Phantom Menace's First Draft: The Better Movie You Never Knew Existed
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace remains highly contentious to this day, with opinions ranging from "absolute trash", to "good ideas, flawed execution", to "good, but never could live up to its hype", and so on.
Consequently, most aspects of the movie and the history of its making were scrutinized and nit-picked by the fandom, to provide ammunition for the debates surrounding it. In particular, there is a strong argument that the movie's first draft (1999 CD-ROM The Episode I Insider's Guide included a copy of the final script with notes about differences from that first rough draft) would have been a much superior version.
Some parts of this argument are pretty much indisputable.
Jar-Jar Binks speaking perfect English and generally being less wacky no doubt would have made him a much less hated (if less meme-worthy) character.
The Chosen One prophecy, which at best was an example of a prophecy so open to interpretation that it misled people in-setting and caused vitriolic debates within the fandom, was not mentioned in the first draft.
Watto told Anakin to "come back someday and visit your Mom" as the latter was leaving, setting up Schmi's eventual fate in Episode II and placing the blame for it more clearly on Anakin and Anakin's infatuation with his new life of high adventure.
Darth Maul got some more lines, making him a relatively developed character, instead of little more than Sidious' trained attack dog.
Other parts of the first draft are more dubious. Obi-Wan is much older in the draft, and takes over the role of Qui-Gon, who is nearly absent from the story. The final version of the script explains how Obi-Wan can be a good person but a bad mentor, doomed to fail his pupil, by forcing him to take up the mentor role when he was not even wholly ready to be a Jedi Knight, except in sheer fighting skills, much less to teach a troubled kid.
The initial draft instead uses hints of an upcoming love triangle between Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme as an explanation of Obi-Wan's failure. The tragedy of the only proper father figure Anakin ever knew (Qui-Gon) getting killed within a few days of their meeting is also absent in the draft version.
And some parts, like Anakin having much stronger natural Force abilities, down to prophetic visions, or the Jedi Council being less dogmatic about training him, could have turned out great or not so great, depending on execution.
But overall, the version of TPM based on the draft probably would have been received considerably better, if only for not inflicting the final version of Jar-Jar on the audience.