Eagle-eyed film buffs recall trailer clips that weren’t in the actual movie

Marketing for movies is one of the most expensive aspects of movie-making, so it’s not a surprise that a lot of material used in trailers are cut out and are often used solely to promote.

The general belief to calculate how much a movie cost to make, you need to double its production budget to account for marketing. For something like a Marvel Cinematic Universe flick, that can mean a budget over $500 million when you put trailers into the mix.

It can be infuriating for moviegoers when a scene teased gets left on the cutting room floor, and hardcore kinophiles are expressing their displeasure at great moments from trailers that got cut. So many movies are guilty of this, from Inglorious Basterds to Avengers: Infinity War.

Starting it off is the inordinate amount of cut content from Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which saw heavy reshoots between its first peaks and its final trailers. Things cut include monologues from Saw Guerrera and Jyn Erso, alongside various action scenes including a climactic TIE Fighter battle.

Marvel are notorious for doing sneaky editing tricks in their trailers and TV spots. One of the most well-known is how they hid the Infinity Stones in each trailer for Avengers: Infinity War. There’s clear inconsistency in even the same shots but in different trailers, as they hoped to mislead audiences on how Thanos got the stones. Another favourite is the first trailer’s big Avengers running shot, which was completely cut.

Spider-Man is constantly on-screen, but an awful lot of the promotional material for the character’s films has been muddied with this. Many are aware of The Amazing Spider-Man duology’s bizarre amount of cut content from trailers, but further back there were similar issues. Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man initially had a scene with the Twin Towers, which had to be cut after 9/11.

Sometimes, cut content is perhaps for the better. Case in point, Suicide Squad. After so much build-up around Jared Leto as The Joker, he was plastered across nearly every possible poster, trailer, and popcorn box worldwide. Fortunately, Leto’s Joker is barely seen in the film, but did get a return in Zack Snyder’s Justice League (where he offers Batman a “reach around”).

Now a moment of silence for a meme lost thanks to editors not being in touch. The Bourne reboot in 2016 had an iconic moment ruthlessly cut where a security agent exclaims “Jesus Christ, it’s Jason Bourne!”. Not to be seen in the movie at all, and frankly it’s why the film got such mediocre reviews.

Out there are trailer parks filled with all these bits of cut footage, sitting on a goldmine of leaked material or scrapped content for big blockbusters. Perhaps a Batgirl trailer is out there somewhere, and will soon delight the internet.