Het is geen geheim dat de legendarisch TV serie Lost letterlijk on the fly is geschreven terwijl het gefilmd werd en ABC studio's hele andere beloftes kreeg. Ook Robert Kirkman die The Walking Dead comic en TV serie bedacht vertelde zijn investeerders een heel ander verhaal dan zijn ware bedoelingen. Dit en meer kan je in dit artikel lezen.

#3. The Walking Dead

When Robert Kirkman first pitched The Walking Dead to Image Comics, executives had mixed feelings about it. It's hard to blame them. People had only ever seen two-hour-long zombie movies that had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And now here was this guy pitching a zombie comic book that could potentially go on for decades. They didn't think a series about people wandering a zombie-infested wasteland was enough to keep readers coming back. It needed something ... more.

o Kirkman gave them more, presented in the form of a crazy-as-fuck plot twist: He told Image that, as the series progressed, it would slowly be revealed that the zombie apocalypse was caused by aliens who were using the zombies to weaken humanity's defenses. When mankind was appropriately dismantled, the alien hordes would descend upon Earth and take over, and the story would then be about the battle between humans and aliens.

It was all bullshit. Kirkman made it all up just so he could get the green light. It's like begging your parents to borrow the car so you can go to the school dance, then driving to a strip club.

One of the higher-ups at Image, Jim Valentino, later asked Kirkman about the alien plotline, not catching the hints to it after reading the first issue. Kirkman fessed up and told him that he never intended to put aliens in it. Here's Kirkman paraphrasing Valentino's reaction: "Well, that's good, because I was kind of reading the book, thinking, hey, he might ruin this by putting aliens in it."