The Avengers at 25: The screenwriter explains what went wrong with the notorious flop

https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/movies/the-avengers-screenwriter-studio-massacred-original-vision-140834246.html

It was all meant to be so different.

When 1998's The Avengers — the big screen adaptation of the 1960s British spy caper TV series, not its Marvel namesake — was released 25 years ago it was greeted with the kind of reception that suggested the filmmakers had murdered the critics’ firstborn.

But the film that had been released, starring Ralph Fiennes, Uma Thurman and Sean Connery, was much different to the one originally envisaged by screenwriter Don Macpherson.

After disastrous tests, the film was butchered by a panicky studio, which took nearly an hour of footage out of the original. The finished movie was massacred by critics (Radio Times called it a "stunningly designed blockbuster that's stunningly awful in every other department"), and by audiences (it received a CinemaScore rating of D), and was subsequently nominated for nine Golden Raspberry awards, winning one for Worst Remake.

It scraped in $54.7m at the global box office against a $60m budget, making it a flop in every sense of the word.

We talked to Macpherson, about his original, much darker, vision for the film, what went so wrong and the tantalising possibility of a director’s cut.