The 2002 Tom Cruise flick Minority Report was a mostly awesome little slice of sci-fi, but did you know we almost got it a decade earlier — as a sequel to Total Recall?

How it all started: Back before director Paul Verhoeven teamed up with Arnold Schwarzenegger for the campily awesome Total Recall in 1990, David Cronenberg was developing a much more serious take on Philip K. Dick’s short story.

Cronenberg’s version of the story would’ve starred William Hurt as a tortured hero and featured everything from mutant camels to a much weirder ending. But the studio realized his movie wasn’t the version they wanted to make, and it eventually landed on Verhoeven’s plate.

Fast-forward a few years: Once Total Recall became a major success, the studio wanted to get a sequel off the ground. So they went back to the Philip K. Dick well and acquired the rights to Minority Report, with plans to combine the two worlds and make Report a sequel to Recall.

Writers Gary Goldman (who polished the Recall script that was used) and Ronald D. Shusett (who worked on Cronenberg’s aborted version) teamed up to bring the sequel to life. The story would’ve followed Quaid (Schwarzenegger) as he becomes head of a group that uses mutants with precognitive abilities to predict future crimes.

But just as the project was gaining some steam, host studio Carolco Pictures went out of business and the project was shopped over to 20th Century Fox — which decided to drop the sequel aspects and make it a standalone. It headed into development hell for about a decade after that, until Steven Spielberg got hold of it and brought his pal Tom Cruise along to the Pre-Cog division.

Interesting note: Goldman and Shusett both received producer credits on Spielberg’s 2002 version of Minority Report, for their contributions along the way.

Be honest: Which version would you have preferred?

(Via Bad Ass Digest)

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