Archived Discussion Main / ExecutiveVeto

This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.

• The Incredible Hulk movie was going to have Banner contemplate suicide and find the frozen body of Captain America as inspiration, but the ending was changed, removing an important cameo for future movies.
• X-Men 2 was going to use the plot of God Loves, Man Kills, but was vetoed in favor of focusing on Wolverine.
• Movies like Monkeybone and Ultraviolet may have turned out better if the producer didn't veto the director's cut in favor of a producer's cut. When the director disowns his own movie after the editing stage, this may be a sign.
• The comic Runaways was going to have Sister Grimm adopt her persona as a way to rebel against her overly Christian parents, this was nixed by Marvel, but later implied in dialog
• Chris Claremont couldn't use the Shadow King in X-Treme X-Men, so he came up with Bogan to take his place. Many of his story proposals have been nixed that may have filled in a lot of continuity gaps.

• Hasbro let the writers of Transformers: Beast Wars kill off Optimus Primal at the end of the first season, but forced them to bring him back from the dead shortly after the start of the second.
  • This troper is fairly certain that resurrecting Optimus Primal was always the writers' intention. His death was a Shout-Out to Optimus Prime's death ("Oh, you Optimuses do love to sacrifice yourselves..."), and as with Optimus Prime, his resurrection was inevitable. They merely wanted a sufficiently dramatic cliffhanger and way of giving Optimus a new body.
  • And his comeback was a very impressive Big Damn Heroes moment.
• R.A. Salvatore realized, sometime before the seventh Drizzt novel was completed, that there was little purpose in Wulfgar's existence. He wasn't the main character; he was a sidekick. But Drizzt, originally planned as the sidekick, already had four sidekicks, and any role Wulfgar could have filled was already quite thoroughly filled by either the sidekicks or Drizzt himself. He decided to kill Wulfgar... But TSR (or Wizards Of The Coast, who may have owned TSR by that point) by that point was having none of it. They explained to Bob that if he didn't find a way to bring Wulfgar back, they'd have someone else do it. Deciding that he could probably do it as well as anyone, he actually figured out a cosmologically-consistent way to resurrect him... And do it in a way that made him a much more interesting character. He was, however, recently written out of the Drizzt books; Wizards apparently realized that the cash cow was Drizzt, not Wulfgar.
  • Fortunately, Death Is Cheap in Dungeons And Dragons based worlds like that of the Drizzt novels; there are plenty of well-established ways to bring people Back from the Dead.
    • It may be a little late, what with the 4th edition Time Skip and all.
    • At least this time Wulfgar was just Put on a Bus, rather than killed.
• Literary example (Star Wars): after learning that the writers of the New Jedi Order series were intending to take Anakin Solo roughly the same route as his grandfather and namesake from the films, George Lucas thought readers would be too dumb to realize that Anakin Skywalker and Anakin Solo weren't the same person and disallowed it. This resulted in Anakin swapping positions with his brother Jacen (and dying instead of him). There are also other restrictions that Star Wars writers have to abide; for example, Wookiees and Hutts are no longer allowed to become Jedi, although there are a few of them already, introduced before this restriction took place.
  • The New Jedi Order authors also wanted to kill off Luke (he had become so powerful it was hard to challenge him) and make the Yuuzhan Vong Dark Side Force users; both of these were also vetoed by Lucas.
    • Or they could have just abided by Timothy Zahn's writings and have Luke choose to limit his own powers (explained as using too much raw power drowning out the 'guidance' aspect of the Force). But no, that would be too easy...
  • There was also, for a few years, a ban on interspecies relationships in the Expanded Universe...which was odd, given how thoroughly implied it is that, just for an example, Twi'lek women are much desired by sentient hermaphroditic slugs, let alone male humanoids of other species. (It is explained that Jabba is considered rather deviant in "his" taste for watching humanoid females dancing, but interspecies relationships are heavily implied, particularly in the prequels.)
    • Put that together with the "No Wookies or Hutts as Jedis" and the Star Wars universe starts to look REALLY racist. Or...whatever the alien equivalent is (Spacist?)
• Marvel Comics stopped J Michael Straczynski from revealing that Gwen Stacy had had Peter's kids, which then speed-grew into adulthood; they thought having adult children would make him look "too old" (something that Joe Quesada has been obsessed with avoiding, very much to the detriment of the comic). Instead, he made Norman Osborn the father — a much odder person for Gwen to have sex with.
  • This may actually be a positive example of the Executive Veto. What this troper finds baffling is that Straczynski honestly thought Marvel would let him depict the company's most marketable character as having had premarital sex, and having two children out of wedlock. Yeah, like that'll do wonders for movie ticket sales in America. The fact that Straczynski thought this plotline was a good idea at all, regardless of whether Norman or Peter was the father, leaves this troper wondering what the hell JMS was smoking.
    • It's already cannonical that MJ and Pete had pre-marital sex so it would hardly be that shocking. It's certainly less potentiall offensive than a young girl having kids with a guy who, in addition to being a psychotic murderer, abusive parent and corrupt businessmen is also old enough to be her father AND a super villain.
  • Given the bizarre storylines and decisions of late, one wonders if it's just something potent in the water there at Marvel that's hitting everybody.
• Chiaki J. Konaka mentioned on his website that the original idea for Jeri of Digimon Tamers was that her dad was a Yakuza boss working in prostitution. Unsurprisingly the producers nuked that one from orbit.
  • What you mean in a show about kids fighting evil with adorable monster companions the network didn't want prositutution and organised crime elements? This is censorship gone mad.
    • Given what Tamers did do, it seems a bit surprising.