12 Movie Scenes You Didn’t Know Were Reshoots

Reshoots? Where we're going we definitely need reshoots.

By Tim Saxby /

To most moviegoers, we take what we see on the silver screen to be the final product that the studio and the creative team behind it set out to make.

Advertisement

You expect that the writer - or more commonly, the director - is approached by the studio to produce their newest film. The studio has a number of ideas of what the film's message should be, and how it should be presented. A few years later, we praise the director and creators, who get a number of awards and instantly attached to a handful of new blockbusters.

However, a lot of the time - thanks to studio interference and heavy restrictions in the budget - the original idea of a movie is changed during production, and more often than not, production has to start up again with the whole cast and crew coming back to film additional scenes, some of which were never even intended in the first place.

With that in mind, let's take a look at some blockbuster movies that you didn't know had reshoots - or, in some cases, where you didn't know basically the whole film was reshot.

12. The Government Tent - E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

E.T is famed for being one of the only films to come with a warning issuing the fact that it can force grown men to burst into tears at its gut-wrenching ending.

Advertisement

The movie is just as famous as its director, Steven Spielberg - who noticed that during test screenings of his first movie, Jaws, audiences weren't being as frightened my the man-eating shark as he wished them to be.

So it's no surprise that when it came to E.T The Extra-Terrestrial, he paid extra attention to building the reaction he wanted from his audience. As mentioned, the movie is famed for its emotional ending: but that wasn't always going to be the case.

Steven Spielberg originally planned on having the film's title character die in the government captivity tent after he is taken from Elliot and his family. With Spielberg wanting E.T to be a significantly more family-friendly movie than Jaws, he changed his mind.

If he didn't, we wouldn't have gotten one of the most paused moments in cinema history: the iconic shot of Elliot and E.T flying their bike in front of the light reflected by the moon. This would have caused more problems for Spielberg down the line, as that later became the logo for his company, Amblin Entertainment.

Advertisement