The Original Version of 'Elf' Was Actually a Way Darker Christmas Movie

May 2024 · 7 minute read

The Big Picture

The expectations of a film by an unknown writer, a director who was more recognized as an actor, and a star who had never led a movie were understandably modest. In a true Christmas miracle, these unlikely players converged to create Elf, the holiday classic of its generation. The film, starring Will Ferrell as the lovable Buddy the Elf and directed by Jon Favreau, sits among the canon of Christmas classics including Miracle on 34th Street, It's a Wonderful Life, and Home Alone. It is indebted to the sentimentality of the season with just the right amount of postmodern spins on the beloved genre of Christmas movies. In an alternate timeline that retained the film's original darker script, the Elf that we all adore almost didn't come to fruition.

Elf
ComedyFamilyFantasyRomance

Raised as an oversized elf, Buddy travels from the North Pole to New York City to meet his biological father, Walter Hobbs, who doesn't know he exists and is in desperate need of some Christmas spirit.

Release Date October 9, 2003 Director Jon Favreau Cast Will Ferrell , James Caan , Bob Newhart , Edward Asner , Mary Steenburgen , Zooey Deschanel Runtime 97

'Elf' Was a Turning Point for Will Ferrell and Jon Favreau

Released in the holiday season of 2003, Elf is the story of a human raised by elves at the North Pole, Buddy (Ferrell), and it follows his expedition to New York City to bond with his biological father, Walter Hobbs (James Caan). The film became an turning point in the career arcs of Ferrell and Favreau. Although it wasn't his first movie after Saturday Night Live, this was Ferrell's first major film where he starred as the protagonist following his breakthrough on SNL. The series had been a reliable pipeline for comedy stars in film for decades, but the prospect of channeling Ferrell's manic energy into a family Christmas movie was met with skepticism.

Favreau, a symbol of 1990s indie cinema thanks to Swingers, directed one feature film before Elf, a loose spiritual successor to Swingers, Made. More prolific as a sturdy supporting actor in films like Rudy, Deep Impact, and The Replacements, his cachet for directing a project beyond an indie level was unproven. As history has made evident, Ferrell emerged as one of the most valuable movie stars of the 2000s, and Favreau remains one of the most influential filmmakers and producers in the business, including his later work in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and on the Star Wars franchise.

In the episode dedicated to Elf in the Netflix docu-series, The Movies That Made Us, David Berenbaum cited his screenplay as semi-autobiographical. Having lost his dad at a young age, Berenbaum framed his story as a story about a son searching for the affection of his father set against a holiday backdrop. This was a script, according to Berenbaum, that wore its heart on its sleeve. However, from Favreau's perspective, it still lacked the ideal grandeur of a festive holiday film.

The Original Script for 'Elf' Was Much Darker

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While being interviewed by Rolling Stone for the 10th anniversary of Elf, Favreau recounted that the initial script he read was a "much darker version of the film." Favreau, who was working with Judd Apatow, who shared the same manager as Will Ferrell at the time, was not enthusiastic about the offer to direct this project. Drawn to the promising venture of working with Ferrell in his first post-SNL creative bid, he wanted to configure the script to his sensibilities. The studio, New Line Cinema, was eying a rewrite — a task that the director accepted. While workshopping Elf, Favreau said, "If I made the world that he (Buddy) was from as though he grew up as an elf in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, one of those Rankin/Bass Christmas specials I grew up with, then everything fell into place tonally." Along with shifting the thematic style away from PG-13 to PG material, Buddy became an innocent figure, reminiscent of the pastiche characters of the timeless holiday television specials. The Netflix series revealed that Favreau also shared deep sentimentality with Christmas, having grown up watching the classic specials with his father and vowed to keep Elf a wholesome film that he could show his children.

Rankin/Bass, the production company behind Rudolph and Frosty the Snowman, was also an inspiration for David Berenbaum, as he said in The Movies That Made Us. Favreau wanted to push the homage one step further by rendering the visual aesthetic of Rankin/Bass and utilizing stop-motion effects for the creation of the North Pole. Favreau, who would accelerate the advancement of digital technology with his experiments with photorealism in his remakes of The Jungle Book and The Lion King, was hesitant to rely on CGI when directing Elf. His crew built real sets, models, and matte paintings. Favreau was so committed to paying homage to Rankin/Bass that executives at New Line grew concerned that they would face legal action relating to plagiarism, as many of the characters in the North Pole closely resemble the iconography of Rudolph and Frosty.

For Favreau, New York City was a place in dire need of Christmas spirit. "It was a city in mourning," Favreau described New York in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The director was fond of the idea of Buddy spreading his childlike wonder and innocence to an environment that needed a spiritual reclamation. "There was a tremendous amount of paranoia at that time in the city. They had to get to know us," he said. The integration of New York as a character, along with the city being a frequent setting in Christmas movies, is indebted to the classically wholesome nature of Favreau's vision for Elf.

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What 'Elf' Could Have Been Before Jon Favreau Shifted the Tone

Shifting Elf from a standard adult studio comedy into a sentimental family Christmas film was a cumbersome task for Favreau. The producers originally offered the directing job to Terry Zwigoff. He turned it down due to the script being "based on this contrived silliness." Instead, Zwigoff directed a Christmas movie in 2003 that stood tonally on the total opposite end of Elf, Bad Santa. During post-production, New Line attempted to re-cut the film as a darker and raunchier comedy — one that resembled Ferrell's other film in 2003, the R-rated, fraternity romp, Old School, which was released earlier that year. A definitive answer to the initial vision of Elf is mere conjecture, but these behind-the-scenes details indicate that the film was once representative of a typical R-rated comedy that was lucrative in the early 2000s, or a film with a contemporaneous identity in the mold of the various star vehicles for Saturday Night Live cast members. A film riffing on the fish-out-of-water concept with an elf bumbling his way through Manhattan feels like something akin to a '90s SNL project.

Jon Favreau's distinct vision for Elf was perhaps an unpopular direction to take at the time of production, but it is one that audiences are certainly thankful for. He aspired to make Elf a timeless classic and not a disposable comedy about a boisterous elf haphazardly interacting with humans. Culture in the early 2000s favored irony over unabashed sentimentality. Even though Elf is set in a contemporary environment, the wholesome, if not saccharine, tone of the film vaults it into a realm of timelessness. Favreau's film, which taps into the iconography of Rankin/Bass, pays tribute to our collective ideas of Christmas spirit, and as a result, leaves an indelible holiday classic for future generations to pass on to their children.

Elf is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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