11 Awesome Movie Scenes That Almost Didn't Happen
Steven Spielberg's most iconic shot ever almost wasn't even filmed.
Somewhat infamously, movies don't always work out the way they're supposed to. When you throw together so many creators and talents and ask them to sing from the same hymn sheet, things are bound to turn fluid pretty quickly. That's why there are so many stories of alternate cuts of classic movies and why so many of them are completely unrecognisable from their earliest scripts.
A lot of the time, the changes work out well (given the state of some deleted and alternate scenes), but you have to wonder about those genius ideas and moments that ultimately didn't make it into films that could have vastly improved them. That might sound fanciful, but there is evidence that some movie scenes that were only added at the very last minute - or which weren't planned to happen at all - ended up being the best thing about their films.
Just imagine the others that could have been on this list...
11. 'Pool Cleans Up - Deadpool 2
Ever since X-Men Origins: Wolverine was released, Ryan Reynolds had something hanging over his head. In his eagerness to bring Deadpool to screen, the actor became part of one of the worst mistreatments of any comic book movie character as 'Pool became a laughable bastardisation of the beloved figure from the comics.
In Deadpool 2, though, he fixed that problem, using the finale's time travel montage to go back and do some housekeeping, including stopping Ryan Reynolds from signing on to Green Lantern and killing off the Origins version of Wade Wilson. It's legitimately one of the greatest meta comic book movie moments ever, and it almost didn't happen.
It turns out that using the footage from Origins was actually a bit of a ball-ache, as Reynolds later revealed:
We had a dick of a time trying to get the actual raw footage though from X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The movie was shot on film, it wasn't shot on digital so it was harder to get. We were sitting there on the Fox lot, the exact piece of the movie we need had been damaged on whatever the transfer was, so we had to go to some backup which was in some vault somewhere in the middle of the country, the United States, and we ended up finally, at the last second inputting it into the movie.
For me, I was literally losing sleep over it though, I was thinking 'oh my god, how are we going to do this, am I going to have to call Hugh and ask him to shoot this chunk that looks exactly like a movie he's already done?' I can't think of a worse hell for a human being to do.
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To be honest, it's a pretty big shame they didn't have to get Jackman to come back.
10. Darth Vader's Massacre - Rogue One
Say what you want about the infamous Rogue One reshoots, but they definitely improved the movie (or they at least didn't destroy it entirely as some people had suspected they might).
Sure, they meant that lots of footage from the marketing campaign didn't actually make it into the movie, but they were responsible for one of the movie's most enthralling, impactful (and let's be honest, fan-baiting) scenes of all: the moment Darth Vader shows what he's made of.
Rogue One's version of Vader is a horror movie villain, mostly silent and menacing and more about presence than acts of villainy. That changes right at the end when we get to see him terrifyingly cut down a troop of Rebel soldiers in his attempt to retrieve the Death Star plans. He goes from 1 to 11 in a matter of seconds and cements his reputation perfectly.
And to think, this was one of the last scenes added in the reshoots and was close to not happening at all.