10 Times Studios LOCKED AWAY Deleted Movie Scenes From Directors
4. The Last Airbender
There's no denying that M. Night Shyamalan's The Last Airbender was a terrible movie any way you slice it, and while it's unlikely that any number of deleted scenes could turn it into a good film, that doesn't mean Shyamalan wasn't dealt a bum hand while making the movie.
This is a particularly unique case of a studio cynically gutting a film for commercial reasons, with Paramount removing 30 minutes of footage from the fantasy adaptation shortly before release.
Their rationale? Paramount saw the commercial success of several recent films that had been converted to 3D in post-production, and decided that it was worth doing the same with The Last Airbender.
Except, time constraints wouldn't have allowed them to convert the entire two-hour movie before its set-in-stone release date.
And so the studio simply had a half-hour's worth of scenes cleaved away, leaving massive gaping narrative holes which they tried to fill through shorter expository speeches added in re-shoots.
To reiterate, The Last Airbender is still a poorly-staged dud no matter how you approach it, but Shyamalan clearly received way too much of the flak for this one. Paramount basically threw him under the bus, as there's clearly a two-star version of this one-star movie sat in a vault somewhere.