20 Movie Scenes That Should've Been Cut
These movie scenes belonged on the cutting room floor.
The process of making even the "simplest" movie is surely far more complex than the average viewer can ever imagine - the sheer number of creative decisions that go into making the final cut of any film is absolutely mind-boggling.
And editing is naturally one of the chief tenets of filmmaking, as the director and editor work together to sculpt story, performances, tone, pacing, and so on.
Directors are often forced to cut scenes they love for one of many reasons - pacing or studio mandate being most common - but sometimes it works the other way too.
Sometimes a filmmaker includes a scene in the final cut that sticks out like a sore thumb to audiences, leaving them wondering why such a blatant misfire of a scene was included in the movie at all.
This could be failed comic relief, lame fan service, or simply a case of showing the audience more than they actually need to see.
Whatever the content of these 20 scenes, though, each baffled a large swath of moviegoers who were left wondering how they weren't cleaved away during the editing process...
20. "Talk To The Hand" - Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
One of the biggest complaints about Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines is the overabundance of goofy comic relief, and it's never worse than in the embarrassing "talk to the hand" scene.
Early in the film, the new T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) acquires its clothes from a bar that's having a "ladies' night" strip show. The T-800 ends up getting its leather gear from a male stripper who initially rebuffs the T-800 by telling him, "Talk to the hand."
We get a wince-inducing callback to this halfway through the film when the T-800 is on the road with John Connor (Nick Stahl) and Kate Brewster (Claire Danes), and they stop at a gas station for supplies.
The T-800 attempts to leave the store without paying for the goods, and when challenged by the kid running the store, he firmly throws up a hand and says, you guessed it, "Talk to the hand."
To make it even worse, the gag is accompanied by a ridiculous, wacky song (William Randolph III's "Funky Man") that sounds like it belongs in a boner comedy, not a Terminator movie.
Terminator 3 is an unfairly maligned sequel in many ways, but silly scenes like this deserve every bit of fan vitriol they've ever received because they don't suit the established tone of the franchise at all.