Movie Details That Were Changed For Bizarre Reasons

Much as film fans tend to think of any given movie as "belonging" to the director, star, or screenwriter, anything that ever ends up making it to the screen is always the work of dozens of different people. Filmmaking, in fact, is an intensely collaborative effort, and even a casual glance at the credits of a modern blockbuster is enough to prove that entire massive teams are often brought to bear on creating our entertainment. Of course, with all those individuals involved, visions are bound to clash while everyone works together to determine what the final product should look like — and also how best to appease the notoriously fickle viewing public.

Given all that, it isn't at all that surprising that many movies are changed extensively throughout the production process. Often, while we may not agree with them in retrospect, the reasons for these changes are easy enough to understand; sometimes, however, things can take a turn for the truly bizarre. With that in mind, we're taking a look at some times when studios, directors and even actors insisted upon making changes to a movie for exceedingly strange reasons.

The 2012 re-release of Titanic contained a number of minor, almost imperceptible changes, many of which are barely worthy of note. For the most part, these changes fixed otherwise minor mistakes fans had noticed over the years since the movie's initial release, like filming equipment or safety cables being briefly visible in some shots. Although Cameron himself has thus far refused to comment on the bulk of the changes, eagle-eyed fans poring over the re-release have noticed and chronicled at least a dozen CGI fixes.

Curiously, one of the most subtle changes made to the movie is the only one Cameron has ever directly confirmed: the stars Rose sees as she's lying on that big door. According to Cameron, he received "a snarky email" from celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson explaining that the stars in the sky during that scene were all wrong for the time period. Somewhat annoyed, Cameron sent back a snarky email of his own asking for the correct star field, which Tyson happily provided. Cameron then passed this onto the team re-mastering the movie so that the stars in that scene could be changed — or to put it another way, James Cameron moved the heavens themselves just to make Neil deGrasse Tyson be quiet.

In the Stephen King novel that Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is based on, most of the story's action takes place in room 217. However, in the film adaptation, this is changed to 237 — which confused fans of the book, given Kubrick's reputation for perfectionism. As it turns out, while the change was made by Kubrick, he was only acting on the wishes of the Timberline Lodge, the hotel where the movie was filmed. The Timberline didn't have a room 237, but they really did have a room 217, and management didn't want their guests to be scared of staying in that particular room after the movie was released. One of the few conditions they had for filming was that this single detail be changed.

According to author James Howard, Kubrick agreed to change the number largely as a favor to the Lodge — and amusingly, in direct contrast to their initial fears about the film and its potential impact on the room's popularity, the Timberline would later report that despite Kubrick changing it, room 217 is still the most commonly requested in the entire hotel.

The Charlie's Angels film series is a lot of fun, but it isn't exactly known for being high cinema, and it would seem safe to assume that most of the actors involved understood that none of it was never supposed to be taken seriously. Apparently Crispin Glover, who played the villainous Thin Man, never got this memo — he reportedly had some choice words for director McG about his character's dialogue. Specifically, as Glover would later tell the Guardian in 2015, he disliked that all of his lines were "just expositional," and requested that his character instead just be mute.

Rather than being offended at being told all of the lines written for the character were awful, McG agreed and fully supported Glover's idea of making the Thin Man completely mute. As a result, Glover didn't have any lines for either Charlie's Angels movie and got paid for literally saying nothing throughout the franchise.