6 Films That Put Painstaking Work Into Things You Don’t Even Notice

Sometimes it's obvious when a film's creative team has invested a lot of time and money into a particular scene or special effect. It took serious manpower to get Jurassic World up and running, and James Cameron pretty much put digital effects on the map with Terminator 2: Judgement Day in the early '90s.

Nobody would be surprised to hear that a lot of work went into bringing those dinosaurs or that liquid-metal cyborg to life, but there are times when movies plough an insane amount of their resources into things you don't even notice.

That location which spent all of two minutes on screen may have been painstakingly built from scratch or based on a scale model that took months to construct. There are always interesting stories to be found in these cases, and once they've come to light, you'll often come away with newfound respect for the film in question.

Either that, or you'll scoff at how wasteful the studio was to allow the director to shell out so much on a scene or effect that passed most of the audience by unnoticed.

If Superman Returns had put as much time and effort into doing the character justice as it did building a farm, it would have been the best DC Comics movie to date.

Director Bryan Singer went to great lengths constructing the Kent Farm from scratch, a process he outlined in a production diary included among the film's DVD extras.

According to the featurette, the movie's production team built barns and even planted corn to ensure the set looked as realistic as possible. Pa Kent would have been proud.

Going above and beyond like this is all well and good, but the Kent Farm only features on screen for a matter of minutes. Clearly Superman Returns' bloated budget was burning a hole in Singer's pocket because he also splurged $10 million on a scene set on Krypton that ended up on the cutting room floor.