The 2008 superhero comedy Hancock spent 12 years in development hell before director Peter Berg was finally able to transform Vy Vincent Ngo’s 1996 spec script—originally entitled Tonight, He Comes—into something that wasn’t completely unfilmable. A quick glance at the drafts floating around out there offers plenty of clues as to why it took so long for the idea to make it to the big screen. The titular alcoholic superhero portrayed by Will Smith in the movie caused his fair share of problems in the final cut of the film, but his scripted counterpart is downright monstrous in comparison. The story also ends on an insanely dark note.
How dark? For starters, Hancock kidnaps his friend Ray’s wife, Mary (Charlize Theron’s character), in the final act after she rejects his advances. Once he gets her alone, he decides that he needs “a special kind of healing,” according to the script, and corners her as she pleads with him to leave her alone. From there, Hancock grabs Mary, “running his hand down her back and between her buttocks.”
He continues making his move until she reaches her breaking point and slaps him across the face.
The First Draft of ‘Hancock’ Was Way More Disturbing Than the Movie We Got
Hancock then takes his anger out on the police surrounding the building he’s holding Mary captive in, first by tearing a helicopter in half, which proceeds to crash into a cluster of cops below, effectively severing their heads. Before long, the entire police department is wiped out, and all that’s left is a “panorama of bedlam, overturned vehicles, and mangled bodies.” Hancock nearly gets Mary killed in the process, and after thinking she’s dead, he picks up a gun and fires it at his temple. The bullet bounces off his head, and our “hero” is last seen sobbing into his hands.
Of course, the craziness got dialed back significantly by the time Hancock landed in theaters, but there was still some wild stuff that ended up getting filmed. In one deleted scene, Hancock brings a girl to his trailer to have sex and tries to warn her to get out of the way when it’s time for him to ejaculate. The reason for this, we soon find out, is that his orgasms are so powerful that they literally shoot holes through the roof of his trailer.
You can check out the sequence in question below, should you be so inclined.
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