20 Biggest Blockbuster Movie Showdowns Of All Time

Every penny was up there onscreen when it came to these super-sized smackdowns.

While blockbuster cinema is largely marketed on the back of things like name recognition, brand appeal and built-in fanbases, these big-budget movies live and die by their action scenes. With tens, often hundreds, of millions of dollars being spent on these productions its a virtual guarantee that each and every trailer will contain at least one 'money shot' that will make the movie seem like a must-see event in an attempt to entice casual viewers to part with their hard earned cash. Most of the time these 'trailer moments' are organic to the story and integral to the plot, but there can be exceptions. Take the incredibly misleading trailers for Nimrod Antal's Predators for example; nearly every promo featured Adrien Brody's character with dozens of weapon sights trained on him, but in the finished movie there was only one. More recently, the marketing blitz for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 heavily teased the showdown between Spidey and Paul Giamatti's Rhino, which again misleadingly turned out to be the last shot in the movie. And of course, the unsubstantiated rumors that the San Francisco scene in Star Trek Into Darkness was written because the studio wanted a shot of a spaceship crashing into a city for the trailer. With that in mind, this article will take a look at 20 huge blockbuster showdowns that actually managed to deliver, regardless of the quality of the rest of the movie. It is a list that features humans, superheros, aliens, pirates and giant robots, backed up by stunning CGI, impressive practical effects, plenty of explosions and more than a few blood squibs. This is by no means a rundown of the best showdowns in blockbuster history, but due to the imagination, devastation and sheer magnitude of these confrontations, they are the biggest. Do you agree with the choices in the article? Are there any other blockbuster showdowns that you would have included? As always, sign off in the comments below.
 
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