9 Disappointing Films With Great Deleted Scenes

It's not irregular for movies to excise material during the editing process. Most of the time it's just a case of trimming the fat, removing scenes or whole subplots that either hinder the film or add little to the overall product. More often than not, deleted scenes are pieces of trivia, and not anything that would be truly missed. On occasion, however, deleted scenes have revealed themselves to be exciting in their own right - and sometimes better than anything in the final film. Think the Michael Jai White sword fight in Kill Bill Vol. 2, or the original 'return to Krypton' opening of Superman Returns. These are scenes that could have added something extra to questionable films, films which could have used the added quality. This list, however, is for the scenes we never got to see, cut out of disappointing films that could have used every bit of help they could get. In some cases, these scenes were removed for logistical reasons; in others, they were taken out as a result of meddling from the studio. Whatever the case, they surely would have made the films in question more enjoyable. So, without further ado, here are 7 scenes from disappointing movies that we'll likely never see, but which sound incredible all the same. 9) Prometheus Ever wondered why Ridley Scott hired Guy Pearce, a man in his 40s, to play Prometheus’s eccentric 99-year-old billionaire Peter Weyland? Watching the final film, it hardly makes sense that Scott would want an actor to play a character twice his age, thus forcing him into five hours of make-up each day to look convincingly old, when an actual old person would have sufficed. Well, turns out Pearce got the role because he was also originally supposed to star in the film – sans prosthetics – as a young version of the character. One flashback scene involving the younger Sir Peter was set on a terraformed Mars, home to one of Weyland’s off-world offices. Other scenes, meanwhile, were set in the movie’s present, and found android David interacting with the hyper-sleeping Weyland in his dreams, in which Weyland resided in his idealized younger state, living on a yacht surrounded by beautiful women. Alas, these moments were cut. Could they have saved Prometheus from being a Lindelof-tainted mess? Probably not, but they would have been cool to see nonetheless. 8) Gangster Squad Despite all it had going for it, there was hardly anything fun about Ruben Fleischer's Gangster Squad. Whether it was Dion Beebe's ghastly cinematography, which lacquered everything in a cartoonish sheen, Sean Penn's OTT villainy, or the flatness of the cinematic reunion between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, so much about this film stank of failure. When crazy uncle Nick Nolte comes out of a film with more dignity than anyone, you know you're on to a loser. And yet, there very nearly was at least one saving grace for Gangster Squad: the film's Tommy Gun-blazing movie theater shoot-out, advertised in the trailers as its key action sequence. However, the scene was pulled following the real-life Aurora cinema shooting, and reshoots replaced the sequence with another more generic set-piece set in Chinatown. The filmmakers can't be blamed for removing a scene that could have potentially offended; they can, however, be blamed for replacing it with something as dull as what we eventually got. 7) Kick-Ass 2 Kick-Ass was everything that the superhero genre needed at the time of its release. In 2010, there was a feeling that the superhero movie was becoming stale; so, along came Matthew Vaughn with his adaptation of Mark Millar's R-rated, post-modern comic book to shake things up. It was curse-happy, it was violent, it had Nicolas Cage aping Adam West and giving one of his most enjoyable performances in ages - this was the real deal. The sequel, Kick-Ass 2, was not. With Vaughn and Cage gone, and with MVP Hit-Girl grown-up and less controversially entertaining, Kick-Ass 2 lacked the spark of its forebear. That being said, the sequel did very nearly bring back one of the best components of Kick-Ass - Cage's Big Daddy - for one standalone action scene. Director Jeff Wadlow originally hinted Big Daddy would return briefly to comfort Hit-Girl at his own funeral. It's unclear whether the scene was ever filmed, but storyboards confirm that Wadlow's original plan was for Big Daddy to appear before before his daughter in an explosive daydream. 6) Hancock It wasn't just one edgy, potentially great scene cut out of Peter Berg's Hancock, but several, all of which carried the spirit of the original project. Basically, Berg sanded it down from an R to a PG-13, and took out everything that made the film interesting in the first place. A bit of background: Hancock was conceived by Vincent Ngo as Tonight He Comes, a darker than dark superhero movie that imagined Superman as an asshole alcoholic with behavioural issues. Going through several directors over the years, it finally landed in Peter Berg's lap in 2006. Ngo envisioned Tonight He Comes as an intense, darkly comical superhero movie, the likes of which no one had ever seen. Berg filmed something close to that, but it was made more family-friendly in the edit. You can see the infamous scene where Hancock super-ejaculates holes in a roof whilst in bed with a woman as a deleted scene; what you can't see is the even darker stuff, involving Hancock swearing like a sailor and getting drunk with kids. This could have been an epochal, mature superhero movie; instead, we got a bland, forgettable studio flick. 5) Carrie Much like the Hancock scenario, it wasn’t just a case of one scene getting cut and subsequently affecting the quality of Kimberly Peirce’s Carrie remake, but a whole bunch of ‘em. Only, the studio that cut this one down and significantly altered the original vision didn’t count on the fact that Carrie had a rabid fanbase, some of whom were prepared to do some sleuthing to find out just what was missing from the truncated and poorly-received theatrical cut. Lo and behold, those responsible for the online petition for MGM to release a director’s cut of Carrie found that Peirce’s original was full of up to 40 minutes of extra footage. These included crucial scenes from the novel, a brand new opening and ending, found footage elements, and an entire courtroom-set framing device that would essentially turn the movie into a giant flashback. The fans who’ve done their research say this: that the director’s cut would be the closest we’ve ever gotten to seeing Stephen King’s novel realized for the screen. 4) Fantastic Four Josh Trank's Fantastic Four was an unmitigated disaster - nobody in their right mind is arguing with that. Incoherent and tonally inconsistent, the film also features some below-par CGI and a truly terrible third act that by all accounts came about when Trank and 20th Century Fox couldn't agree on how the film should end (Trank's original ending involved the Fantasticar, nowhere to be seen in the final cut). Most immediately noticeable to many, however, was the film's lack of action. While we don't know what Trank's original ending of Fantastic Four was to be, we do know of at least of one key action sequence that was inexplicably cut at the last minute. This was the 'Thing drop' sequence teased in the trailers, the scene that featured Jamie Bell's The Thing dive-bombing out of a stealth jet to take out a terrorist camp. The whole thing was filmed, and - judging by the trailers - effects work was completed. Again, it's unclear why - in a film desperately lacking excitement - the creatives decided such awesomeness should be cut. 3) The Golden Compass To give you an idea of how bad the movie is, not even Golden Compass director Chris Weitz likes The Golden Compass. That would be because studio New Line Cinema heavily trimmed Weitz's version of the film in post-production, critically disrupting the flow and taking it from a likely three hours to a more marketable 113 minutes. No cut to the film was more significant, though, than the one New Line made to the ending, which was something the theatrical cut was roundly criticized for. Essentially what happened was this: Weitz adapted the Golden Compass book rather closely, but New Line for some reason wanted to hold the entire original ending over for never-materialized sequel, The Subtle Knife. Audiences were baffled by the theatrical finale, which seems to cut to credits before the big event comes, while critics were just as exasperated. Helpfully, a fan of the book and the film made a version of the ending out of existing clips, set photos, and storyboards - giving an idea of what a satisfyingly-concluded Golden Compass movie might look like. 2) Ant-Man Though it didn't come across as quite the disaster that the behind-the-scenes drama suggested it would be, Ant-Man still revealed itself to be one of the most middling Marvel efforts. In large part that can be put down to the feeling that too many cooks were in the kitchen on this one, with the departing Edgar Wright having his film totally reworked by new director Peyton Reed and writers Adam McKay and Paul Rudd. Which means there were plenty of proposed Ant-Man scenes from the mind of Wright and co-writer Joe Cornish that didn't even make it to shooting. One, however, did still make it through - then, in post, Reed decided to scrap it. This despite the fact that it sounded like an action sequence more original than any of the others in the final film, and a damn sight more exciting than the opening scene they decided to go with for the theatrical cut. The original opening sequence involved Hank Pym going rogue and using the Ant-Man costume in 1960s Panama, taking out a military leader (played by Jordi Molla) in a moment described as Bond-like. Sounds pretty awesome, right? 1) World War Z OK, so World War Z isn't an overall terrible film (in fact, it's easily the most distinctive and interesting on this list). It does, however, feature a third act that pretty much derails the entire movie that's gone before it, by shamelessly setting up a franchise in an all-too obvious manner, and by offering a solution to the movie's zombie crisis that's so stupid it kills whatever believability the film had. The worst part about it is that it could have all been so very different. Originally, the plane that Gerry Lane took from Jerusalem at the end of the second act would land not in Wales, but in Russia - where Lane was taken as a soldier-slave and forced to fight zombies in an epic third-act battle set in Moscow. This scene actually shot, as did scenes featuring Matthew Fox's character taking Lane's wife as a sexual hostage (yeah, this version was dark), but director Marc Forster decided to scrap it and go with the newly-shot Wales-set finale. You can see snippets of the Russia sequence at the end of the theatrical cut of the movie, but don't hold your breath for ever seeing this other, awesome-sounding final act in its entirety.