Adam Sandler Almost Starred In One Of Tom Cruise’s Best Movies

Some movies take circuitous routes to production. It all, as we like to say, starts on the page, and sometimes all you have on that page is a pitch — a basic idea centered on a killer hook. And that pitch can go through various permutations as different producers, writers, directors, and stars become attached and unattached. Take “Bad Boys” for instance. Long before Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer teamed up-and-coming filmmaker Michael Bay with the then unproven-at-the-box-office duo of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, the project was intended to be a broad two-hander comedy starring “Saturday Night Live” veterans Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz. Hard to imagine a four-film-and-counting franchise blossoming out of that.

Something in the same vein almost happened with Michael Mann’s “Collateral.” The moody Los Angeles thriller starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx is considered by many to be one of the director’s finest films (I think it’s brilliant until succumbs to convention at the outset of the third act), but it began life as a comedic New York City thriller starring a very different kind of funnyman as the cab driver. For that matter, the assassin was cut from a pretty different cloth as well.

In the early 2000s, Stuart Beattie’s screenplay was titled “The Lost Domino,” and it attracted the interest of Russell Crowe, who brought the script to his “The Insider” director. At the time, the cab driver was written to be Jewish, which, with Crowe at the peak of his mainstream popularity, seemed like a perfect fit for Adam Sandler. Crowe and Sandler in a big-budget action-comedy? The commercial potential was through the roof.

But what if, instead of Crowe, you paired Cruise with Sandler? This was on the table! Why didn’t it happen?

Michael Mann took Collateral in a different direction

In a 2014 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Mann was asked about this initial conception of “Collateral,” and why he changed the location (as well as the tone of the story). Per the filmmaker:

“[I]t took place in New York, the Jamie Foxx character was a badly-written Jewish cab driver, with the kind of stereotypes that can only come from someone writing that kind of a character who’s foreign, who’s not American, that doesn’t live in New York. It was Woody Allen playing the guy.”

At the time, I might’ve been intrigued to see Allen in the part just for the sheer unpredictability of it, but there’s no way he would’ve had the patience for shooting a big Hollywood action flick (then or, really, ever). Sandler is much more comfortable working on a large scale, and is respected throughout the industry for his professional approach to acting. He would’ve gotten along well with the hyper-focused likes of Mann, and probably would’ve hit it off with Cruise as well.

In any event, why did Mann take “Collateral” in a different direction? As he told THR:

“I didn’t like the screenplay, I didn’t like the dialogue, I didn’t like writing, but if you took the screenplay, and put it under an MRI, or an X-ray machine, and took a look at it, you realize this thing has beautiful, beautiful bones. It’s one of the most beautifully constructed stories I’d had ever run into. And it was gemlike, and it all took place in one night, and the roles each guy played in the other’s realization of himself, and it was just a beautiful piece of writing by Beattie. But I loved the story structure of it, so I rewrote it.”

Did he make the right call?

Foxx and Sandler is a genius-and-genius coin flip

As I said above, my primary issue with “Collateral” is that it veers off from being a wholly unpredictable tale of two men unexpectedly joined at the hip for one night in Los Angeles. However, it’s spectacularly inventive for two-thirds of its runtime as Mann keeps you wondering when Cruise’s Vincent will become the wolf and attempt to liquidate Foxx’s Max. Once that trigger gets pulled, “Collateral” turns into a familiar game of cat-and-mouse, one that feels like a technical exercise for Mann (who was experimenting with what he could get away with in low-light settings with digital film cameras).

It’s possible that “Collateral” was destined to disappoint regardless of how you played it. What’s the other viable option? Vincent doesn’t try to kill Max? Max has been a stealth hitman all along? They all get run over by a truck?

None of these ideas is more satisfying than the direction in which Mann went (though the truck finale has some fine touches to it), so I suppose we got the best possible version of “Collateral” possible (which is just fine for former /Film writer Joshua Meyer, who disagrees with me about effectiveness of the ending). Was it the best possible cast? I’d obviously like to peek in on that alternate universe where the Crowe-and-Sandler-in-NYC got made (as well as the Cruise-Sandler variation), but it’s hard to top Cruise and Foxx. I’m happy to settle here.