Salt

Phillip Noyce’s 2010 film started as Kurt Wimmer’s script for a male lead, The Far-Reaching Philosophy of Edwin A. Salt; Columbia bought the shortened version in January 2007. Tom Cruise stayed attached over a year, then walked: the part was too close to his own Ethan Hunt. Amy Pascal put Angelina Jolie in front of Noyce, and Brian Helgeland renamed the character Evelyn Salt. The change Jolie pushed for was in the third act. As written, the hero rescued a wife and child; Jolie said she did not believe a mother would leave her child that way, so Wimmer cut the thread and swapped a Fort Knox sequence for an infiltration of the White House. That is why no family needs rescuing anywhere in the film. Shooting ran through spring 2009 in New York and Washington, Noyce avoiding postcard views of the capital. Three cuts appeared in December 2010: theatrical, director’s and extended. In the director’s cut the husband drowns in front of her rather than being shot at once. Wimmer wrote a sequel draft, Jolie turned it down in early 2012, and no follow-up came. A good fit if you can end on a setup for a sequel that never arrived. Not for anyone who wants the question of who she is closed off cleanly at the end.