A lot can happen in two years. By summer 2010, the U.S. will be about eighteen months into a new presidential term. Sixty generations of overcrowded laboratory fruit flies will have come and gone. An elephant who gets knocked up today will be taking her baby on its first migration. Two years is a long time, in other words, but Sony Pictures is planning way ahead by revealing its Green Hornet website, complete with a brand new, shiny green logo. (Hilariously, the new website reminds us that "This film is not yet rated." No! Really? "This film is not yet in existence," is more like it.) Why now? Why so early? Maybe Sony doesn't realize it could shoot itself in the foot with two solid years of pre-release hype. Maybe Sony is trying to get the movie-going public used to the idea of its unconventional action movie star. Or maybe an intern just had some free time on his hands and wanted to play around with Photoshop.

The last filmmaker you'd associate with an Elizabethan-era drama exploring the identity of the "real" author behind the work of William Shakespeare would be Roland Emmerich, the director of such spectacle-driven, explosion-filled entertainments as Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012. And yet, there's Emmerich's name in the credits for the already-controversial Anonymous, which opens in theaters on Friday. It's a daunting departure for Emmerich, but he's far from the first director that's attempted to upend his image by accepting an assignment that seems well outside of his comfort zone. Here are some of the other biggest directorial change-ups from within the past decade or so.