The shark wasn't working. It was the mid-'00s, and Jan de Bont—director of such big-screen velocities as Speed and Twister—was showing off a small sculpture of carcharodon megalodon, the ancient shark that was to be the star of his next film, Meg.  Based on Steve Alten's 1997 book, about a deep-sea diver who encounters a prehistoric underwater beast, Meg  had been the subject of a million-dollar movie-rights deal before the book was even published.

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