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This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.

Divorced Installment

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Various intellectual properties and franchises will have discussions on adaptations, sequels and spin-offs, often just to try and keep the license. But a curious thing can happen early on in the production process when a work that starts off as part of a franchise or IP ends up being reworked into something else or entirely divergent from where it began. It may be that the license expired, the popularity of the work was seen as on the decline, the sales pitch ended up rejected, or the creative team had deviated from the source material to the point that the project was so In Name Only that they might as well change the name too. Mostly, they wanted to keep the script and existing production work that was done while having the Serial Numbers Filed Off. If you tilt your head and squint at it you might be able to see where it came from, but all definitive signs of its heritage are completely erased.

If the creators are lucky enough, the new property can end up being so successful that it ends up becoming its own popular series that may never have materialized had it remained tied to its license; indeed, some of the most iconic and long-running franchises of all time, such as Star Wars and Super Mario Bros., originated from failed plans for a licensed work.

A contrast to Dolled-Up Installment, where a work started unrelated and was then boosted afterwards with an established name.

Take into consideration key definition points:

  • The work has to be slotted within a particular title, franchise or "sub" franchise, before turning down a different path. Whether the work counts as Canon Discontinuity or an Alternate Universe to a "prime" canon is not the issue of consideration. For instance, If an author writes a story about Sherlock Holmes, but it's set in a dystopian future instead of the late 19th century, it's still a Sherlock Holmes story. In order to qualify for this trope, the story would have to be rewritten to remove all Sherlock Holmes characters and mythos from the narrative.
  • The trope is not about anything as simple as titles. It is centered around core story beats with an eye towards what they can change in order to get around a copyright lawyer. If a work is called "Sherlock Holmes Without a Problem," and is later renamed to simply "Without a Problem" but still stars Sherlock Holmes, it's still a Sherlock Holmes story.
  • To qualify, a story has to fundamentally part ways with the work it started from. While a Mid-Development Genre Shift can result in a notably different final product, it may have just been a natural evolution of the story as it came together. If an author writes a Sherlock Holmes story and it ends up becoming a romantic comedy instead of a Whodunnit?, it's still a Sherlock Holmes story. But if it started as a Sherlock Holmes story and it ultimately turned into a James Bond story, then it became a different beast altogether. Yes, this can overlap with Dolled-Up Installment, and often does.

This can get complicated with Canon Welding and conflicting Word of God statements.

Subtrope of Derivative Differentiation and What Could Have Been. Compare Serial Numbers Filed Off, Spiritual Successor, Ascended Fanfic and Exiled from Continuity. Sometimes overlaps with Market-Based Title, and may feature Suspiciously Similar Substitute characters.

Examples:

    open/close all folders 
    Anime & Manga 
  • Armored Police Metal Jack was going to be a sequel to the live-action tokusatsu show Dennou Keisatsu Cybercop, but due to certain difficulties in the show's production, it was made into an anime series instead and had no ties to the tokusatsu series.
  • The original Duel Masters manga was about Shobu and his friends having wacky antics while playing their favorite card game... Magic: The Gathering. Yeah, the series was directly licensed by Wizards of the Coast themselves. However, the deal did not quite go as planned, leading the creators to develop their own original card game to replace Magic, and said new card game became the centerpiece of the Duel Masters anime, games, and so on that followed the manga. Still, it is quite surreal to go back to the source and see things like Shobu rocking a Sliver deck.
  • Eagle Riders was actually a mash-up of Gatchaman II and Gatchaman F. Because Saban did not own the rights to either of the previous Gatchaman adaptations (Battle of the Planets and G-Force) they had to pitch their dub as an unrelated series.
  • GEAR Fighter Dendoh is partially based on Saint of Braves Baan Gaan, the proposed ninth installment of the Brave Series and a sequel to both GaoGaiGar and Betterman.
  • Robotech is a strange case. It's well known that this dub is a mash-up of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, but the rewrites mean that Robotech's version of events are unconnected to the events of its originators (though you could still watch a sequel like Macross 7 and understand what's going on), and in fact Robotech wound up having its own canon with events that play out completely differently.
    • Not only that, but just on the American side there were lines that were intended at one point to tie in to Robotech (but not any of its three originators) but those plans got quashed. It's a testament to the anime geek mental capacity that they're able to keep it all straight in their head.
    Audio Drama 
  • Big Finish's earliest forays into the Whoniverse, before they got the licence for actual Doctor Who, included adaptations of the Doctorless New Adventures starring Bernice Summerfield ... except two of the books they adapted for this range weren't Doctorless. Birthright was at least a "Doctor-lite" story, so all that's required is to replace the "TARDIS exploding" opening with the Time Rings going wrong and have Jason take the role of Ace. In Just War he kind of takes the role of Roz and Chris in London, but the absence of the Doctor means the focus is on Benny being stuck in occupied Guernsey entirely alone. It would later be implied that Irving Braxiatel mucking about with Benny's timeline had resulted in her having the same adventures twice without realising.
    Comic Books 
  • John Byrne's 2112 was originally a pilot of sorts for the project that eventually became the Marvel 2099 line. When he parted ways with Marvel, he simply excised the Marvel-exclusive parts of the story and published what was left as a graphic novel.
  • Mœbius's Airtight Garage originally had Jerry Cornelius from The Cornelius Chronicles as a protagonist but Cornelius was renamed "Lewis Carnelian" in reprints after his original author, Michael Moorcock complained about him being out of character.
  • Aquaman: The Aquaman (1962) book was canceled at issue #56, ending on a Cliffhanger. Writer Steve Skeates later created a similar hero named Prince Targo for Eerie magazine and used his plot for what would have been Aquaman #57 for one of Targo's adventures. He later did a direct sequel to Aquaman #56 in the pages of Sub-Mariner over at Marvel, with the set-up involving a Broad Strokes recap of #56 and a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo from Aquaman himself.
  • Astro City: The Dark Age started life as a sequel to Kurt Busiek's Marvels series. It was originally to be called Cops & Robbers, and then Crime & Punishment. When Marvel ended up not going ahead, Kurt retooled the story to take place in Astro City rather than the Marvel Universe.
  • Batwoman's costume began as an unused design Alex Ross had come up with for a modern take on Batgirl.
  • Breach was originally going to be a Captain Atom reboot.
  • Jack Kirby's character Captain Glory began as an unused Captain America design Marvel had asked him to create in the event that the company lost ownership of the character.
  • Contest of Champions (1982) was originally written and drawn as a tie-in to the 1980 Summer Olympics, following a similar tie-in that featured Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk at the Winter Games. Unexpectedly, Jimmy Carter decided to boycott the Summer Games that year, resulting in the crossover being shelved. It was eventually revived two years later, with the plot heavily ReTooled to omit all references to the Olympics.
  • Dwayne McDuffie's Deathlok series was originally supposed to be a licensed RoboCop comic book.
  • DEMO was spawned from unused ideas Brian Wood came up with for NYX back when he was going to be the writer for that book, as well as stuff he wasn't allowed to do when he was writing Generation X.
  • Rob Liefeld's Fighting American series started off as a way for the artist to reuse some unfinished artwork and plots from his short-lived tenure on the Heroes Reborn Captain America series. This resulted in the Fighting American becoming even more of an Expy of Cap, which in turn led to Marvel taking legal action against Liefeld.
  • Duncan, the main protagonist of Firebreather, originated in a pitch for a Marvel series called The Crew, which would have starred a Young Avengers-like group of teen heroes. When that plan fell through, the character was simply Retooled for use at Image Comics. Had he been published at Marvel, the Firebreather would have been the son of Fin Fang Foom.
  • Harlan Ellison's "Five Dooms to Save Tomorrow" was originally written as a Hawkman and Hawkgirl story but was rejected by DC Comics for being "too sophisticated." Following this, a truncated synopsis of the story was published in an issue of the fanzine Comic Art, with Hawkman and Hawkgirl swapped out for a pair of thinly veiled Expies called Falcon and Greywing. This version of "Five Dooms" was eventually read by Marvel editor Roy Thomas, who liked it so much that he contacted Ellison to see about publishing the story as an issue of The Avengers. After Thomas adapted the synopsis and made the necessary character changes, "Five Dooms to Save Tomorrow" finally saw an official publication as The Avengers #101.
  • G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) was originally pitched as Fury Force, starring the son of Nick Fury leading a S.H.I.E.L.D. team against Baron Zemo and Hydra. When Larry Hama has been picked to write comics based on the G.I. Joe license, he used what he had from that pitch as a basis.
  • Rob Liefeld created a character for the New 52 Grifter (2011) series named Niko, who was originally supposed to have been Cheshire from the Teen Titans. The name was changed, but her Asian ethnicity and green costume were kept.
  • Many of the characters and plots from Hardware (1993) were originally part of a Luke Cage series Dwayne McDuffie had unsuccessfully pitched to Marvel Comics.
  • Willoughby Kipling of Doom Patrol and Ambrose Bierce in Stanley and His Monster were both meant to be John Constantine, but DC Comics wouldn't allow it, the former due to not wanting Constantine's realism to be undermined by interacting with superheroes and the latter due to not wanting the Vertigo-associated characters to appear in kid-friendly titles.
  • Frank Miller's graphic novel Holy Terror was originally going to be a Batman story in which Batman fights Islamic terrorists, but Miller decided that it would work better with an original character.
  • Justice League (2011): Goldrush, a one-shot character appeared in #16, was originally supposed to be the Golden Age heroine Lady Luck.
  • Kamandi was created after DC tried and failed to get the license to publish a Planet of the Apes comic book.
  • Spider-Man story arc Kraven's Last Hunt was based on a storyline involving Wonder Man and the Grim Reaper that J. M. DeMatteis submitted to Marvel and was rejected. He then reworked it into a Batman vs. Joker project that got nixed because The Killing Joke was already in production. Next DeMatteis developed the "return from the grave" story into one about Batman and Hugo Strange, but that also was rejected by DC. Finally, he reworked and expanded the story for Marvel into the epic we know today featuring Spider-Man, his wife Mary Jane, Kraven the Hunter, and Vermin, which was published in 1987.
  • The Lara-Su Chronicles by Ken Penders is this to the Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) series. He obtained the rights to the stories and characters he created for the series but he cannot create any new content directly based off of anything from the Sonic franchise, resulting in him needing to heavily alter the series to be legally distinct.
  • John Wagner and Alan Grant's Lobo story, Bob The Galactic Bum was reprinted in The Judge Dredd Megazine and for copyright reasons, Lobo had to be replaced with a female Bounty Hunter called "Asbo".
  • Alejandro Jodorowsky turned his unproduced script for Dune into The Metabarons: elements such as the Hooker-Nuns Shabda-Oud are a clear Expy for the Bene Gesserit, with the same kind of genetic agenda.
  • The Order (2007) was supposed to be a revival of Champions (1975), a Marvel team book that starred Black Widow, The Incredible Hercules, the Angel, Iceman and Ghost Rider. Unfortunately, Marvel had lost the trademark to the name "Champions", so the series had to be named something else.
  • Peter David originally created the characters Sachs & Violens for his run on The Incredible Hulk. Concerns about the content led to David instead giving the characters their own limited series at Epic Comics.
  • Neil Gaiman originally pitched The Sandman (1989) to George R. R. Martin as part of the Wildcards universe. Martin passed because of Gaiman's lack of writing credits, and the idea was eventually revived at Vertigo Comics.
  • The Vertigo series Scarab was conceived as a Darker and Edgier take on Doctor Fate.
  • Shang-Chi exists because Jim Starlin and Steve Englehart wanted to do a licensed Kung Fu (1972) comic book, but had to replace Kwai Chang with an original character after learning that the show was made by Warner Brothers, the parent company of DC, Marvel’s biggest rival. The character of Shang-Chi himself has since been divorced from his origin as the son of Fu Manchu, after Marvel lost the license to adapt the novels. His evil genius father has been retconned to be an original character named Zheng Zu.
  • Grant Morrison originally envisioned Seven Soldiers as a Justice League Spin-Off focusing on some of The DCU's lesser-known heroes.
  • The short-lived DC series Takion was originally pitched as a revamp of the Will Payton version of Starman (DC Comics), who'd seemingly died at the end of the Darkness Within crossover.
  • Tomorrow Stories was intended to have a Cobweb "story" which consisted of Cobweb narrating a comic biography of the real-world rocket scientist and occultist Jack Parsons. DC refused to print it because it described the alleged involvement of L. Ron Hubbard in ritual magic and questionable financial dealings in the years before he founded the Church of Scientology, which they feared would get them in trouble with the Scientologists. The item was eventually printed in a Top Shelf anthology called Top Shelf Asks The Big Questions, with the Cobweb transparently renamed as La Toile, a French translation that had already been used in the main series as the alias of an earlier Cobweb who lived in France. However, the incident heavily contributed to Alan Moore's second break with DC. In addition, Moore's wife and Cobweb co-creator Melinda Gebbie stopped drawing the comic.
  • Void Indigo was originally pitched to DC as a Continuity Reboot of Hawkman.
  • Wanted was originally going to be a reboot of DC's Secret Society of Supervillains, but was converted into a stand-alone work when Mark Millar decided he wanted to go Darker and Edgier.
  • Watchmen: Originally written by Alan Moore to make use of Charlton Comics's superheroes after DC Comics acquired the rights to them, but because they wanted to incorporate said heroes into the mainstream DC Universe, the characters were changed into original characters in a reality of their own, e. g. Captain Atom to Doctor Manhattan, The Question to Rorschach, Blue Beetle to Nite-Owl, Phantom Lady to Silk Spectre, Peacemaker to The Comedian, etc.
  • X-Men: Storm and Nightcrawler were recycled from a pitch Dave Cockrum had for a Legion of Super-Heroes Spin-Off called The Outsiders. Nightcrawler ended up being the same, while Storm was created as a Composite Character of a few different unused characters: Trio (cape and headdress), Quetzal (long flowing hair), and Typhoon (weather powers), as well as a prototype X-Men character, called Black Cat (costume and basic physical appearance). Silkie from The Futurians was also conceived as a member of the X-Men before rights issues got in the way.
  • Youngblood (Image Comics) was originally a proposed Teen Titans spin-off, explaining Shaft's "coincidental similarities" to Green Arrow's sidekick Arsenal. In addition to Shaft being an obvious Arsenal stand-in, Diehard was supposed to have been a S.T.A.R. Labs android, and Vogue would have been a new version of the Harlequin. Additionally, the characters Brahma, Photon, Combat, and Cougar were recycled from a rejected Young Avengers pitch Liefeld created with Jim Valentino during the 90's.
    Films — Animation 
    Films — Live-Action 
  • The 1955 film serial The Adventures of Captain Africa was intended as a sequel to the 1943 serial The Phantom, but Columbia lost the film rights to the Phantom and had to substitute an "original" masked jungle hero.
  • The Hong Kong movie The Avenging Fist👁 Image
     started out as a Live-Action Adaptation of Tekken. A lot of the source material's influence remains, though.
  • Avenging Force was originally written as a sequel to Invasion U.S.A. (1985) with Chuck Norris returning to the role of Matt Hunter. When he was uninterested, the role was rewritten to be younger and was given to Michael Dudikoff instead and it became a standalone film.
  • Beyond the Valley of the Dolls was supposed to be a sequel to the Valley of the Dolls film adaptation until Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert were brought on board to direct and write, respectively, turning the film into a spoof of the first one instead.
  • Big Trouble in Little China started life as a sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. This included trying to get director of the film (and co-writer of Big Trouble) W.D. Richter to helm the project, but declining because of the huge scope of the film.
  • The Blacksheep Affair was originally written as a sequel to High Risk, with Jet Li reprising his character (now working as a bodyguard in the fictional country of Lavernia) but when Li declined to return, a new character played by Vincent Zhao (a.k.a discount Jet Li) is written into an original storyline.
  • John Woo's Bullet in the Head was meant to be a prequel to A Better Tomorrow. When he fell out with producer Tsui Hark, he made a standalone film, while Hark made the prequel A Better Tomorrow III: Love and Death in Saigon.
  • Bumblebee was originally conceived as a prequel to the Michael Bay-directed Transformers film pentalogy. However, the disappointing box office returns for The Last Knight led it to be redeveloped into a standalone film (though the producers did make conflicting statements, even up until the film's release, whether they shared the same canon or not). Once Bumblebee became a smashing success, Hasbro decided that it would serve as the start of a new Transformers continuity, thus completely severing its connections with the Bay films.
  • The sci-fi horror film Camp Fear was originally slated to be a sequel to the slasher Cheerleader Camp.
  • Chaos was going to be a remake of The Last House on the Left, though the change was so last minute that both films are still extremely similar.
  • The Climax was originally intended to be a sequel to Phantom of the Opera (1943), and was filmed on the same sets as that movie. However, it was ultimately changed to be a standalone story featuring all new characters.
  • The Collector (2009) started as a Saw prequel.
  • Colombiana starring Zoe Saldaña was originally written by Luc Besson as Mathilda, a sequel to The Professional which would have followed an older Mathilda Lando getting revenge on the men who had wronged her after the death of her mentor Leon Montana. It was also intended to be set in the same universe as Nikita, but because Besson left Gaumont (the production company behind the film) after the failure of 1999's The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc, coupled with him unable to get Natalie Portman interested, it became a standalone film.
  • The Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Cyborg (1989) was originally going to be a sequel to Masters of the Universe (though as Troubled Production shows, the story is complicated). It also utilized props, sets, and costumes from a Spider-Man movie that was almost made before Cannon lost the rights.
  • When Sam Raimi was unable to obtain the rights to The Shadow, he made Darkman instead.
  • Death Sentence was originally based on the book Death Wish (1974) is based on — yet it has nothing to do with the films spawned from the first book, including going complete Adaptation Name Change on the main character (Paul Benjamin" in the books, "Paul Kersey" in the Death Wish films, and "Nick Hume" in Death Sentence).
  • Die Hard:
    • The original Die Hard 1 is based on the novel Nothing Lasts Forever, which is a sequel to the novel The Detective. The first novel had already been adapted into a film starring Frank Sinatra more than a decade before Nothing Lasts Forever was published, and the main character of the sequel is an old man around Sinatra's age at the time, but the filmmakers of Die Hard deliberately rewrote the story as a standalone film and made the main character younger. Nevertheless, they were contractually obligated to offer Sinatra the lead role first – Sinatra, who was 70 years old by then, unsurprisingly turned it down. The story was also briefly considered to be used for a Commando sequel.
    • Die Hard with a Vengeance started life as Lethal Weapon 4, making it a Divorced Installment and a Dolled-Up Installment.
  • District 9 was originally going to be a Halo movie before it became apparent that the final production budget would be in excess of $250 million; Universal had paid $5 million for the option alone, and that was only after Microsoft had asked for $10 million and 15% of the gross; they settled for 10%. 20th Century Fox even came on board as a partner, but eventually, the production was canceled because Peter Jackson and executive producer Peter Schlessel refused to cut their percentage points in the gross, reducing the profit margin for the studios even further. Jackson allocated $40 million to Neill Blomkamp both as a way of a goodwill gesture, and to salvage all the work that had already been done. Many of the props used in the film were repurposed from their original intended use.
  • Dracula vs. Frankenstein was originally planned as a sequel to Satans Sadists, with Russ Tamblyn and other "bikers" reprising their parts from that film. However, not long after filming began, it was decided to turn it into a horror film instead of a biker picture and much of the footage with Tamblyn and other actors from the first film was cut out. They were unable to cut them completely out of the movie, though, which is why Tamblyn and his biker gang seem to be wandering in and out of the film, with no connection to the storyline and with not much to do.
  • EuroTrip was originally supposed to be a sequel to Road Trip before it was realized that other than the concept, had little to do with the previous film. Road Trip would later get an In Name Only sequel in the form of Road Trip: Beer Pong (which is more of an American college version of Beerfest).
  • Excalibur (1981) was born out of John Boorman's failed attempt to adapt The Lord of the Rings.
  • Final Destination has its origin as a spec script for The X-Files. The final film's subplot in which Alex falls under the suspicion of a pair of FBI agents is a very obvious artifact of its X-Files connection.
  • George Lucas wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie, but he couldn't get the rights, so he made Star Wars. Ironically, Star Wars became so popular that an actual Flash Gordon (1980) movie would get made a few years later.
  • Foxy Brown was originally a sequel to Coffy.
  • The 1971 movie Friends originated from a screenplay that Lewis Gilbert had initially intended to adapt from The Blue Lagoon. Gilbert had planned to produce the film in the mid-1960s with Walter Mirisch. However, when Gilbert was unable to obtain the rights from Henry De Vere Stacpoole's estate, he decided to transform his idea into an entirely new and original story.
  • Ghosts of Goldfield was originally going to be the fourth Urban Legend film, but was released independently of the series at the last minute.
  • Godzilla:
    • The original American dub of Godzilla Raids Again tries to modify itself into a standalone movie retitled Gigantis, the Fire Monster with heavily modified footage, soundtrack, and dialogue. Originally, it was going to be a full remake with the same effects known as The Volcano Monsters but the studio responsible went bankrupt before filming started.
    • The American dub for War of the Gargantuas similarly omits mention of the fact it's a sequel to Frankenstein Conquers the World by removing all mention of Frankenstein from the original dialogue. Which, admittedly, wasn't that hard since the connection was rather tenuous to begin with.
    • Ebirah, Horror of the Deep was originally written as a King Kong film, but it was scrapped after Rankin/Bass Productions thought it was too different from The King Kong Show, which it was supposed to adapt. So a new script was written and made into King Kong Escapes, while Toho retooled the initial script by replacing Kong with Godzilla, hence his rather Kong-like fascination with the film's human heroine. Some posters for the movie clearly never got the memo and continue to advertise it as a King Kong movie.
    • The Japanese film Gunhed originally began life as a proposed sequel to The Return of Godzilla, submitted as part of a sequel writing contest, ultimately losing out to the film which became Godzilla vs. Biollante. When Gunhed became a standalone film, it lost many of its original elements, aside from the removal of Godzilla himself.
  • Halloween (1978) took a lot of influence from the earlier slasher Black Christmas (1974). Bob Clark, director of the latter, said that he was contacted by John Carpenter for ideas of what a Black Christmas sequel could have been, and workshopped the ideas from there.
  • Quentin Tarantino' originally envisioned The Hateful Eight as a Django Unchained Tie-In Novel (called, apparently, Django: White Hell), until he realized the disadvantages of having the main character the audience already knew was the good guy, and was also not likely to die in his own sequel..
  • High School Musical was originally written as Grease 3 (which explains a lot), with Sharpay being Rizzo's daughter.
  • William Wyler originally conceived How to Steal a Million as a follow-up to Roman Holiday, another film he made with Audrey Hepburn.
  • When Vince Offer started making another Sketch Comedy Anthology Film, he announced it as Underground Comedy 2010 to be a sequel to his 1999 film The Underground Comedy Movie. When it actually got released in 2013, it was titled In AP Propriate Comedy.
  • The Invisible Man was originally envisioned as part of the Dark Universe until The Mummy bombed at the box office.
  • The Kiss of the Vampire was meant to be the third in Hammer Horror's Dracula series. It was an attempt to make a Dracula film without Christopher Lee.
  • Knocked Up was originally a sequel to The 40-Year-Old Virgin, with Seth Rogen and co. reprising their roles as the Smart Tech team.
  • Kull the Conqueror was originally going to be the third Conan the Barbarian movie, but Arnold Schwarzenegger was unavailable at the time. Amusingly, this is the reverse situation of the first Conan story, see under literature for that one.
  • Masters of the Universe (1987) for a long time was thought to have been altered from a script for a New Gods film, as things like the teleportation to Earth and alterations to He-Man and Skeletor's personalities better fit the tone of the Orion vs Darkseid conflict. The movie was actually designed to be MOTU from the start and those changes came from budget reasons, while the rumors it was supposed to be New Gods came from comments made by none other than John Byrne, who said he felt the film was a Spiritual Adaptation.
  • Minority Report initially started life as a sequel to fellow Philip K. Dick adaptation Total Recall, with Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising his role as Douglas Quaid. However, the project was reformatted into a more straightforward adaptation of Dick's short story after Carolco Pictures went bankrupt.
  • Jackie Chan's Mr. Nice Guy was initially planned to be the fifth film of the Police Story series before being rewritten as a standalone film.
  • Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was supposed to be a sequel to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, but when Gary Cooper was unavailable, Frank Capra rewrote the film as a vehicle for James Stewart.
  • Mulholland Drive began development as a spin-off of Twin Peaks, focusing on the character of Audrey Horne trying to make it in Hollywood. At some point it mutated into a whole new property, with Audrey replaced with a new character played by Naomi Watts. It was also supposed to be the pilot for a TV series, but after none of the networks were interested, it was re-edited and partially reshot into a standalone film.
  • Mysterious Doctor Satan from Republic Pictures was written as a Superman serial, but the whole project had to be altered when it turned out that the character's film rights were actually at Fleischer Studios. A quick round of rewrites turned Superman into a new hero called Copperhead, Lois Lane into Lois Scott, and the villain into the titular Doctor Satan.
  • Neighborhood Watch (also known as Deadly End) was recycled from an early draft for a script to Dr. Giggles.
  • Nighthawks was originally The French Connection III with Gene Hackman reprising his role opposite new sidekick Richard Pryor. When Hackman said no, it became a standalone thriller.
  • The Night House was originally conceived as a Hellraiser reboot told from the perspective of Julia from the original movie. The film was to follow Julia's descent into occultism as she grieved the loss of her lover Frank, which was reworked into a standalone story after Dimension Films passed on the pitch.
  • Once Upon a Time in the West was originally supposed to be a fourth film in the Dollars Trilogy, but when Clint Eastwood declined to return as The Man With No Name, Charles Bronson was instead cast as a new character, The Man With The Harmonica. This wasn't too big a deal, since the Dollars Trilogy was more of a Thematic Series than a cohesive story anyway.
  • The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure was originally envisioned as a film adaptation of Teletubbies. It was changed to an original property due to Anne Wood, the creator of the Teletubbies, refusing any kind of film adaptation of the series.
  • The Columbia short film Pardon My Terror starring Schilling & Lane was originally going to star The Three Stooges, but right before filming was supposed to begin, Curly suffered a massive stroke, leading him unable to perform. Schilling & Lane were brought in place of the Stooges and the script had to be reworked to suit them.
  • Prince of Darkness was originally written as the fourth Halloween film (when the series was to be unrelated Halloween anthology films like Halloween III: Season of the Witch) but was rewritten as a stand-alone film when the producers decided to resurrect Michael Myers, a story arc John Carpenter felt he had concluded with Halloween II (1981).
  • A Quiet Place was originally envisioned as another entry in the Cloverfield series — already a rather loose anthology series of standalone horror/sci-fi stories from Paramount — but its screenwriters determined it would work better entirely on its own without a franchise connection (though the film would be successful enough to warrant sequels of its own).
  • Red Sonja (1985): Lord Kalidor was supposed to be Conan, but the film did not have the rights to this name. They did have Arnold Schwarzenegger, though, later they stated that it was Conan, just under one of his traveling names.
  • Guillermo del Toro originally wrote The Shape of Water as a script for a potential remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon, and part of what would eventually become the Dark Universe. Once Universal turned down his script, Del Toro completely rewrote his script as an original story.
  • The Sicilian was based on a book that was a Spin-Off from The Godfather focusing on Michael Corleone's exile in Sicily, but all references had to be removed for copyright reasons.
  • Very nearly happened to The Silence of the Lambs. Orion Pictures had the film rights to Thomas Harris' novel, but Red Dragon - to which The Silence of the Lambs was a sequel - had already been brought to the screen a few years prior, as Manhunter. This meant that Manhunter's producer, Dino De Laurentiis, still owned the film rights to all characters who had appeared in his film, including Hannibal Lecter himself. Assuming they wouldn't be able to get the character rights, the Orion team planned to simply rename them (Hannibal himself would have become Dr. Gideon Quinn), but since Manhunter had been a commercial disappointment, De Laurentiis wasn't feeling very possessive of the rights, and allowed them to use the original names free of charge.
  • Snow Day was originally written as a Pete & Pete movie, but Nickelodeon took so long to approve the script that by the time they gave the go-ahead to start filming, the actors who played Pete and Pete themselves (Michael Maronna and Danny Tamberelli) were too old for their roles (and as well a good part of the kids cast), resulting in the change of characters.
  • Solace was originally a sequel to Se7en called Ei8ht focusing on Detective Somerset as a psychic who helps the FBI find a known serial killer.
  • Speed 2: Cruise Control was an unused script for Die Hard with a Vengeance.
  • The script for Superhero Movie was originally intended for Scary Movie 4, until they realized it had no horror movie references, and so it was made into a superhero spoof.
  • Zack Snyder:
    • Army of the Dead was originally conceived as a sequel to Snyder's own Dawn of the Dead from 2004. It is now its own franchise starter.
    • Rebel Moon, a Science Fantasy Space Opera, was once pitched as a Star Wars movie during the acquisition of Lucasfilm by Disney. This is also a peculiar, full-circle example, as it wasn't conceived to be nor started off as one notebeing an original story he developed for decades, inspired by Seven Samurai, but set in space and it wouldn't have featured any legendary icons or locations from the franchise, had Lucasfilm accepted the pitch, since Zack Snyder wanted it to still be its own unique entity regardless.
  • Tears of the Sun started life as Die Hard 4, but became stand-alone when it was decided it was too different from the other movies. Bruce Willis said John McClane should die at the end of Die Hard 4.
  • The 1997 made-for-TV Disney film Tower of Terror removes all The Twilight Zone-based elements from the source ride.
  • Train (essentially Hostel, on a train) was initially going to be a remake of Terror Train.
  • Vantage Point was a discarded script for a 24 movie.
  • The book Zathura was based on a sequel to Jumanji where the board game turned itself into a space game because the new kids who found it had no interest in jungles.
    Literature 
  • Douglas Adams:
    • Life, the Universe and Everything is a Divorced Installment and a Dolled-Up Installment — originally an abandoned Doctor Who story proposal called "Doctor Who and the Krikketmen", it was first considered as the plot for one of the many unsuccessful proposals for a Doctor Who feature film, and then divorced from Who and dolled up as the second season of the Guide TV series. When that got canceled in pre-production, it finally became the third Guide novel.
    • Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was originally "Shada", a Doctor Who script by Adams that was never completed due to a BBC strike (and has since seen other adaptations). The plot also contains elements of "City of Death" (also by Adams), a serial that was filmed.
    • At the time of his death, Adams was considering transforming The Salmon of Doubt, which in the existing draft is a Dirk Gently novel, into a Hitchhiker's novel.
  • Alien Chronicles and its sequels were originally conceived as part of a trilogy of novels written by the Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer named Alien Exodus, which narrated the origin of the Star Wars species. However, it was decided that the story would be in its own universe without Star Wars characters or species, leading Deborah Chester to finalize the project.
  • R. L. Stine wrote a stand-alone book called The Adventures of Shrinkman, which he has confirmed was originally supposed to be a Goosebumps book called The Incredible Shrinking Fifth-Grader👁 Image
    .
  • The J.T. Edson novel Blonde Genius was originally written as a screen treatment for a St. Trinian's movie.
  • The first Conan the Barbarian story, "The Phoenix on the Sword", is a rewrite of a rejected Kull story, "By This Axe, I Rule". Many passages are word for word identical.
  • Thomas Ligotti, along with his friend, Brandon Trenz, wrote a spec script called "Crampton" for the The X-Files, which they later reworked and published as an original story.
  • Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
    • The Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel, The Burning Heart was supposed to be a crossover with Judge Dredd but after the failure of the 1995 movie, Dredd was replaced with Adjudicator Joseph Craator.
    • The Bernice Summerfield series began as a spinoff of Virgin Books' Doctor Who New Adventures. When Virgin lost the Doctor Who license in 1997, Benny continued on her own, no longer able to meet or make direct references to the Doctor himself. Eventually, the rights moved to Big Finish, which later also acquired a Doctor Who licence, enabling them to be reunited in the Big Finish Doctor Who audios.
    • The Faction Paradox novel Erasing Sherlock has a complex history. It was first a prize-winning manuscript, which the author then had difficulty in finding a publisher for due to its uncertain genre. It was finally published by Mad Norwegian after being slightly rewritten to make it a Faction Paradox novel. However, the author later released a self-published version with all Doctor Who and Faction Paradox references removed to make it a stand-alone novel again.
  • The Hot Rock originally began life as a draft for a novel in author Donald E. Westlake's Parker series. Westlake can up with the idea of a story in which Parker had to repeatedly steal the same object. However, the story didn't work with Parker's personality (the pragmatic Parker would have just walked away from the caper), so he abandoned it. However, the idea would not let go of him, and he returned to the manuscript and created a new protagonist for whom the plot did work: the Born Unlucky John Dortmunder. Thus was born the Dortmunder series.
  • Mercedes Lackey's short story "Fiddler Fair" was originally written to fit the world of Ithkar for a shared-universe anthology, before being rewritten into the springboard for the Bardic Voices series.
  • Fifty Shades of Grey started as a Twilight fanfic before it was changed to an original story.
  • Project Itoh's novel Genocidal Organ was based on a Snatcher fan-fiction he wrote.
  • John Grant's 1994 licensed Judge Dredd novel The Hundredfold Problem was republished in 2003 with all references to the Mega-City One 'verse removed. Judges Dredd and Callisto were replaced by Dave Knuckle and Petulia McTavish.
  • Popcorn Love by K.L. Hughes is an Ascended Fanfic that started as a Once Upon a Time (2011) Transplanted Character Fic with no magic whatsoever, pairing Emma and Regina. When it was revised, they became Allison Sawyer and Elena Vega, respectively.
  • These Old Shades was originally intended to be a sequel to Georgette Heyer's first novel The Black Moth.
    Live-Action TV 
  • One idea that J. J. Abrams had for Felicity was a Plot Twist in which it turned out that Felicity Porter was a CIA agent. While it was obviously never used for the show, he did turn the idea of "college student moonlights as a secret agent" into a different TV series, Alias. (Funnily enough, Keri Russell, who played Felicity, would eventually get to play a spy on The Americans, albeit a KGB agent instead of CIA.)
  • Chilling Adventures of Sabrina was developed as a spin-off of Riverdale and planned to air on The CW, before it moved to Netflix and became its own thing. Still, before the series ended, the creators admitted to planning a crossover with Riverdale in the could-have-been fifth season and indeed, the crossover eventually happened in the latter's sixth season.
  • Doom Patrol is a weird one. The fact that it stars most of the same actors reprising their roles from Titansnote The sole exception is the Chief, who is now played by Timothy Dalton. and airs on the same streaming platforms should have been enough indication that it was originally planned to be a spinoff of Titans. Ultimately, it took place in a separate continuity and the creators have alluded to it being set in an alternate universe (which was kinda confirmed in Crisis on Infinite Earths, where clips from Titans and Doom Patrol were shown with two different universe numbers in a montage of various Earths).
  • The Following was based on a discarded screenplay for Scream 3. Both the series and the movie franchise are produced by Kevin Williamson.
  • Rob Brydon's gameshow, The Guess List was meant to be called Mrs. Brown's Celebrities. A pilot episode was recorded but Brendan O'Carroll turned down a full series because he thought it would water down the Mrs. Brown brand.
  • Chico and the Man was supposed to be about Pedro and the Man from Up in Smoke but Cheech & Chong wanted to stick with movies.
  • The Australian university drama headLand was originally planned as a Home and Away spin off (under the Working Title Away From Home), but when British Channel 5 (which shows Home and Away in the UK) weren't interested in co-funding it, it became its own thing.
  • Helstrom: Originally planned to be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and the first installment of a Journey Into Fear sub-franchise along with a Ghost Rider series (starring the same actor who played Ghost Rider in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) that it would have crossed over with, the changing of the guard at Marvel Television caused this series to instead be a completely standalone Marvel Comics adaptation with no official connections to the MCU. The continuity that the series is set in was unofficially dubbed Earth-TRN836, rather than the MCU's Earth-199999.
  • K9 was the only Whoniverse spinoff show not to ever directly reference or be referenced by Doctor Who and the other TV series in the franchise, as it was licensed by Bob Baker, the co-creator of the character K9 who owned the rights to him, with no involvement or permission from the BBC, who hold the rights to the Doctor.
  • Kamen Rider Agito is an odd case: it was originally designed as a sequel to the previous year's Kamen Rider Kuuga, but was eventually reworked to be standalone, allegedly because the staff were not very enthusiastic at the idea of Kuuga's hard work being undone by a second set of ancient serial-killing monsters showing up out of nowhere. The odd part being that this rework apparently happened really late in development, as early episodes still refer to the events of Kuuga (as "the Unidentified Lifeform Incidents", given for instance as the reason behind the development of the G3 Powered Armor), resulting in a series that simultaneously isn't a sequel to Kuuga but relies on it having happened anyway.
  • Krypton was originally planned to be a prequel to Man of Steel, taking place 200 years before the film, thus it would've served as the first DC Extended Universe TV series but it was revised during production when Geoff Johns took over as chairman of DC Films and thus it became a completely standalone DC Comics adaptation with no official connections to the DCEU.
  • The L.A. Complex was split off from the Degrassi franchise, presumably so it could be sold to US networks outside the Viacom group.
  • According to one of its actors, Mighty Med, a Disney XD Kid Com about two teenagers who work in a secret superhero hospital, was originally developed as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with the show's original logo denoting the hospital as being a S.H.I.E.L.D. facility.
  • Although Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers was always meant to adapt/use footage from Super Sentai, taking a better part of a decade to get off the ground lead them to change which series was used. The initial pilot was made from Choudenshi Bioman footage and original scenes in 1986, called both Bio-Man and Galaxy Rangers. Both the successful version of the pilot and the series proper in 1993 used footage from the newer Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger. The latter pilot recycled the original Bio-Man footage, hence sharing names for the Power Ranger cast.
  • Parks and Recreation was originally conceived as a Spin-Off of The Office (US) (even being called the "Untitled Office Spin-off" by media outlets when it was announced Greg Daniels and Michael Schur were working on a new series together). Many different ideas were thrown around on how to connect the two, but after not being able to (as Daniels put it) "find the right fit", the spin-off plan was quickly scrapped and ''Parks and Rec" was made into its own independent entity. There was still at least another attempt to connect them where the Dunder-Mifflin Scranton office's copier would break, be fixed and refurbished, and then shipped to the Pawnee Parks and Rec department, though that never materialized either.
  • The Pitt (2025) was originally conceived as a revival of ER, with Noah Wyle reprising his role as an older version of Dr. Carter from the original show. However, after talks with the estate of Michael Crichton broke down, the creative team instead moved forward with a similar series that now starred Wyle as a new character, with the setting also changed from Chicago to Pittsburgh. The similarities were still blatant enough that Crichton's widow sued the show's producers and WB Television👁 Image
    for breach of contract.
  • The Prisoner (1967) co-creator George Markenstein treated the series as a sequel to Danger Man, believing that Number Six was John Drake. Patrick McGoohan disagreed.
  • Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets was intended as another installment of the Walking with… series titled "Walking with Spacemen", but this connection was dropped once it was released.
  • Rowan Atkinson's Comic Relief sketch, Spider-Plant Man was originally conceived as a fifth season of Blackadder where Blackadder and Baldrick would have been Batman and Robin-style superheroes.
  • Stranger Things came about because the studio passed on the Duffer Brothers' treatment for It (2017). Coincidentally, both projects would feature Finn Wolfhard.
  • As revealed in the season two finale, Superman & Lois is set in a universe independent to that of the Arrowverse, despite sharing many actors playing the same characters and clearly still being part of the Arrowverse's established multiverse. The showrunners claimed that they had planned for the series to be separate from the Arrowverse since early on in the development of the first season (though not from the very beginning), which explains the various story and character inconsistencies between the two universes' versions of Superman and Lois.
  • The first Super Sentai show, Himitsu Sentai Gorenger, was originally envisioned as the next Kamen Rider show before Shotaro Ishinomori decided to make a separate series out of it.
  • Toumei Shoujo Ea was originally written as a scenario for the direct sequel to Machi, but the game’s commercial failure put a damper on any sequels, barring the spiritual successor 428: Shibuya Scramble.
  • What's Happening!! began life as a TV adaptation of Cooley High before being ReTooled into its own thing.
  • Yellowjackets was originally conceived as a gender-flipped film adaptation of Lord of the Flies before it fell into Development Hell. When it came out of such, it was retooled into a TV series unrelated to the book.
    Music 
  • When The Royal Guardsmen first recorded "Snoopy vs. the Red Baron" in 1966, a song about the Peanuts character of the same name, they released it in Canada under the name "Squeaky vs. the Black Knight" due to copyright concerns with Charles M. Schulz, with lyrics changed to be about a beaver named Squeaky instead of Snoopy. The Squeaky version was only available for two weeks before the legal issues with Schulz were resolved.
    Pro Wrestling 
  • Perros Del Mal Producciones was drawn up as an idea to make a Perros Del Mal angle in CMLL more believable to audiences by having the Power Stable run their own promotion. Disputes lead to PDM starting up a year late and having nothing to do with CMLL.
  • Pro Wrestling El Dorado was born under the Toryumon flag, very much like its predecessor Dragondoor, but before its debut show, they declared the promotion as independent from Toryumon or any of its marks.
  • Pro Wrestling ZERO1 is named for the fact it was started in 2001. The original concept of the promotion was called "Pro Wrestling Zero", as it was conceived at least a year earlier, and was intended to be an extension of New Japan Pro-Wrestling dedicated to a purer strong-style product and commanded by Shinya Hashimoto. However, with bookers Antonio Inoki and Riki Choshu shutting down the idea, and especially after Inoki mistreated Hashimoto's career to build Naoya Ogawa's, Shinya left the company and started the company as an independent promotion, capitalizing on it to rebuild his career.
    Radio 
    Sports 
  • Anaheim, California's NHL hockey team, the Ducks, were once known as the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, wearing uniforms that matched those from the second film and owned by Disney themselves. In 2005, Disney sold the team, thus changing its name and removing the movie iconography from its brand. That said, their mascot, Wild Wing, still wears the mask from the classic logo.
  • For many years, the mascot of the University of Oregon Ducks teams was none other than Donald Duck, thanks to a unique trademark agreement originated by Walt Disney himself. By 2010, the University had grown tired of the highly restrictive guidelines placed on the character and modified the agreement so that the costumed mascot appearing at sports games and local events is merely, "the Oregon Duck", no longer considered to be Donald. The cartoon version👁 Image
    still looks exactly like him, though, and is still covered by the agreement.
    Tabletop Games 
    Theme Parks 
  • Nara Dreamland was an entire theme park that resulted from this. The owners had obtained a license from Walt Disney to make it into a Disneyland in Nara, Japan, but partway through construction, the deal suddenly fell through. It was decided to just remove the Disney elements and make it into its own park. Alas, being a Disneyland knockoff was its downfall. Twenty-one years later, an actual Japanese Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland, was opened, and it became the world's third most-visited theme park, after Disneyland Park and Magic Kingdom. However, the park continued to limp on (mainly thanks to distance; Tokyo and Nara are 4 hours apart by train) until 2001, when both Tokyo DisneySea and Universal Studios Japan opened within months of each other, the latter of which is located less than an hour away from Nara Dreamland and basically ate up whatever's left of the park's visitors. Sales hit rock bottom, maintenance issues abounded due to the lack of visitors, and the park was abandoned in 2006.
  • The 2022 edition of Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando was originally due to feature a house based on Evil Dead, likely a tie-in to Evil Dead Rise. When that film's release was pushed back to 2023, the Evil Dead house was dropped from the lineup. Hellblock Horror was the house that took its place, reusing the intended Evil Dead layout and now featuring a "Hellhole Prison for extradimensional entities" concept that was chosen to allow for an easy reuse of past monster designs on a tight schedule.
    Toys 
  • The Mutant figures from Beast Wars were retooled prototypes from the canceled Animorphs line.
  • Beastformers were a Spin-Off of the Transformers Headmasters line in Japan. When Hasbro imported the line as Battle Beasts, they dropped any connection to the Transformers.
  • Gormiti initially was planned to be a fourth series in the Exogini series, the first one to feature original designs instead of repurposing pre-existing toylines like the first three did. This is very much noticeable in the first series, which mostly features characters that are very skinny, matching up the character designs of Fistful of Aliens (the toyline that was repurposed as Series 3 of Exogini).
  • At one point, Hero Factory was meant to be revealed as a sequel to BIONICLE rather than a Spiritual Successor. Concept creator Christian Faber detailed multiple ideas for this connection in an expansive but ultimately discarded Universe Bible. Both franchises were also planned to be tied to older LEGO series like LEGO Space and Aquazone. Though vague hints for this reveal were laid out in early Hero Factory media, the franchises remained unconnected. After this, Faber also pitched BIONICLE (2015) as a sequel/prequel to the original series that involved Time Travel, which likewise got rejected in favor of a full Continuity Reboot. As before, some artifacts of Faber's original idea remained in the final product.
  • Due to Kinnikuman not being translated into English, the Kinkeshi toys were released in America by Mattel under the M.U.S.C.L.E. brand.
  • The Spider-Man: Techno Wars and X-Men: Mutant Armor lines began as a way to recycle ReTooled Iron Man action figures leftover from his short-lived animated series.
  • The Team America series from Ideal Toys was created as a way to salvage their earlier line of Evel Knievel products after Knievel was arrested on battery charges. A tie-in comic book series was even published by Marvel Comics as a way to promote the toys.
    Video Games 
  • Agent Under Fire was originally a PS2 version of The World is Not Enough (EA), before it was turned into an original Bond story.
  • Done numerous times with the Aleste franchise of shoot-em-ups by Compile:
    • The Master System ports of the first two Aleste games were localized as Power Strike and Power Strike II, respectively (though the latter port was not released in Japan until 2020's Aleste Collection).
    • The Genesis/Mega Drive installment, Musha Aleste, was localized as M.U.S.H.A..
    • While the first Game Gear game, GG Aleste, stayed in Japan, GG Aleste II was turned into Power Strike II despite being a completely different game from the Master System game.
    • Finally, the SNES installment, Super Aleste, became Space Megaforce in North America, but kept the Aleste name in Europe, marking the first time it was seen outside Japan.note Another Compile shoot-em-up, Guardic, received a spinoff on the NES called Guardic Gaiden, which was brought west as The Guardian Legend.
  • Alex Kidd in Miracle World was originally intended to be a Dragon Ball game, but it was made into an original IP when Sega couldn't secure the license. The major element of this that remains in the game is the use of Rock Paper Scissors (or Janken) to fight bosses: this was Goku's signature move at the time, before he adopted the much more famous Kamehameha.
  • After the development of Duke Nukem 3D, 3D Realms planned to make another side-scrolling Duke Nukem titled Duke Nukem Forever. The project was canceled and sold to another developer, which finished and released it as Alien Rampage. The title Duke Nukem Forever was repurposed for a later entry in the series, which became one of the most infamous examples of Development Hell before finally releasing in 2011.
  • ANNO: Mutationem was originally developed to be set in the SCP Foundation universe. It was later reworked into an original intellectual property in order to avoid potential issues with the SCP IP, while maintaining some elements from the original buildout.
  • Assassin's Creed I was originally going to be a Prince of Persia game before becoming its own franchise.
  • The Commodore 64 game Astérix and the Magic Cauldron was released in the United States as Ardok the Barbarian, likely because Asterix was not popular enough there to be worth licensing.
  • Several games released by Bandai for the NES were anime Licensed Games in Japan that were released overseas in the disguised form:
    • Dragon Power was originally a Dragon Ball game. At the time, Dragon Ball was not well-known in the United States (although the game was also translated to French with the Dragon Ball license intact). Bandai tried to change it into a more generic Journey to the West game, which, while still not being well known in America, unlike Dragon Ball, is public domain. They didn't do a very good job at it, incidentally; Bulma, Oolong, and Yamcha, among other characters, all kept their original designs.
    • Chubby Cherub was originally a game based on the anime Little Ghost Q-Taro. Few changes were made to the game aside from replacing Q-Taro with a cherub.
    • Ninja Kid (not to be confused with the UPL Arcade Game) was a similar alteration of GeGeGe no Kitarō: Youkai Dai Makyou.
  • Battalion Wars is a borderline example. The Working Title was Advance Wars: Under Fire, but Nintendo decided to change the name due to the fact that it was a very different game from the original Advance Wars and it wouldn't have made much sense to release a game named after the Game Boy Advance on the GameCube (it's still part of the overall Wars series, though). In Japan, the game was released as Totsugeki! Famicom Wars.
  • The first BattleTanx started out as a Nintendo 64 port of BattleSport.
  • Beetle Adventure Racing! for the N64 started development as a Need for Speed game and used the same engine as the NFS games of the time.
  • Black Belt, a side-scrolling beat-'em-up for the Sega Master System, is a localization of a Fist of the North Star game for the Mark III in which the graphics were altered to remove all traces of the original license. Kenshiro was renamed Riki and his blue vest and jeans outfit was replaced by a white karate gi, while all of the other characters and backgrounds were modified as well, changing the game's locations from post-apocalyptic deserts and towns to modern-day temples and cities. The Japanese Mega Drive sequel, Hokuto no Ken: Shin Seikimatsu Kyūseishu Densetsu, was released overseas as Last Battle: Legend of the Final Hero, but the changes made during the localization were lazier by comparison to the first game. All the sprites were recolored and the names were changed, but the character designs remained almost identical and the seemingly nonsensical script (which consisted mainly of out-of-context dialogue transcribed verbatim from the manga) was a word-to-word translation of the original, aside from a few minor changes. Gore was also removed for the overseas release.
  • Blasphemous was originally pitched to publisher Bandai Namco as a 2D version of Dark Souls 3, but Bandai Namco passed on the project. The developers retooled the project as an original IP, substituting their homeland's (Spain) morbid history with Catholicism in place of Anor Londo's morbid medievalism.
  • Bombshell was originally conceived as Duke Nukem: Mass Destruction, but a legal dispute arose over the use of the Duke Nukem intellectual property (specifically, Gearbox Software said that their deal with Apogee Software - the one which resulted in Duke Nukem Forever finally coming out - precluded Apogee from publishing any more Duke Nukem games). As such, Duke was replaced by Shelly "Bombshell" Harrison as the game's protagonist.
  • Bravely Default was planned as a sequel to Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light but became its own Spiritual Successor series. Aside from sharing a character designer/art director in Akihiko Yoshida and similar battle systems, the first Bravely title even features the Demon Lords from 4 Heroes of Light as Nemeses, accompanied by a remix of that game's normal battle theme, "Battle with Monsters." The side character the Adventurer and her fox from 4 Heroes of Light also cross over into Bravely Default and Bravely Second.
  • The original Burnout was born out of a proposed Playstation 2 port of Thrill Drive. When Konami passed on Criterion's pitch, Criterion decided to prototype a new game liberally inspired by Thrill Drive.
  • Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker was originally envisioned as a Zelda puzzle title starring Link, thanks in part to one of the main elements in the game being not having the ability to jump obstacles, which at first appeared to be out of place for a Mario title.
  • The Famicom game Moeru! Oniisan was based on a Toho OAV of the same name. Toho published a Westernized NES version of this game under the title Circus Caper.
  • Cold Fear began life as an Xbox-exclusive Time Crisis game that got canceled. Afterwards, it was retooled into an Alone in the Dark sequel, as its developer Darkworks had previously made Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, the fourth game in that series. This too was scrapped early on, and it instead became a standalone Survival Horror game.
  • Counter-Strike was initially sold in stores as "Half-Life: Counter-Strike", treating it like a Half-Life spinoff, but the Xbox port of the game treated it like a separate series altogether, and since then, every other Counter-Strike game would do the same.
  • Cratemaze for the TurboGrafx-16 was originally released as a Doraemon game in Japan.
  • Obscure Mega Drive/Genesis shooter CrossFire👁 Image
     was originally released in Japan as Super Airwolf, based on the Airwolf TV series and intended to be a sequel to Kyugo's 1987 arcade licensed game. The Western localization edited the theme song to a suspiciously similar version and the rest of the references to the show were removed.
  • Croc was at first conceived as a 3D Yoshi's Island game, that was ultimately turned into an original property after the prototype was rejected by Nintendo... and became a Playstation exclusive in the process. Croc himself is still clearly a barely-disguised, direct stand-in for Yoshi.
  • The SNES racing game Cyber Spin was originally a game based on Future GPX Cyber Formula, it was brought overseas with references of the series removed, and in the American version, the setting was changed to a futuristic Formula One setting.
  • The Dark Pictures Anthology was originally conceived as Supermassive Games' pitch for a new Silent Hill game. Konami turned them down in favor of a pitch from Bloober Team that turned out to be a remake of Silent Hill 2, but Supermassive, undeterred, reworked their ideas into a series of original games.
  • Darkstalkers was originally supposed to be a licensed fighting game starring the Universal Horror monsters. This influence can still be seen in many of the characters, as Demitri Maximoff is an obvious stand-in for Dracula, Jon Talbain for The Wolfman, Rikuo for the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Victor von Gerdenheim for Frankenstein's Monster, and so on.
  • Daymare 1998 was originally a Fan Remake of Resident Evil 2 before the developers received a cease & desist letter from Capcom, who were working on their own official remake of that game. This led them to Retool it into an original Survival Horror title that served as a Genre Throwback to the genre's late '90s heyday.
  • Decap Attack was originally a tie-in to the anime Magical Hat in its Japanese version. The localization team didn't feel like paying the licensing fees for an obscure and unimported anime series, so the graphics and story were redone from scratch.
  • Def Jam Vendetta was originally planned to be a WCW game, tentatively called WCW 2000 or WCW Mayhem 2, depending on the source, for the then-upcoming PlayStation 2, but EA lost the WCW license after the latter company was acquired by the WWF in 2001.
  • The Descent-clone Defiance was originally developed as a PC port of the 3DO game Blade Force, but the deal eventually fell through and the game was converted into an original title.
  • The NES game Destiny Of An Emperor, along with the arcade games Dynasty Wars and Warriors of Fate, were all games by Capcom based on Hiroshi Motomiya's manga series Tenchi o Kurau, which was loosely based on the Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. While the former two kept the characters and plot mostly intact which isn't really hard to do, Warriors of Fate removes even that and replaces everyone's names with Mongolian names.
  • Diddy Kong Racing was at one point planned to be a sequel to Rare's RC Pro-Am series until the game was shown to Shigeru Miyamoto, who suggested adding Diddy Kong as the main character. This change happened late enough in development that a small amount of merchandise was printed under the Pro-Am 64 title.
  • Both the little-known RPG Divine Divinity by Larian Studios and the somewhat better-known first installment of the Hack and Slash franchise Sacred by Ascaron were originally supposed to be set in the The Dark Eye universe (having no connection whatsoever otherwise). The Larian game had the title The Lady, the Mage and the Knight, abbreviated as LMK, which, in the German title, would have stood for Legenden der Magierkriege, i.e. "legends of the Mage Wars" (the Mage Wars being a period in the history of Aventuria in the TDE setting). The precursor of Sacred was called Armalion (a powerful artifact in the TDE universe). In both cases, problems with the license prevented the projects from leaving the pre-alpha stage, but the existing code and parts of the art were used as building blocks for Divine Divinity and Sacred, respectively.
  • A sequel to the Combat Wings series titled Combat Wings: The Great Battles of WWII was delayed at the last minute and renamed Dogfight 1942. Though considering the previous Combat Wings games were very generic arcade WWII flight combat games with few recurring characters or plot elements, this doesn't change much.
  • The original Donkey Kong (1981) was reportedly a Popeye game initially, but changed because Nintendo couldn't get the license. After their success with Donkey Kong, they would make a Popeye game, but their original IP would go on to become gaming's most iconic franchise.
  • After Rare was bought out by Microsoft, Donkey Kong Country characters were removed from two of their upcoming games for the Game Boy Advance: Diddy Kong Pilot became Banjo-Pilot, and Donkey Kong Coconut Crackers became It's Mr. Pants.
  • Doom (1993) was going to be an Aliens game, but the creators pulled out of negotiations because they wanted total creative freedom. Later came full circle when the first total conversion mod for the game was based on Aliens.
  • Dota Auto Chess was an extremely popular mod for Dota 2, and proved popular enough to the point that Dota's competitors created their own versions of Auto Chess. Discussions between Valve and the mod creator ultimately led to the decision that each of them work on their own separate auto chess games. What was left from Dota Auto Chess turned into simply Auto Chess, while Valve created their own version of the game, Dota Underlords.
  • The PS2 shooter Dragon Rage was planned to be a Might and Magic spinoff.
  • Echo was pitched as part of Blackgate's canon, but has very early on established itself as its own thing in a more mundane setting. Relics of this origin can be seen both here and in Adastra (2018), where the supernatural Big Bad from each takes heavily inspiration from Blackgate's Eternal. Conversely, Adastra began as a Star Trek-esque show in Echo, but it evolved into a radically different thing, a Space Opera with nothing in common. The other project of the group, Glory Hounds, is also not connected to any of those.
  • Fallout's game system was originally meant as a computer adaptation of GURPS called Vault 13: A GURPS Post-Nuclear Adventure before disagreements with Steven Jackson caused Black Isle to terminate their license and create their own SPECIAL system.
    • And before that, it was intended to be a sequel to Wasteland before rights issues got in the way.
  • Family Pinball was originally a Namco game in Japan, but a different publisher brought it to the U.S. as Rock 'n' Ball. The Namco characters were replaced with generic equivalents, and the Pac-Man table was not only genericized but slightly altered in layout.
  • One of the original concepts for Fighting Force was to make it a 3D sequel to the Streets of Rage series (and indeed, the leaked Saturn prototype👁 Image
    has much more overt similarities to SOR, such as Hawk looking like Axel), but Sega pulled the deal after disagreements with the developers over what platforms the game would be released on, and it became its own thing.
  • The roster for Arika's Fighting Layer were originally created for Street Fighter EX before being given their own game. Arika would go on to develop two more Street Fighter EX titles before Capcom discontinued the spinoff series, while Arika would bring their original characters back in Fighting EX Layer. The Fighting Layer characters are still considered to be part of the official lore of Street Fighter, however.
  • The 2½D Hack and Slash Final Exam began life as an interquel in the ObsCure series of Survival Horror games. It was retooled into a separate game after the original developer, Hydravision Entertainment, closed its doors and reformed into Mighty Rocket Studios. However, it still has many Shout Outs and Continuity Nods to the ObsCure games, most notably Shannon, one of the series' protagonists, returning as an NPC, and the first game's villain Principal Friedman serving as the Final Boss, to the point where fans of that series consider it all but an unofficial sequel.
  • One early design concept for Final Fantasy VII would have been a detective mystery set in contemporary (mid-late '90s) New York. While this obviously didn't pan out, the basic idea would later be reworked into a video game sequel to Hideaki Sena's novel Parasite Eve (1995).
  • The Working Title of Final Fight was Street Fighter '89. According to producer Yoshiki Okamoto, he was originally commissioned to work on a sequel to the first Street Fighter I, but he wanted to make a side-scrolling beat-'em-up after being inspired by the success of Double Dragon. When it was obvious that the resulting product looked nothing like the original Street Fighter, the game was renamed Final Fight. Despite this, many of the characters from Final Fight later crossed their way into the Street Fighter series and other Capcom fighting games (including a spin-off of its own titled Final Fight Revenge).
  • Freedom Planet started as a Sonic fangame, but later became its own thing for commercial release. In this case, it switched over before getting a C&D.
  • FreeSpace originally started life as a sequel/spin-off of the developer's Descent series. It developed into its own thing quickly, but in America was still called "Descent: Freespace" for strange copyright reasons (it was released as "Conflict: Freespace" elsewhere).
  • The Forgotten City started its life a quest mod for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim released in 2015. The mod was met with acclaim by the modding community and even managed to garner some praise from the mainstream gaming press. Encouraged by the positive response, the mod's project leader Nick Pearce decided to work on expanding the mod into a full game, divorcing it from The Elder Scrolls universe and instead transplanting it into its own original setting.
  • Gemini: Heroes Reborn was conceived as a spin-off game based on the Heroes TV series, which is hardly a surprise given the superpowered civilains theme. The Heroes wiki even has articles dedicated to the games' characters.
  • An NVIDIA GeForce Now data leak👁 Image
    indicates that Gotham Knights (2022) began development as an installment of the Batman: Arkham Series known as Batman: Arkham Insurgency (the game was developed by the same studio as Batman: Arkham Origins to boot), probably as a sequel to Batman: Arkham Knight, but was reworked into a standalone game for reasons unknown.
  • There was once a sequel to the original The Great Giana Sisters in development. Due to the controversy of the original game, it was canceled and retooled into Hard 'N' Heavy.
  • Heavenly Guardian for the PlayStation 2 and Wii was originally announced in Japan as Kiki Kai World. Apparently, the Kiki Kai Kai characters were replaced with original ones because the developer somehow lost the license.
  • In an example mixing both this trope and a Dolled-Up Installment, the Game Boy game Home Alone 2: Kevin's Dream was retooled into an adaptation of Bobby's World before finally being cancelled outright.
  • The Jaguar shooter Hover Strike was originally meant to be a remake of BattleZone.
  • Early plans were for Halo: Combat Evolved to be set in the Marathon universe, with a lot of similar themes and related/returning characters before being gradually removed over the course of rewrites, genre changes and Bungie being purchased by Microsoft to build an original franchise. By itself the game could be argued to be a Stealth Sequel, though later games fleshing out the timeline make it unreconcilable.
  • Human Killing Machine was born out of a failed pitch by Tiertex for an official sequel to their home computer port of Street Fighter I. Even though Capcom declined, that didn't stop Tiertex from touting HKM as a Spiritual Successor to Street Fighter in interviews and some promotional material. Kwon, the protagonist of the new game, even bore a superficial resemblance to Ryu.
  • The GBA-exclusive FPS, Ice Nine (and one of the first of it's kind) was originally a tie-in game to the movie The Recruit before becoming an independent title on it's own.
  • According to Kenji Obata, Ikari Warriors was originally developed as a licensed adaptation of Rambo: First Blood Part II (which was known as Rambo: Ikari no Dasshutsu in Japan). When SNK was unable to secure the rights, the project was instead released as a standalone game with the title shortened to Ikari. Elements of this still made it into the finished game, such as the fact that two protagonists, Ralf and Clark, are very clear Rambo Expies. Though the characters would later undergo Divergent Character Evolution in the King of Fighters series, Ralf never quite lost the obvious Sylvester Stallone influence.
  • The Jetsons: Invasion of the Planet Pirates for the SNES was retooled for its Japanese release as Yōkai Buster: Ruka no Daibōken, starring the mascot character of Marukatsu Super Famicom magazine.
  • Jimbo, released with the March 1995 issue of German Commodore 64 magazine Magic Disk 64, doesn't do much to hide that it was originally developed as the fourth game in Codemasters' CJ's Elephant Antics series. (The third game was never released in any form. The first game, for that matter, was built on the engine of an unfinished Commodore 64 port of The NewZealand Story, different from the one actually released by Ocean Software.)
  • Journey to Silius started development as a game based on The Terminator, but was reworked into a stand-alone title when Sunsoft's license expired.
  • The TurboGrafx-16 platformer Keith Courage in Alpha Zones was originally one of many games based on then-popular anime series Mashin Hero Wataru. The story went from being about a kid pulled into a spirit realm to battle demons, to being about an adult who is part of a military organization that fights aliens. However, the game's title screen still shows a Sunrise copyright, perhaps because only the Excuse Plot was actually altered.
  • Kunio-kun:
    • Renegade (1986), Super Dodge Ball, River City Ransom (aka Street Gangs), Nintendo World Cup, and Crash 'n' the Boys: Street Challenge were all localizations of different games in the Japanese Kunio-kun series that were westernized (or in the case of Nintendo World Cup, globalized) in order to make them more marketable overseas. The Neo Geo version of Super Dodge Ball, along with the Nintendo DS games localized by Aksys Games, were the only games in the series prior to Arc System Works' revival of the franchise where Kunio and Riki retained their Japanese identities in the overseas versions. The original unaltered versions would later be localized as part of the DOUBLE DRAGON & Kunio-kun Retro Brawler Bundle.
    • The original Double Dragon was planned as a sequel to the original Nekketsu Kōha Kunio-kun (aka Renegade). The change in title, setting, and characters was precisely done to appeal to the western market from the get-go without the need of making a separate overseas version.
    • The Super Famicom game Super Mad Champ was originally planned as a Kunio bike-racing game. Developer Almanic was the same team that worked on River City Girls Zero for Technos.
  • A persistent rumor has it that Lady Stalker was originally going to be a Dragon Quest Gaiden Game based around Alena from Dragon Quest IV, but was quickly made into an unrelated game when the license was lost partway through development. The rumor has strong supporting evidence, including the party being near carbon-copies of the party from Alena's chapter in DQIV; a series of tomato enemies that are suspiciously similar to the Dragon Quest slimes in appearance and near-identical in mechanics, right down to having a "rotten tomato" that can inflict poison equivalent to the Babble/Bubble Slime; and some items being identical between the two games, down to their price.
  • Warsong on the Genesis/Mega Drive is actually a localization of the first Langrisser game.
  • In its very earliest stages, The Last of Us was actually a Continuity Reboot of Jak and Daxter. Naughty Dog decided to make it a new IP instead when they realized the ideas they liked best had nothing to do with Jak and Daxter.
  • Legacy of the Wizard for the NES is known in Japan as Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family, being the fourth installment in Falcom's Dragon Slayer series.
  • Little Ninja Brothers for the NES is actually a localization of the Famicom game Super Chinese 2. Despite the fact that the first Super Chinese game had already been released in the west as Kung-Fu Heroes, Culture Brain chose to localize the sequel as a completely separate game. This would later be repeated on the SNES, as Super Ninja Boy on that system is known as Super Chinese World in Japan.
  • Lunar Knights for the Nintendo DS is actually the overseas version of the fourth Boktai game (Boktai DS). The first two games sold poorly outside Japan due to their solar sensing gimmick and as a result, the third game didn't get an international release and Konami took out the solar sensor in the fourth game. The localization team attempted everything to distance the fourth game from the franchise by changing the title and renaming the main characters Django and Sabata into Aaron and Lucian.
  • Magical Doropie (released in the US as The Krion Conquest) was originally going to be based on the 1982 anime adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz before the rights fell through.
  • Mario Party 9 includes a Falling Blocks mini-game called "Castle Clearout". This game would later appear in Clubhouse Games: 51 Worldwide Classics under the name "6-Ball Puzzle" with ties to the Mario series removed.
  • Maru's Mission for the Game Boy is a Ninja Jajamaru-kun game in Japan.
  • Mega Man 1 was originally meant to be a licensed game based on Astro Boy, but Capcom lost the license, so they reworked it into an original title featuring Astro Boy expies like Mega Man (Astro Boy), Roll (Uran/Astro Girl), Dr. Light (Dr. Ochanomizu) or Dr. Wily (Dr. Tenma).
  • Mickey Mouse III: Yume Fuusen was being localized as Mickey Mouse: Dream Balloon, but licensing difficulties apparently intervened because Kemco ended up editing in their own character and releasing the game in the US as Kid Klown in Night Mayor World. Indeed, every Mickey Mouse game from Kemco that wasn't published overseas by Capcom or Nintendo was modified into something else outside Japan.
  • Mortal Kombat (1992) was initially going to be a Universal Soldier video game, but ended up as an original property when a deal couldn't be reached. This can be seen in Johnny Cage, a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Jean-Claude Van Damme with a Groin Attack move inspired by a scene from Bloodsport (1988).
  • Mystic Defender was originally developed as an adaptation of Peacock King, before Sega removed the licensed materials for the game's international release, turning it into a wholly-original game. For instance, the main villain Zareth was supposed to be Oda Nobunaga, while Joe the hero was Kujaku from the anime. Alexandra from the game was also originally supposed to be Azusa. The game's back cover even uses stills from the anime as promotional material!
  • The sequel to Need for Speed: Shift dropped the NFS from the title and was titled Shift 2: Unleashed (not to be confused with the other Shift 2.
  • Nexus: The Jupiter Incident started out as Imperium Galactica 3: Genesis. It then got bounced around several developers/publishers under the title of Galaxy Andromeda before finally being released as its current title. Word of God is that the storyline remains largely unchanged, so Nexus can be considered a Spiritual Prequel to Imperium Galactica.
  • Nuclear Strike had a trailer for a new installment called Future Strike, which ended up being turned into the unrelated game Future Cop LAPD.
  • Paradise Lost is a Far Cry Arcade Game sold without the Far Cry name.
  • Path of the Midnight Sun was a reworked version of a Fire Emblem fan game (then known as just Midnight Sun).
  • Pax Corpus, a 1997 PlayStation action game by Cryo Interactive, was retooled from a canceled Æon Flux game.
  • Codemasters distributed the Spanish ZX Spectrum game Phantomas under its original title, but distanced its sequel from it by retitling it Vampire. Interestingly, Phantomas and Phantomas 2 began development as unrelated but similar games, but Dinamic convinced the coders of both games to use the same main character.
  • Rare had planned to develop a sequel to GoldenEye (1997), but lost the license as they were outbid by Electronic Arts. Downplayed, as the Goldeneye development team hadn't wished to create another James Bond game anyway, instead wanting to create their own, original spy-based title. Thus Perfect Dark was made as a standalone game with similar mechanics.
    • The canceled Perfect Dark Core would have undergone the same thing had development continued; by the time it was canceled it had turned into a completely different game, featuring a new male protagonist fighting Humongous Mecha.
  • Pikmin (2001) was planned to be a Mario game at one point in its development, its idea being in part born thanks to the Super Mario 128 tech demo for the Nintendo GameCube.
  • Power Punch II was originally developed as a sequel to Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!, with the original title Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch. A beta version of Mike Tyson's Intergalactic Power Punch has since leaked out. And no, just in case you were wondering, there is no Power Punch I.
  • Project: Snowblind was originally going to be Deus Ex: Clan Wars. It was changed to be a Spiritual Successor to Deus Ex when that game's own sequel Invisible War sold poorly.
  • Red Faction was originally conceived as the cancelled Descent 4. Some elements were carried over, such as the textures, the protagonist's name (Parker) and the jet fighter combat level.
  • Rage of the Dragons, a Neo Geo fighting game by Evoga and Noise Factory, was originally intended to be a sequel to the Neo Geo version of Double Dragon, but the developers were unable to get a hold of the rights. Thus, all the characters were turned into ersatzes of the Double Dragon cast: the Lee brothers became the Lewis brothers, while Abobo became Abubo.
  • Remothered started out as a 2D remake of Clock Tower (1995), but the developers made the decision to go all the way and make it its own IP after deciding to make the jump to 3D. In addition to being an excellent game in its own right, it also still manages to capture the spirit of the original Clock Tower series quite well.
  • Resident Evil:
    • The first game was originally conceived as a remake of Capcom's horror game Sweet Home (1989), itself an adaptation of the film of the same name, but since they didn't have the license to that film anymore, they turned it into an original title instead. This would make the original Resident Evil double as a Spiritual Successor of Sweet Home the movie, as well. Tokuro Fujiwara, the director of Sweet Home the video game, worked as a producer on Resident Evil and envisioned it as a Spiritual Successor.
    • One of the most successful examples came from Capcom's attempt to create a sequel to Resident Evil 2, which spawned not only Resident Evil 4, but three other potential versions of that game (out of four) which saw release as their own games.
      • Devil May Cry 1 is the most well-known. It originally starred a new protagonist named Tony who had superhuman abilities (explained here, in traditional RE fashion, with biotechnology instead of demons), and the dev team's research trips to the UK and Spain to study medieval castles wound up influencing the settings of both games. It was turned into an original game after the team realized that it was straining credibility to have an action-packed hack-and-slash as the next entry in what was then still a pure Survival Horror franchise. Some of the RE influence still remains in the first game however, such as the aforementioned creepy castle setting and the much darker, more horror-focused tone, especially compared to the campier feel of the DMC sequels. Dante, the protagonist of DMC, uses the alias "Tony Redgrave" as a Development Gag in later games, while several of the monsters in the DMC franchise bear a distinct influence from the RE series' visceral baddies.
      • There is evidence that Haunting Ground came out of another early version of Resident Evil 4, called the 'Castle Version', with the basic plot being taken from the Castle Version's sideplot of a woman exploring a castle with a B.O.W. dog at her side. The dog, which became Hewie in Haunting Ground, still ended up having a small role in the final version of Resident Evil 4, as well as its remake.
      • Finally, Resident Evil: Dead Aim was based on one of the final rejected proposals for RE4, and thus bears quite a bit of resemblance to it due to being an actual Resident Evil game, in particular the duo of hero Bruce McGivern and flip-flopping sidekick/nemesis Fong Ling being similar to Leon S. Kennedy and Ada Wong.
    • Onimusha: Warlords began life as Sengoku Biohazard, a Resident Evil game set in the Sengoku period where the player would use Ninja weapons to battle monsters in a house filled with booby traps. It also helped inspire the Devil May Cry combat system, with pre-release versions of Onimusha allowing the player to knock enemies into the air, then juggle them by continuing to attack; while this was fixed in Warlords, it would be incorporated into DMC to give that series its distinctive style.
  • Retro City Rampage started as an NES hardware-based demake of Grand Theft Auto III titled Grand Theftendo, but eventually ended up an 8-bit-retraux Reference Overdosed Spiritual Successor of Grand Theft Auto (Classic).
  • Rise of the Triad was to have been a sequel to Wolfenstein 3-D; its working title was "Wolfenstein 3D Part II: Rise of the Triad".
  • Secret of Mana began development as Final Fantasy IV, only to be divorced from that series and renamed Chrono Trigger before becoming a Mana game.
  • Secret Weapons Over Normandy was apparently born out of a canceled Medal of Honor spin-off called Fighter Command.
  • An inversion: Natsume's side-scrolling action game Shatterhand for the NES was first released in Japan as a Licensed Game for the Famicom based on the Metal Heroes series Tokkyuu Shirei Solbrain. However, the Solbrain version, despite being released first, is actually the modified version, not Shatterhand. Angel, a subsidiary of Bandai, agreed to cover the publishing costs for Natsume under the condition that they could modify the game to promote one of Toei's superheroes.
  • Zig-zagged with Sleeping Dogs (2012): started out as an original game, was later incorporated into the True Crime franchise by Activision who later canceled it, then it was revived by Square Enix who turned it into an original game again.
  • Sega made two video games based on Kujaku-Oh (Peacock King, also known as Spirit Warrior): one for the Master System, based on the anime series, and a sequel in number only for the Mega Drive, based on the second OVA. The Master System original came out in America as Spellcaster and the Genesis sequel came out as Mystic Defender, in both cases having all the Peacock King elements replaced with wholly new storylines and characters (the Big Bad of the Genesis game was originally Demon King Nobunaga, for instance).
  • Star Gladiator was originally going to be a licensed Star Wars fighting game developed by Capcom and LucasArts. LucasArts instead opted to make their own fighting game, Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi, which was released to decidedly mixed reception. Elements of the original source material can still be seen in Star Gladiator, as Hayato's Plasma Sword is essentially a lightsaber, Gamof bears a very strong resemblance to Chewbacca, June has a seemingly-dead father who turns out to be working for the villain, and Bilstein is a rather blatant Darth Vader Expy.
  • Starswirl Academy was originally a visual novel where you could date humanized versions of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic characters. Hasbro caught wind and told the devs to change some elements. They changed the character names and now we have characters like the rainbow-haired Robin Douglas (Rainbow Dash).
  • Street Combat for the Super NES was originally a Ranma ½ game in which you played as either male or female Ranma and battled the rest of the anime cast. The U.S. version turned Ranma into a mulleted soldier named Steven (female Ranma was Steven in street clothes, while male Ranma was Steven in Powered Armor), and the Ranma cast with all sorts of things (Kodachi, for example, became a clown). This was averted with the sequel, which was brought to the U.S. as Ranma ½: Hard Battle.
  • When Street Fighter II was in development, Takashi Nishiyama pitched the idea that the protagonist should be an American this time, but Capcom wanted to keep Ryu from the first game as the protagonist. Nishiyama kept this idea when he switched to work for SNK and Fatal Fury with its American protagonist Terry Bogard was the result.
  • Super Bikes was originally released in 2006 by Raw Thrills as part of the The Fast and the Furious arcade game series. Although the game was successful enough to spawn sequels, they dropped the Fast & Furious license and kept the rights to the Super Bikes name, so in 2010, they made a sequel simply titled Super Bikes 2, with Super Bikes 3 later coming out in 2019.
  • Sunsoft also started work on a Superman game for the NES (following its success with the Batman games), but was later re-tooled into a Captain Ersatz called Sunman for some reason or other (it did release a Superman game for the Super NES and Sega Genesis). It ultimately ended up not being released in any form.
  • The first System Shock game was originally conceived and pitched by Warren Spector as a Wing Commander spin-off with the Working Title "Alien Commander", and would be set on the wreckage of TCS Tiger's Claw. However, with Looking Glass Studios previous projects having been Ultima Underworld and Ultima Underworld II, both Spector and project leader Doug Church decided that they wanted a greater degree of creative freedom and not have their hands tied by working with an existing franchise, and so they reconfigured the pitch into its own original setting very early into pre-production.
  • The NES game Tecmo World Cup Soccer is actually a Captain Tsubasa-themed soccer sim with Westernized character designs, likely changed because Captain Tsubasa is not licensed in the United States.
  • Tabula Rasa was known as Ultima X in development, and was intended as a Spiritual Successor to Ultima. The first version was going to be a fantasy MMORPG, then was scrapped to make a second fantasy MMORPG, then it was scrapped entirely and made into a completely different MMOFPS.
  • Them's Fightin' Herds started out as My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic, a Friendship is Magic fangame. While still early in development, Fighting is Magic got so much attention that Hasbro sent them a Cease and Desist order. Lauren Faust liked the game, however, so she helped Retool it into an original game about several different kinds of quadrupedal animals.
  • Thunder Force IV for the Sega Genesis was released in America was Lightening Force: Quest for the Darkstar. Not only the spelling of this was odd, as two previous games in the series had been released internationally under the Thunder Force title, and Thunder Force IV came out under its actual title in Europe.
  • Friday the 13th: Road to Hell was a side-scrolling beat 'em up released for Java phones by the developer HeroCraft officially licensed by New Line Cinema. When said license expired, HeroCraft republished the game as Thursday the 12th, changing the protagonist from the hockey mask-wearing Jason to the medical facemask-wearing Slayson.
  • The unreleased NES game Time Diver Eon Man by Taito started development as a sequel to Wrath of the Black Manta.
  • Titus the Fox was originally created as Lagaf': Les Aventures de Moktar - Vol.1: La Zoubida, and based on a comedy dance song, called "La Zoubida". "Lagaf'" is the comedian who sang it, and "Moktar" is the song's protagonist, who pines for the titular La Zoubida. The game starred Moktar going from Paris to Marrakech and back to save his beloved... but, since only French people knew of Lagaf', the developers turned Moktar into a character based on their own mascot Titus, removed each and every reference to him and his song from the graphics (including an entire stage) and replaced the rendition of "La Zoubida" in the soundtrack with original music.
  • Tobal was originally conceived as a Chrono Trigger fighting game before Akira Toriyama offered to design new characters instead.
  • Tower of Doom for the Intellivision was to have been the third Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Cartridge for the system (and the Atari 2600 as well), but it was released without the license after Mattel abandoned the game and the console midway through development; most gamers couldn't tell the difference, of course. (The later Capcom Arcade Game Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom is completely unrelated.) The two earlier AD&D games would have the license stripped out for emulated Compilation Rereleases, appearing under their Working Titles Adventure and Minotaur.
  • Trapt suffers this twice over. Not only is it a game that would have been previously localized as a Deception game, but by Japanese reckoning, it's the first genuine Numbered Sequel, being Kagero 2. It was instead marketed and released as a standalone title, and since it was a Non-Linear Sequel in the first place, this removes all franchise ties.
  • The arcade Shoot 'em Up Turbo Force was originally developed👁 Image
    as an international graphic swap for a spin-off of the Rabio Lepus series named Metal Rabbit, until Metal Rabbit was scrapped and Turbo Force was the version released worldwide.
  • The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang for the SNES is the second game in the Dorabocchan franchise in Japan, with the first game being a Japan-only platformer for the PC Engine (known as the TurboGrafx-16 in America).
  • Tube Slider: The Championship of Future Formula was originally pitched👁 Image
    to be a F-Zero title, serving as developer NDcube's follow-up to F-Zero: Maximum Velocity. Nintendo would pass on the idea, however, instead giving the franchise to Sega to serve as the two companies' first collaborative project following Sega's exit from console manufacturing.
  • The Wonder Boy games were developed by Westone and published by Sega. While Sega owned the Wonder Boy trademark, Westone retained all other copyrights, and so Hudson Soft decided to modify each game when they got the license to work on ports for non-Sega platforms. The only exception was Wonder Boy III: Monster Lair, which remained unchanged when it was ported to the TurboGrafx-CD, though "Wonder Boy III" was dropped from the title in the US.
    • Wonder Boy in Monster Land had a Famicom version by Jaleco titled Saiyūki World. This version inspired its own sequel (Saiyūki World II), which was localized for the NES under the name of Whomp 'Em and had its Journey to the West motif replaced with a Native American one.
    • Wonder Boy III: The Dragon's Trap was remade as Dragon's Curse for the TurboGrafx-16. The PC Engine version of said game was curiously enough released under the name of Adventure Island, the same name that Hudson's own Takahashi-Meijin no Boukenjima series is known as outside Japan.
    • Wonder Boy in Monster World became The Dynastic Hero on the TurboGrafx-CD and had all the original characters replaced with bug people.
    • Outside the Wonder Boy series, Hudson Soft also ported the Sega/Westone arcade Beat 'em Up Riot City to the TurboGrafx-CD under the name of Riot Zone (or Crest of Wolf in Japan) with different player characters, while Blood Gear (a mecha-themed action game) was originally planned as a sequel to Aurail.
  • The Super Famicom game Xandra no Daibouken is a Prequel to the arcade game The Legend of Valkyrie, starring Xandra (the second player in the arcade game) as the titular main character. When the game was localized, since The Legend of Valkyrie would not be released outside Japan for another five years, the game (and main character) were renamed to Whirlo, and the ending screen text confirmed that the game's story continues in The Legend of Valkyrie was changed to just say "THE END".
  • Xenogears was apparently planned to be either Final Fantasy VII or Chrono Cross during its development, but it was retooled into an original title because it was too dark for either franchise.
  • Young Merlin developed out of a canceled SNES version of Fables & Fiends.
  • Zera: Myths Awaken was meant to be a Spyro the Dragon 4 styled in the same way as the original Insomniac trilogy. A cease-and-desist order put an end to that idea. It was reworked into its own concept starring a pink, female, semi-pedal Cartoon Creature named "Zera", but it's still clearly Spyro inspired.
  • The planned third installment of the Amiga hack-n-slash series Switchblade was completely retooled into the Sonic the Hedgehog-style platform game Zool. Much later, after Zool 3's second cancellation, shovelware developer Data Design Interactive picked up the pieces and used them to create Ninjabread Man.
    Western Animation 
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers was originally pitched as a Spin-Off of The Rescuers, but Jeffrey Katzenberg rejected it, as work on The Rescuers Down Under was beginning in the feature department.
  • Creature Commandos was initially conceived as part of the DC Extended Universe, following on from the events of The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker. However, shortly after series creator James Gunn finished the scripts, he was officially hired to take over DC Studios and subsequently did a Continuity Reboot, with Commandos instead being repurposed as the first entry in the new DC Universe. The show still treats The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker as canon in Broad Strokes, but doesn't dwell on their potentially problematic continuity ties to other works from the old universe.
  • When the Extreme Dinosaurs debuted as secondary protagonists in the final season of Street Sharks, they were alien law enforcement agents who underwent Bio-Augmentation in order to gain the strength needed to pursue a trio of raptor-like Space Pirates who had plundered their world, and came to Earth to start all over again earlier in the season. When the Dinos were spun off into their own series, all of the Street Sharks connections and lore were immediately dropped. This resulted in heroes and villains gaining a new shared origin as dinosaurs evolved to gain humanoid intellect and physiques by an alien Mad Scientist who decided prehistoric Earth was the best place to plunder potential Super Soldiers from, before their first conflict left the two rival teams of humanoid dinosaurs stranded in modern day Earth.
  • According to Lauren Faust, the Super Best Friends Forever shorts and her ensuing DC Super Hero Girls TV series were recycled from a rejected pitch she'd made starring Kitty Pryde and the New Mutants.
  • Inspector Gadget was the result of a collaboration between DiC Entertainment and TMS Entertainment, but it originally started life as a kid-friendly spin-off of Lupin III. It was to be called Lupin VIII, starring the descendants of the Lupin III cast and would feature a lot of futuristic gadgets. The pilot episode was nearly complete, but the estate of Maurice LeBlanc, creator of the original Arsène Lupin series which Lupin III was based on (without permission), decided to threaten legal action against the companies. This put a stop to Lupin VIII, but since both companies had already put money into production, they needed to make something. The result was Inspector Gadget, which ran with the idea of a show centered around gadgets, and switched the main character focus from the thief to the police inspector, with Gadget being something of an expy of Inspector Zenigata. Or, perhaps, Maxwell Smart.
  • King of the Hill was originally conceived as a Beavis and Butt-Head spinoff with Hank being Tom Anderson's son, but Fox couldn't get access to Beavis and Butthead characters.
  • Love, Death & Robots began development in 2008 as a sequel to Heavy Metal, but issues with the rights to the original movie meant that Netflix launched it as an unrelated TV series instead.
  • Random! Cartoons:
    • It is no coincidence that the show has a lot in common with fellow Nickelodeon series Oh Yeah! Cartoons (namely, both shows being created by Fred Seibert and consisting of anthologies for seven-minute animated shorts that are intended to serve as pilots for potential Nicktoons), as Random! Cartoons was originally produced as a fourth season for Oh Yeah! Cartoons before the execs chose to rebrand the series as its own thing.
    • The short "Hornswiggle" was initially planned to be a Sidney the Elephant short, but was changed to star a new character who was a rhinoceros rather than an elephant when it was discovered that Nickelodeon didn't have the rights to the Terrytoons characters at the time.
  • The Venture Bros. was originally conceived as a story for the independent comic book, Monkeysuit but was rewritten as a cartoon when Jackson Publick realised his notes were too extensive.
  • Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man: The series was originally announced to be set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a prequel focusing on Peter Parker before the events of Captain America: Civil War. However, it was eventually shifted to a series set on a different Earth in the wider MCU Multiverse, albeit with some of the actors still reprising their roles (such as Charlie Cox as Daredevil) and certain characters resembling their MCU counterparts. According👁 Image
    to executive producer Brad Winderbaum, this was because they found the original idea to be too limiting.

Alternative Title(s): Divorced Instalment

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