Universal Pictures objected to this climax, feeling that it was too negative and depressing in tone, and so a more positive and optimistic ending was filmed and ultimately incorporated into the theatrical cut. Cast Bruce Campbell as Ashley "Ash" J. Williams and "Evil Ash" Embeth Davidtz as Sheila Marcus Gilbert as Lord Arthur Ian Abercrombie as Wise Man Richard Grove as Duke Henry the Red Timothy Patrick Quill as Blacksmith Michael Earl Reid as Gold Tooth Bridget Fonda as Linda Bill Moseley as Deadite captain Patricia Tallman as Possessed witch Ted Raimi as Cowardly warrior/Second supportive villager/Anthony, the S-Mart clerk/Skeleton voices Angela Featherstone as S-Mart store girl (uncredited) Production Development Plans to make a third Evil Dead film had been circulating for a number of years, even prior to the production of Darkman. Evil Dead II made enough money internationally that Dino De Laurentiis was willing to finance a sequel. Director and script writer Sam Raimi drew from a variety of sources, including literature with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, The Three Stooges, and Conan the Barbarian. Evil Dead II, according to Bruce Campbell, "was originally designed to go back into the past to 1300, but we couldn't muster it at the time, so we decided to make an interim version, not knowing if the 1300 story would ever get made". Promotional drawings were created and published in Variety during the casting process before the budget was deemed too little for the plot. The working title for the project was Medieval Dead, before it was later known as Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness. The title "Army of Darkness" came from an idea by Irvin Shapiro, during the production of Evil Dead II. Writing Initially, Raimi invited Scott Spiegel to co-write Army of Darkness because he had done a good job on Evil Dead II, but he was busy on rewrites for the Clint Eastwood film The Rookie. After the good experience of writing the screenplay for a film called Easy Wheels, Sam and his brother Ivan decided to co-write the film together. They worked on the script throughout the pre-production and production of Darkman. After filming Darkman, they took the script out and worked on it in more detail. Raimi says that Ivan "has a good sense of character" and