popular horror movie franchise: Final Destination which began in 2000. In each film a group of hot young actors escapes a grisly fate only to be hunted down by death in killed in creative ways such as with logs from a logging truck (which gave all millennials plenty of trauma)

But originally the teens would have had to deal with Agents Mulder and Scully of the FBI instead of death as original writer Jeffery Reddick initially wrote the idea that would eventually become Final Destination as an X-files script after hearing an interesting news story:

But it was Reddick who had the ‘ah-ha’ moment. “I was actually flying home to Kentucky and I read this story about a woman who was on vacation in Hawaii and her mom called her and said ‘Don’t take the flight tomorrow, I have a really bad feeling about it,’” said Reddick, who is formally credited for his story creation in both Final Destination and ‘Final Destination 2’. “She switched flights and the plane that she would have been on crashed. I thought, that’s creepy- what if she was supposed to die on that flight?”

Fortunately (or maybe unfortunately) Reddick was convinced by friends to turn the idea into a screenplay (originally title: Flight 180) which was sold to New Line and so a franchise was born and Mulder and Scully continued to fight aliens and not Death itself.

Zombieland went from the potential tv series to a movie to a tv series then to another movie

It turns out the Zombieland franchise is harder to kill than the zombies it portrays. In 2005 writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick wrote Zombieland as a pilot spec script. Eventually that script became a full-length movie which was released in 2009 and starred Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, and Abigail Breslin (with a delightful cameo by Bill Murray) which became a moderate cult success.  In 2013 an attempt was made to turn the movie back into a series when a pilot (not starring anyone listed above) was made for Amazon Prime, but unfortunately it went nowhere. Fortunately, the franchise was brought back almost exactly 10 years later in 2019 with a sequel: Zombieland: Double Tap. Who knows maybe the series will continue the cycle with another attempt at a series or maybe a comic book or videogame.

The Following was inspired by an unmade version of Scream 3

You may not remember the short-lived 2013 Fox series The Following that ran for three-season, but originally it came from a forgotten idea for a Scream 3.

The series, which stars Kevin Bacon follows an FBI agent as he attempts to stop a serial killer who has created a cult following, but originally it was supposed to be the basis for the third film in the Scream franchise.

In 1999 Scream writer and The Following creator Kevin Williamson was tapped to write a screenplay for the then in development Scream 3. Being busy with other projects he was only able to contribute an outline which was later discarded. Williamson’s idea would have involved a cult of teenagers in Woodsboro following Stu Macher, the somehow still-alive villain of the first film who would have collectively been the killers. Outside factors such as the Columbine Shooting and other violent acts caused the studio to want a less violent and more comedic third Scream film and so Williamson’s ideas were largely ignored and instead, we got Sydney’s half-brother and arguably the worst film in the franchise. Years later Williamson stripped his ideas of any connection to the Scream franchise and turned them into the Following

Sopranos was originally just another Gangster movie and not a groundbreaking tv series

The Sopranos is undeniably one of the best television series around and a prime example of prestige television, but it was almost just another Mafia movie about a mobster going to therapy to deal with his problems with his mother, but after pitching it as a feature film creator David Chase was convinced by his manager he had a great series on his hands and so it became a flagship series for HBO and the rest is history. It is probably for the best as the premise is a little similar Analyze This starring Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal so who knows how it would have done in theaters. On television it managed to run for 86 episodes which is about 86 therapy sessions.

Those are just a few projects that started out as something else. Were you surprised to see anything on this list?