We asked and you complied. Following last month’s first instalment, here are another 25 trailers offering scenes that didn’t end up in the finished film, mostly supplied this time by your good selves via Empire’s various social media sources. Some of your memories, we suspect, were playing tricks on you – we couldn’t find any trace of The Abyss’ water tentacle turning into a gun, or Dumb & Dumber trailers that included the Little Old Lady scene – but most of you were on the money. Here are our favourites, and feel free to suggest even more… but bear in mind that are another 25 of these things on the other list.
Spider-Man
A few of you mentioned this, so we’ll start here even though it doesn’t quite represent what we’re talking about. This teaser of Spider-Man catching bank robbers in a web between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre played in theatres months before the release of Sam Raimi’s first Spidey film, but was always a stand-alone sequence. The trailer was pulled in the wake of 9/11, but none of this footage was strictly cut from the movie, because it was never intended as part of the movie.
Gangster Squad
This, in contrast, was a film affected by real-life tragedy. Ruben Fleischer’s action-gangster-drama originally included a scene in which four gunmen burst through a cinema screen and open fire on a cinema audience. In the wake of the awful cinema shooting in Aurora, Colorado, the sequence was removed from the film (necessitating reshoots and release delays). It remains in the trailer, however, and in the UK at least, was still playing in theatres for some time after the tragedy.
Insidious Chapter 2
This is more a soundtrack cheat than a missing scenes affair. Fans of the original Insidious would have remembered its creatively bizarre use of Tiny Tim’s Tiptoe Through the Tulips. This trailer strongly suggests we’ll be hearing it again in the sequel, with all the mad red demon puppet guy shenanigans it entails. Not so. Let’s chalk this one up as “aural misdirection”.
Thunderball
Proving that we’re not talking about a recent phenomenon, here’s an example from the fourth James Bond movie, dating back to 1965. Luciana Paluzzi begins a seduction of Sean Connery’s Bond at the 01:49 mark, and he muses, “The things I do for England.” This didn’t appear in the finished film, and the line was recycled two years later in You Only Live Twice.
Alien 3
The original theatrical version of David Fincher’s controversial Alien threequel, bowdlerised as it was by the studio, chopped several the scenes glimpsed here, including one with Charles Dance carrying an unconscious Sigourney Weaver, and another with Ripley and co. baiting the creature. Happily, it’s all since been restored in the excellent 2003 Assembly Cut, so we only had to wait a decade for satisfaction. (Suggested on the forum by Litshttam)
Teen Wolf Too
The Michael J. Fox-less Teen Wolf follow-up promised this not-unamusing scene of Jason Bateman talking to his uncle through a bathroom door, denying any lycanthropic symptoms while quite plainly manifesting the same. Those who have experienced the ensuing DTV 90-minutes attest that it’s AWOL. Incidentally, Bateman seems barely to have physically changed since this 1987 classic. Maybe he’s been on the wolf in the real world. (Suggested on the forum by daskoyne1)
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
Rupert Wyatt’s Apes reboot contained much to applaud, but it very much did not include the scene glimpsed here: James Franco driving away from the facility as it explodes. If you blinked and missed it, it’s at 02:20 (Suggested on the forum by mgmstudios)
Batman Returns
There’s a particular shot here of Michelle Pfeiffer laughing uproariously on a bed (down to a little snorting noise at the end) that didn’t make Tim Burton’s final cut of his 1992 Batman Christmas fairytale. It seems to be an alternate take from the existing scene in which Pfeiffer’s Catwoman and Danny DeVito’s Penguin discuss whatever it was they were talking about. The bed’s in the film. The laugh isn’t. (Suggested on the forum by union-jak)
Beverly Hills Cop 2
The trailer for Tony Scott’s Axel Foley revisit includes a quick sequence of Axel, Rosewood and Taggart picking their way gingerly through some laser trip wires. This looks like it came from the scene where the trio break into the Beverly Hills Gun Club, but in the finished film they find what they were looking for without this much difficulty. (Suggested on the forum by Mulholland Empire)
Internal Affairs
If there was one thing you could rely on in any ‘80s cop thriller, crime drama or action movie, it was a visit to a strip club. And yet Internal Affairs seems to have included one and then lost it again. The first thing we see in the trailer is Andy Garcia and Richard Gere apparently enjoying an “exotic dance” in a bar, but they weren’t so lucky in the final cut. (Suggested on the forum by bradcam72)
Bridesmaids
Bridesmaids was famous for the sheer volume of scenes shown in advance that weren’t in the film: director Paul Feig even justified it in interviews as a way of not spoiling the finished movie’s jokes (see also: Bad Neighbours). So take your pick here. Most significant in this particular trailer – towards the end - is a long-ish look at Kristen Wiig meeting a potential wedding date and getting temporarily landed with his problematic son. (Suggested on the forum by poinsonedhoney)
Mission: Impossible
Dum-dum-der-dum-dum... Several of the promo clips for Brian De Palma’s first instalment in the still-continuing franchise suggested Tom Cruise and Emmanuelle Béart in a hotter relationship than the movie gave them. It’s still hinted at in the film, but we never see them doing what they’re getting up to at 01:23 here. (Suggested on the forum by Mr Grizzly)
Thor: The Dark World
This one much energised and perplexed the Hiddlestoners of the world. Glimpsed only in this TV spot is a quick shot of Tom Hiddlestone’s Loki in a fur-lined cloak saying, "Give the people what they want". Not only is this scene not in the film, it hasn’t surfaced on disc as deleted footage either, suggesting that someone, somewhere, has failed to give the people what they want. It has, however, finally found its way online and comes from a fantasy Loki conjures of his own coronation. It runs thusly:
(Suggested on the forum by jshillingford, and on Twitter by #VoteLoki, Kerry Jazmine, Tanya Crowell, Hiddles Tigress and Peetey897!)
Notting Hill
The promo for this Richard Curtis / Roger Michell Brit-rom-com includes a scene with Hugh Grant’s William Thacker telling his parents about his top-secret new girlfriend. “It’s not Fergie, is it?” asks his aghast mother. The elder Thackers don’t make a single appearance in the finished film. (Suggested on the forum by pgmark)
King Kong
In a nod to the ship-board screen-test scene from the 1933 original, Peter Jackson shot this sequence with Jack Black’s Carl Denham and Naomi Ann Darrow. "Scream, Ann! Scream for your life!" instructs Denham, and as she gives it her best Fay Wray, there’s an answer from the jungle... It’s a great homage to Merian C. Cooper, but it's another example of a scene filmed specially and only for the trailer. (Suggested on the forum by leviathan0999)
Major League
Right at the end of this clip comes a bonding-moment joke between Tom Berenger’s veteran baseball coach Jake Taylor and Charlie Sheen’s Ricky "Wild Thing" Vaughn. "That ball wouldn’t have been out of a lot of parks," Taylor consoles Vaughn. "Name one," challenges Vaughn. "Yellowstone," is Taylor’s cheeky response. Laughs all round, but it apparently wasn’t funny enough to make it into cinemas. (Suggested on the forum by leviathan0999 – again!)
Cliffhanger
This iconic, wordless promo for Renny Harlin’s mountain-climbing Stalloner includes shots of Sly running towards the edge of a cliff, jumping off and then – viewed from a low angle – flying through the air with a rope attached to his back. There is much running and jumping in the film, but this particular instance doesn’t feature. (Suggested on the forum by rosskies)
Godzilla (1998)
Like the Spidey twin-towers business, this famous teaser trailer for the Roland Emmerich Godzilla was never meant to be part of the film, and is a discrete sequence unto itself. A group of schoolchildren at a natural history museum are suddenly distracted from the mighty T-Rex model, when a gigantic Gojira foot crashes through the ceiling and stomps it. There was another spot with an old man and a fishing rod{
The Devil's Own
We couldn’t find the vaguely-remembered shot of Brad Pitt firing an RPG at a plane (though there is a quick bit with someone else aiming a bazooka), but this clip advertising Alan Pakula’s IRA thriller has other secrets. Harrison Ford outlines Pitt’s back-story in a voiceover and flashback from which nothing survived. And note also that William Atherton is still named in the credits here, but his role was entirely dropped from the finished film. (Suggested on the forum by Peter Becher – sort of)
Sherlock Holmes
The trailer for Guy Ritchie’s first go around Victorian London with Robert Downey Jr. extensively uses a scene that reached the film in much altered form. In the film, Downey’s Holmes ends up handcuffed to the bed after Rachel McAdams’ Irene Adler drugs him. In the trailer, while Holmes’ ultimate destination is the same, he gets there by being beaten by the corseted Irene in a fight. The promo also has a kiss between Holmes and Irene (still corseted, so from the same scene) suggesting that rather more happened between the bust-up and the bondage... (Suggested on Facebook by Nathalie Cloet)
Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey
In addition to the realisation that Bill S. Preston and Ted “Theodore” Logan had been lied to by their album covers, this trailer reveals that Keanu and Alex’s sojourn in Hell originally included encounters we ended up missing. Included here is a clip of a demon proudly holding up a rat for the boys’ appreciation. “Not bad, dude!” says Bill. “We totally knew a guy who got one of those in his bucket of chicken,” adds Ted. (Suggested on Facebook by Al Gale)
Scream 4
This trailer for Wes Craven’s Ghostface fourquel contains a couple of snippets from the same deleted scene, in which Rory Culkin and Marielle Jaffe discuss the horror tropes currently impinging on their real lives. Culkin observes that Neve Campbell’s Sydney is "victim royalty", but Jaffe reminds him that, on the contrary, she’s expendable by belated sequel rules, and Culkin concurs. "It’s time for someone new to die," is also a line missing from the final cut. (Suggested on Facebook by Gil Marcel Cordeiro)
Star Trek
We mentioned Star Trek last time, but we missed a trick. In addition to the shots of baby Spock with his obviously much younger parents, there are also glimpses of a deleted scene with Eric Bana’s Nero busting out of Klingon prison (the reason he’s missing from the film’s narrative for 25 years). There’s the briefest flash of a fight between Nero and two of the pastie-heads at about 01:35, and Nero’s line, “The wait is over,” at the trailer’s climax comes from the same source. (Suggested on Facebook by Graham Parker)
District 9
Documentaries always discard more footage than they use, so it’s appropriate that the trailer for Neill Blomkamp’s South-African alien ghetto satire teases some footage that was ultimately dropped. Specifically we’re talking about the Prawn interrogation scene that starts at around the minute mark. “Why don’t you leave?” asks a government spook. “How can we go anywhere if you have our ship?” is the subtitled retort. (Suggested on Facebook by Michael Barnes)
Jonah Hex
Here’s a split-second of Megan Fox erotica for you: a couple of frames that became many a fanboy gif. The fun starts and ends at 02:09, and whatever purpose it served in Jimmy Hayward’s comic-book farrago is lost to the dust of the cutting room floor, never even showing up as a DVD deleted scene. There were few enough reasons to see Jonah Hex anyway. The loss of some gratuitous bedroom action can’t have helped. (Suggested on Facebook by Tim Baldwin)