Stars Almost Cast in the Year’s Biggest Movies

Stars Almost Cast in the Year’s Biggest Movies -- Vulture

There's something so right about the pairing of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney in Gravity — for the first time, these appealing A-listers are finallystarring in a movie together — but if director Alfonso Cuarón had made the film the way he'd originally intended, Gravity would have had an entirely different cast. When Cuarón first got the space epic on its feet a few years ago at Warner Bros, he was courting Angelina Jolie and Robert Downey Jr. to star, and when Jolie fell out of talks, Cuarón saw nearly every actress in Hollywood for the lead role, including Natalie Portman, Marion Cotillard, Scarlett Johansson, and Blake Lively. You'd be hard-pressed to quibble with who Cuarón ended up with, but the idea of Gravity toplined by Jolie and Downey Jr. still offers a tantalizing what-if, and it got us thinking about the other big names who came thisclose to starring in the year's most notable movies.