This draft, dated January 26, 2002, is an early record of the project's long development history at Twentieth Century Fox. While the film was eventually released in 2012, this version was written a full decade prior during a well-documented "development hell" period. It features credits for multiple writers—including Jordan Moffet, Don Rhymer, and the writing team of Richard Eid & Gavin Harris—who worked on the story long before the final theatrical version was produced.

The script is a primary document of a project that famously stuck around Hollywood for years; the original spec was sold in 1998, yet this 2002 iteration still predates the final McG-directed film by ten years. This specific January 2002 version is not commonly found in standard online script databases, making it a distinct record of the film’s early creative evolution and the various hands that shaped the story before it became a starring vehicle for Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, and Tom Hardy.