10 Movie Scenes Changed After The Actor Died
These scenes were overhauled following an actor's death.
There are few greater risks to a movie production than a major actor dying either during or shortly after filming, with the former forcing the filmmakers to make some seriously tough decisions, while the latter might cause them to carefully reconsider the footage already in the can.
An actor's death has often resulted in a scene being changed, whether because the actor in question obviously couldn't be present to shoot it, wider story changes were needed to explain their sudden absence, or the filmmakers felt that their death fundamentally changed the tenor of the movie.
These 10 movie scenes, then, were all reworked, reshaped, and perhaps even reshot due to an actor passing away.
From minor story changes to absolutely gigantic alterations to the overall narrative framework, these actor deaths all impacted the end product that eventually reached audiences.
If nothing else, many of these changes demonstrate the sheer ingenuity of artists backed into tricky creative corners - forced to deal with a cast member's passing and find a way to make sense of it while completing production. Bravo...
10. Ray Liotta's Death Was Made Less Gruesome - Cocaine Bear
Ray Liotta sadly passed away last year prior to the release of one of his last major movies, Cocaine Bear, in which he played villainous drug kingpin Syd White.
The film ends with Syd being disembowelled by the titular bear after attempting to kill it, with the bear's cubs then helping rip his insides out.
And to rub salt in the wound, the bears then knock his corpse off the cave ledge, sending his lifeless body flopping to the floor below.
Some pointed out the perhaps unintentional comedy of killing Liotta in such an outrageously gruesome way mere minutes before the end credits throw up a dedication to the late actor.
However, director Elizabeth Banks confirmed in an interview with Moviemaker that she actually scaled back the bloodiness of Syd's death after Liotta passed away:
"We were mindful of the goriness of that scene before we even shot it, and after the events that happened, we did reel it in... He bought fully into the entire disembowelment and goriness of it, so his performance was tied to that reality. So you don't want to change the reality too much in post because it just doesn't fit his performance, but we didn't want it to feel exploitative or unnecessary. And so we did modify it a bit."
Needless to say, the released version on the scene is pretty damn brutal, so it'd certainly be interesting to see how much more violent the original pass was.