10 Deleted Sci-Fi Movie Scenes You Need To See
The cuts which could have improved, saved, or in some cases sank, our favourite sci-fi flicks...
You've got to appreciate the venerable institution of the deleted scene. Home to countless boring little vignettes where characters share some unnecessary exposition which the director rightly decided was too static to bother watching, the deleted scenes section of some DVDs (remember those, fellow elderlies?) was also known on occasion to house the occasionally stellar sequence which completely reshaped the reality of the film from which it was cut.
Yes, sometimes a deleted scene, chopped out of the final cut for whatever reason, could shed some much needed light on the film’s backstory, deepening a character arc or filling in details of the world surrounding them. Other times a scene might merely offer us a glimpse of character motivations otherwise left relatively unclear in the theatrical cut, or change the tone of things entirely.
As a genre, the expensive institution of sci-fi seems particularly full of these small scenes that, though they never made it to the screen, can reshape the narrative and characters of their source movies—for better or, in some cases, far worse.
10. Deadpool - Wade Goes Too Far
Ryan Reynolds finally got the starring role to fulfil the cheeky, charming promise he showed as early as 2002’s Van Wilder when his long-awaited passion project, the R-rated comic book adaptation of Deadpool, made it to the big screen in 2016.
The flick allowed Reynolds to flex his funny bone whilst snapping those of countless henchmen, mixing gory action with foul-mouthed comedy and some fun meta touches which freshened up the potentially tired superhero origin story formula.
However Deadpool almost included a scene dark enough for the director to worry it would derail the entire project in the form of Wade killing a man scamming cancer patients whilst he searched for a cure to his disease—in front of his love interest.
The act shocked her, with the whole resulting scene seeing her trying to come to terms with the fact that the man she loved was a cold-blooded killer, and all of it fit about as well as it sounds like it would in a movie that sees its hero murder scores of nameless henchmen to the tune of Juice Newton’s Angel of the Morning.
Luckily the scene was scrapped and Deadpool’s light-but-gory escapist tone escaped to multiplexes untouched by misguided attempts at sombre asides.