9 Last-Minute Changes That Ruined Movies

A lot of content falls by the wayside during the post-production process: unnecessary dialogue, pointless exposition scenes, superfluous characters, and in the case of Ben Affleck's Daredevil, the entire heart and soul of the movie.

As anyone who has seen Mark Steven Johnson's director's cut will tell you, it was almost a good movie. Not quite a great one, but a far cry from the critically-panned mess than arrived in cinemas in 2003.

An entire 30 minutes of footage was flayed away in the editing suite, and while it's not all gold, it beefs up everything from the storyline to the action sequences, and even the characterisation. After watching the film Johnson intended to make, it's clear one of the studio's biggest missteps was minimising Matt Murdoch's role in the film.

In the cinematic cut, Murdoch is basically a cardboard stand-in for those scenes where Daredevil has hung up his crimefighting get-up, but in the original version, he's a character with depth, fleshed out in a subplot involving a gangbanger who has been framed for murder, which ended up on the cutting room floor.

The extra scenes add substance to the story and Burton Batman-esque grit, and most of that is down to Daredevil's legal eagle alter ego.