10 Times Actors Were Edited Out Of Movies
3. Sterling K. Brown - Split
After making several stinkers like After Earth, The Last Airbender and The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan made a big comeback with 2015's The Visit, and then 2017's Split. Both films are impressively laser-focused, wasting not a second of screen time, and in the latter's case, this is because the director made the wise choice to remove a character from the final cut.
In a chat with Collider, Shyamalan talked about how he once had a three-hour cut of Split, but obviously, the studio would never let him release such a version. So, major changes had to be made. The director then revealed that he decided to cut a character called Professor Shaw (played by Sterling K. Brown), in order to reduce that runtime and tighten up the story as a whole.
Shyamalan stated that the character's entire existence was a screenwriting error. In the final cut, he wanted the story to focus more on Kevin Wendell Crumb, but since Shaw's scenes were mostly spent discussing psychology in general - and not Kevin's condition specifically - the character had to go.
Brown can still be seen in action in Split's deleted scenes, some of which were released online.