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This will go into a few spoilers, so if you haven’t seen Jonah Hex… well, I don’t know why you’d want to.

Jonah Hex was the creation of John Albano and Tony DeZuniga, appearing in DC’s All-Star Western and Weird Western Tales in the early 1970s. It wasn’t till 1977 that he got his own comic book series. With DC Comics tied to Warner Bros, a film adaptation was bound to happen.

William Farmer wrote a draft for Jonah Hex back in 1997. His script had a much more supernatural tone to it (a werewolf and a dead army?) and bears little resemblance to the eventual film, for which he has a story credit. Somewhere along the way Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor must have got a hold of it and done a complete rewrite, one that would have resulted in a hard R-rated film. Neveldine had said that Warner Bros loved their script. Looking to also direct the film, they now needed their actors.
In October 2008, when Josh Brolin first read their script for Jonah Hex, he thought it was awful. As an over-the-top action movie, he was not too keen on the incessant swearing, nudity, face melting, zombies and exploding eyeball violence. However, he was interested, so long as changes could be made. A month later Neveldine and Taylor left the film over the usual “creative differences.” It’s believed that they were reluctant to make script changes, yet Warner was desperate to keep Brolin attached. Once he was onboard, Brolin appeared to have a lot of control over the film.

In January 2009, Brolin and Warners decided on director Jimmy Hayward, who had previously only directed Horton Hears a Who!. Brolin revealed that Hayward had somehow managed to email him, listing all the things he loved about Jonah Hex, for it turned out that he actually happened to be a fan of the comics. Before shooting began, Hayward removed everything that was so over the top in Neveldine and Taylor’s script, even changing the ending. A touch of their crass wit survives, but at the behest of Brolin most of it was cut with the intention of releasing Jonah Hex as a PG-13 film.

The film actually managed to acquire quite an eclectic cast. Hayward cited how Brolin was “leading the film… and brought in his friends.” He had called in John Malkovich to play Quentin Turnbull, and after being wowed by Michael Fassbender in Hunger, Brolin asked him to play Turnbull’s right hand man, Burke. Then came the casting of Megan Fox as Hex’s girlfriend/prostitute Lilah. Brolin apparently saw Fox to be full of sorrow during a TV interview and thought that could be useful for the portrayal of Lilah
Principal photography took place a few months later from April to July. However, in December 2009 came news that the film would undergo ten days of reshoots the following month. It was initially reported that Warners brought in I Am Legend director Francis Lawrence to direct the additional scenes, only it was then made clear that his involvement was as a consultant. While reshoots are nothing new, and Warners may have meant well by having Lawrence there, it doesn’t really strike confidence that Hayward has to shoot extra scenes while being guided and overseen by another director.

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