10 More Movies You Didn't Know Recycled Footage From Other Films
Even Pixar cuts corners.
It goes without saying that movies are primarily assembled from footage shot specifically for that purpose, typically at great cost and effort.
Yet sometimes, typically in order to save costs - or, less generously, "cut corners" - slivers of footage might in fact be recycled and repurposed from existing films.
It's generally much cheaper to simply license a three-second establishing shot of a building from a 15-year-old movie than hire an aerial photography firm to fly a camera-equipped chopper to the desired location, for instance, while sometimes it may just come down to time constraints in a rushed production.
For the most part this re-use of previously shot material will go undetected by the overwhelming majority of viewers, but of course, there are always going to be those obsessives among us who manage to notice even the sneakiest feat of Hollywood trickery.
And so, these 10 films, whether mega-budget blockbusters or low-fi genre flicks, all dug back into the cinematic archives in order to save either money or time, but per the Internet's tendency to over-examine every last frame of a movie, they of course got found out...
10. Spider-Man's Dream Sequence Lifted Shots From Darkman & The Beyond
While Sam Raimi was editing 2002's Spider-Man, he learned that there wasn't enough money in the budget to create a more visually elaborate sequence for Peter Parker's (Tobey Maguire) post-spider bite nightmare, and so he had to resort to repurposing existing footage to his own ends.
Most notably, a shot of a synapse is taken from Raimi's prior 1990 superhero film Darkman, though has been rotated and digitally manipulated to show spiders crawling all over the synapses.
Secondly, there's a fleeting glimpse of a tarantula from above, which is taken from Lucio Fulci's cult classic 1981 horror film The Beyond.
The crucial link between all three of these films is Spider-Man editor Bob Murawski, who also worked as an assistant editor on Darkman and holds the U.S. distribution rights for The Beyond.
Raimi credits Murawski entirely with piecing the dream sequence together, even if it wasn't how he originally envisioned it. Given that 99.8% of people who've ever seen Spider-Man didn't notice the act of cinematic recycling, it's safe to call it a success.