5) The Planet Of The Apes
You can imagine how the story meeting went between Tim Burton and his creative team when he signed up to make the money-grab remake of Planet of the Apes. Short of ideas and constrained by a studio that didn’t want Burton to put any of his own personality into the movie (God forbid), the director would have been looking for a way to out-do an original that was never crying out for a straight-up remake in the first place.
The idea he came up with was a new twist: after two hours of Mark Wahlberg generally looking confused on a future Earth populated by intelligent chimps, Wahlberg’s astronaut (how? Just how?) travels back in time to regular old human Earth. And what does he find there, but a statue of Abraham Lincoln, only with a monkey in the place of the dead president.
This is what Burton came up with as an alternative to the original’s Statue of Liberty reveal – this was his one original idea. Obviously he didn’t sign up for a sequel, and neither did anybody else.