When you create something, no matter what it is, it’s natural to feel possessive of that thing. If it was something you thought up and brought to life, it’s literally yours. If that thing ends up in someone else’s hands, for whatever reason, it’s hard to watch that person make changes. Even the best-intentioned creator can fall victim to resentment or outright anger if their thing gets altered and adapted in a way they never intended. Once in a while they even hate what their work became.
10. Roald Dahl Hated the Willy Wonka Movie
Roald Dahl was what people in modern times might call “problematic.” The writer, most famous for his work Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, was a known anti-Semite, given to racial stereotypes, and an adulterer. But he wrote some colorful prose, and that’s how most people remember him.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has been adapted to film more than once now but the most famous version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, dates back to 1971 and Dahl was alive to see it happen.
Dahl had a laundry list of issues with the movie adaptation, starting with the change of name. He also notoriously disliked Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka, despite most modern audiences finding it to be a perfect performance. Dahl hated Charlie in the movie, he hated the film’s score, and he hated pretty much all the changes to the original test.
9. Legendary Animator Chuck Jones Hated Space Jam
For a certain group of people, the 1996 movie Space Jam is considered a classic. The melding of real life and classic Warner Brothers animation captured a lot of imaginations even if it wasn’t a critical favorite. It also wasn’t a favorite of animation icon Chuck Jones.
Jones was one of the founders of Warner’s cartoon empire and he along with a team of others, created Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and all the rest. He wrote and directed many of those classic cartoons over his 30 years working with Warner from 1933 to the 1960s.
Jones was once asked his opinion of Space Jam, something he’d never talked about publicly before, and his answer was unequivocal. “I thought it was terrible,” was the direct quote attributed to him. He felt the story was completely wrong and pointed out that Porky Pig would never claim to have wet himself.
Jones also stated that Bugs Bunny would have never needed help to win a basketball game against aliens, either from other Looney Tunes or from Michal Jordan. And he would have ended it in under seven minutes.
8. Charles Schulz Hated the Name Peanuts
You may not think of the Peanuts franchise as a big deal these days, but it is. Snoopy, Charlie Brown and the gang have been around for decades and they have made a lasting cultural impact. The estimated worth of the property is over $17 billion. That’ll buy more than a few peanuts.
The first Peanuts cartoon ran all the way back in 1950 but the creator, Charles Schulz, never planned it to be known as such. He didn’t pick the name Peanuts, had no input in using the name, and notoriously hated it.
Schulz named his comic strip Li’l Folks. He ran an older strip by that name and wanted to keep it. He thought it had some dignity which was his intention. The word “peanuts” implied something that lacked worth in his mind, and it’s true that we use the term in that way.
There already was a comic called Li’l Abner when the Peanuts debuted, and in the ‘30s there had been a different strip called Little Folks. Not wanting to deal with potential legal issues, a newspaper editor just picked the name Peanuts and ran with it before the first of Schulz’ strips was ever published.
Schulz hated the name, but they refused to change it, so Schulz simply rolled with it, writing and drawing thousands of them under that name for the rest of his life.
7. TMNT Co-Creator Peter Laird Hated the 5th Turtle, Venus de Milo
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have been a part of pop culture for over 30 years now. Much of that time has been spent as a goofy children’s cartoon, even though the franchise was born from a violent comic book parody of the superhero comic universe.
Along the various iterations and evolutions of the characters, several feature films have been made, various cartoon series’, video games and more. And somewhere along the way they even introduced another turtle.
In the late ’90s, one of the TV series introduced a fifth turtle, a female character named Venus de Milo. The character was short-lived, and no one was more relieved than Ninja Turtles co-creator Peter Laird who hated Venus.
Laird did not have creative control of the characters or for most of what came from the turtles, so he could only offer opinions. His opinion on Venus was that having a female turtle was “creatively bankrupt.” He especially hated the idea that they could introduce a new turtle that just happened to have been created along with the other four, we just never saw it before.
When Laird worked on Turtle properties after the creation of Venus, no one could speak of her. It was actually a rule on set and director Kevin Munroe said in an interview once that they could not even joke about her around Laird; he hated the character just that much.
6. The Live Action Dragonball Movie Was So Bad It Forced the Creator Out of Retirement
Critics and fans alike really hated Dragonball: Evolution, the live action movie based on popular anime Dragonball Z. That hate was felt especially strongly by original series creator Akira Toriyama who had stopped his series years earlier. After seeing the live action movie he was inspired to return to the franchise and start writing new Dragonball content because it made him so angry.
The terrible film is therefore seen as a good thing because it saved the franchise, which otherwise might have ended years earlier. The terrible live action film forced new content and gave fans what they really wanted.
5. Paul Newman Paid for Ads to Keep People Away From One of His Movies
Some artists let their hate end with emotion. They’ll answer interview questions about how they didn’t like this or that and we get an amusing story about it. Not so for Paul Newman. The man was a go-getter and when it came to things he hated; he put in the effort to make them go away.
In 1954, Newman made his acting debut in a movie called The Silver Chalice. In later years he referred to it as the worst movie made in the entirety of the 1950s. He disliked it so much he went out of his way to get people to not watch it which arguably backfired poorly on him.
In 1963, the movie was going to be played on TV and Newman paid $1,200 to place ads in the local paper telling people to not watch it. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $12,000. The ads read “Paul Newman apologizes every night this week.” He also apparently screened the move at his home once for friends, but he handed out pots and wooden spoons so people could make noise to drown it out. It’s safe to say his dislike was a little tongue in cheek, but he really was unhappy with the movie.
4. Don Henley Hates People Covering His Music
Don Henley, frontman of the Eagles, may not be well known to the younger generation but his influence certainly is. He’s behind some of the biggest songs in rock, and has been sampled by several more current artists including Frank Ocean. And it was Frank Ocean in particular Henley had a problem with.
Ocean’s mixtape track American Wedding sampled the Eagles hit Hotel California and Henley threatened to sue. He compared Ocean and artists like him to vandals who go into a museum to paint mustaches on other people’s art.
Henley’s threats aren’t idle, either. He forced Okkervil River to take down a cover, one they had posted for free, of his track The End of Innocence.
3. William Friedkin Hated The Exorcist Sequel
Legendary Exorcist director William Friedkin passed away in 2023 and he left behind a legacy of memorable films and equally memorable opinions. Friedkin never minced words and would often tell interviews about how much he disliked certain actors and films. He was also vocal about his dislike for the sequels to The Exorcist.
The first sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic, featured original actress Linda Blair, but it was received poorly by both audiences and critics for being an all around awful movie. Friedkin was quoted as calling the movie “an abomination” and an “f-ing disgrace.”
He said he thought the movie was the equivalent of someone taking a novel by Dickens and then turning it into a porno musical, which is a colorful critique if nothing else. It wasn’t just the first sequel, either. In 2020, when rumors of a new Exorcist were circulating, he took to Twitter to say there wasn’t “enough money or motivation in the world” to get him to go back to the franchise.
2. Writer Michael Ende Hated What They Did to The Neverending Story
Michael Ende wrote The Neverending Story in 1979. It became the basis for one of the most popular fantasy films of the ‘80s, and a movie that is still beloved today. Beloved by many but definitely not Ende.
Ende was clearly very attached to his work and agreed to a deal with a filmmaker after working out a vision for the movie. He was even promised a high level of control over casting and production.
Things fell apart for Ende soon after the deal began. The movie rights were sold to someone else. One day he received a message asking if he liked the new script, something he had never even heard about.
The new script was something Ende hated but the production company threatened to sue him if he hampered production. He was left with little recourse. He tried to sue the filmmakers and felt they had changed the entire story in their new version. He demanded they either stop making the movie or change the name. Neither thing happened, so he had his own name removed from the credits.
1. Clive Barker Disowned Hellraiser: Revelations in No Uncertain Terms
Hellraiser has been one of the most enduring horror movie franchises, right up there with Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street. The first film, written and directed by author Clive Barker, was based on his own short story The Hellbound Heart and introduced the character of Pinhead to audiences, though Barker never called him Pinhead in his own work.
After part one, the movies were no longer in Barker’s hands, and the franchise grew. It also grew notoriously bad. Towards the end of the franchise’s run with the original actor playing Pinhead, the sequels were heavily derided.
It became common knowledge that the studio was producing terrible movies on purpose because they needed to make movies to legally retain the rights. If they didn’t make a movie within so many years of the previous film, the rights would switch to someone else.
The strategy of churning out films resulted in several notoriously bad movies. The awfulness really seemed to culminate with 2011’s Hellraiser: Revelations, which was allegedly filmed in only a matter of weeks and didn’t include Pinhead actor Doug Bradley at all.
Clive Barker made a very brief statement about the movie on his Twitter account after it was advertised as having come from the mind of Clive Barker. Barker said, and this is a direct albeit censored quote, “I have NOTHING to do with the f***** thing. If they claim it’s from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.”