10 Recent Movies That Put INSANE Effort Into Scenes

You'll never believe how they pulled off Top Gun: Maverick's incredible cockpit shots.

Men 2022
Entertainment Film Distributors

As hard as it may seem to wow audiences these days, sufficiently creative filmmakers will always find a way to do something interesting with the medium that makes everyone sit up and pay close attention.

There's nothing quite like watching a scene and knowing that an absurd amount of effort went into creating it. That's certainly the case with these 10 recent movie scenes, all of which required a ridiculous graft to put together.

From instantly iconic scenes in hit superhero movies to ambitious effects-driven sequences in lower-budget hits, these scenes all tested the bounds of what filmmakers can achieve, albeit in wildly different ways.

We always know when we're watching a scene that hasn't had a director's due attention and basically been lazily phoned in, and we know when a scene has benefitted from a determined artist giving everything they've got to it.

The latter is demonstrably true of these scenes, which required an unbelievable heft of effort to bring to the big screen. Whether they were perfect or not, there's no denying the Herculean commitment that went into achieving them for our entertainment...

10. All The Illuminati Actors Were Shot Separately - Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness

Men 2022
Marvel Studios

No matter what you make of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse Of Madness, there's no denying that a clear amount of work went into assembling that unforgettable mid-film Illuminati sequence, featuring cameos from Professor X (Patrick Stewart), Captain Carter (Hayley Atwell), Captain Marvel (Lashana Lynch), Black Bolt (Anson Mount), and Reed Richards (John Krasinski).

The sequence was originally much smaller before being expanded into a more fleshed-out set-piece in reshoots, and due to both the availability of the cast and COVID-19 restrictions, the actors involved largely shot their parts separately.

As Black Bolt actor Anson Mount explained, the various cast members shot their parts alone or with stand-ins, with all the footage then being ingeniously stitched together during post-production:

"That was a very interesting shoot because my role came up in the reshoots. As you can imagine, several of the actors were quite busy. Patrick [Stewart] was not there. Chiwetel [Ejiofor] was not there. [John] Krasinski's contract wasn't even done. He wasn't there. We had actors playing those roles, knowing that they were going to either be substituting their shots or transplanting faces. I've never done anything quite like that, and I was in disbelief of how well it cut together."

That's a hell of a lot of effects and editing work compared to just... shooting the scene in a conventional manner with the cast.

But given the tricky nature of the shoot, which included several pandemic-related shutdowns that caused a planned Daniel Craig cameo to be scrapped, you can't really blame Sam Raimi and Kevin Feige for figuring it out in post.

 
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Stay at home dad who spends as much time teaching his kids the merits of Martin Scorsese as possible (against the missus' wishes). General video game, TV and film nut. Occasional sports fan. Full time loon.