10 Movies That Were Drastically Affected By 9/11

The fallout from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was felt around the whole world. After the Twin Towers fell, Hollywood’s movie studios took a look at their slates and realised they had work to do if they wanted to avoid upsetting audiences with evocative imagery and terrorist themes. These are 10 movies that were directly affected by September 11th…

‘Zoolander’

'Zoolander 2’ recently came out in cinemas, despite the fact the first movie flopped upon release. The 2001 comedy about an empty-headed male model brainwashed to assassinate the Prime Minister of Malaysia is well loved and has its fans, but it was cursed to be released just two weeks after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and people didn’t feel much like laughing. Stiller even had to digitally remove any backgrounds that contained the Twin Towers in the skyline at the last minute.

'Spider-Man’

Many movies were affected by the loss of the Twin Towers from the New York skyline, but few were affected quite so directly as Sam Raimi’s 'Spider-Man’. The first trailer for Spidey’s movie debut saw the wall-crawler trap a helicopter between a giant web he whipped up between Tower 1 and Tower 2 of the World Trade Center (see above); after the events of 9/11, the trailer was removed from circulation and the scene had to be scrapped.

'True Lies 2’
You might be thinking, 'Hang on, there’s no such movie as 'True Lies 2’!’ and you’d be absolutely right: turns out you can blame Al-Qaeda for that. James Cameron abandoned plans for a sequel to his 1994 action comedy after September 11th 2001, because in a post-9/11 world - and this is a direct quote - “terrorism wasn’t funny any more”. A touch insensitive to victims of previous terrorist attacks, possibly, but admittedly the 'global destruction played for yuks’ shtick of the first movie does indeed feel like it’s from a bygone age of cinema.

'Glitter’
Mariah Carey fancied herself a movie star in 2001, but Mohamed Atta and friends had other plans. Like 'Zoolander’, Carey’s vanity project 'Glitter’ - a highly original movie about a poor girl just trying to make it in the big city - crashed and burned in a post-9/11 release date, audiences unswayed by the prospect of spending several hours in an enclosed room with Mariah. The film was later known as “the G word” in Camp Carey but Mariah has since commented on the flop, calling it “a kitsch moment in history… in the history of my life.” Thanks for clarifying that you didn’t consider it to be actual history, Mariah.

'Men In Black II’
The entire finale of Barry Sonnenfeld’s 'Men In Black’ sequel had to be radically changed. A scene in which a Will Smith’s Agent J and Tommy Lee Jones’ Agent K battled aliens atop the World Trade Center had already been filmed, but producers rightly realised this wasn’t exactly how audiences would want to remember the iconic buildings, so Sonnenfeld and his cast were told to shoot a brand new emergency ending. 'Men In Black 3’ featured a shot of the under-construction Freedom Tower in 2012 as a nod.

'Lilo and Stitch’

How could a Disney movie possibly be affected by the terrorist attacks of September 11th? The Mouse House are sensitive to such issues, so when the movie’s original cut featured a scene in which Stitch and friends hijacked a Boeing 747 jet and flew it through Honolulu city centre, swerving around buildings, they knew it had to go. The plane was replaced with a spaceship and the scene was relocated to the mountains. Another deleted scene also saw a gag about tsunami warnings, just a few years before the tragic 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. The editor on this movie deserves a medal.

'The Bourne Identity’
Here’s a movie that was altered not to avoid connections with 9/11 but to invite them. The movie had originally been scheduled to release the week before September 11th but reshoots meant it was pushed back to 2002. In the meantime, the towers fell, so Doug Liman and the movie’s producers went back and forth on whether or not the movie should scale up or tone down the themes of terrorism and suspicious government activity - because it’d feel odd if the movie didn’t at least feel in step with current events. In the end, they compromised and filmed alternate opening and ending scenes, ditching the first sequence in Mykonos to focus on the hard open.

'Collateral Damage’
Arnie’s action career was winding down in 2001 but 'Collateral Damage’ is the movie that may have killed it. Originally scheduled for release on October 5th 2001, Warner Bros pulled it from the schedules for extensive retooling after the attacks - very wise given the advertising featured the word “BOMBING” prominently along with the tagline “What would you do if you lost everything?” A scene featuring Sofia Vergara as a Colombian airplane hijacker was cut, and all unpatriotic material was removed from the movie, which was eventually released to underwhelmed audiences in February 2002.

'Nosebleed’
Jackie Chan was due to star in an action movie set in and filmed on the World Trade Center before Al-Qaeda brought it down. The New Line movie, which saw Chan play a New York window washer who learns of a terrorist plot to bring the towers down, was scrapped for obvious reasons following the events of September 11th. 'Die Hard 2’ filmmaker Renny Harlin had been attached to direct. A rumour circulated shortly after the attacks that Chan had been due to film on the North Tower on the morning of September 11th, although this was later proven to have been false.

'The Incredibles’
Again, it seems strange that an animated movie should feature any echoes of a terrorist attack, intentional or otherwise, but Pixar scrapped a scene where an off-duty Mr Incredible took out his frustrations on an abandoned warehouse. The reason? Said building partially collapses, but onto a neighbouring building, which was enough to make Pixar’s producers get nervy about comparisons to Building 7, even three years after it came down. The scene was replaced and Mr Incredible’s Hulk routine was toned down.

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