Deleted scenes are sometimes more than just cool features on a Blu Ray; little gems that didn’t quite make the final cut. Sometimes deleted scenes are deleted swaths of the film that make a huge impact on the film’s tone, budget, and shooting schedule. Looper (which is a great channel to follow on YouTube for cool videos like this) has put together a piece on the most expensive deleted scenes in Hollywood history from recent films like World War Z and X-Men: Days of Future Past all the way back to The Wizard of Oz. I’m fairly certain the video was made before the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story‘s massive reshoots last summer. Though Disney hasn’t released a figure on how much it cost (and don’t expect them to), bringing in writer/director Tony Gilroy to help with the process cost $5 million before they even began reshooting 20-30 scenes, so it’s safe to say it would make this list as well. However, when you end up with the #7 grossing film in US history, fiscally it all balanced out.
The piece also mentions the $10 million original opening sequence to Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns that was cut in which the film originally opened with a silent exploration of the ruins of Krypton by Superman in his ship. Superman Returns is a polarizing film, but it’s still my favorite Superman film of the bunch, but this was definitely a good cut. If you have never seen it, it was released back in 2011 in the Superman Anthology Blu Ray set, but thanks to the awesome power of YouTube, I can just plop it below.
I agree that Superman Returns is the best-made of the crop, yet it still kind of irks me. It’s a remake of Richard Donner’s Superman, which I don’t hold against it (there are plenty of sequel/remakes out there) but it pretends to break new ground, and pretty strenuously, and I just wasn’t buying it. Lois and Superman’s kid could have been taken out of the movie, and the plot and the trajectory would have been exactly the same.
It’s a shame the opening scene had to be deleted, but it’s obvious why it was.
It’s good that there are now venues for these things to be shown. The original Little Shop ending is a special effects masterpiece that a special effects genius slaved over for an entire year, and I love that I can finally see it, but it so did not belong in the movie. On stage, the tragic ending does not diminish the charm; on screen, the deaths at the end come across as too realistic and melodramatic, and when the plants take over New York it’s so epic that it’s jarring after the small-scale comedy that preceded it. The original ending is great to watch on its own, but it would not have worked, and it does not work in the directors cut. But again, I love this age we’re living in, where everything can be seen. Or at least, almost anything. Disney will hang onto its impenetrable basement vault like grim death, and we’ll never see anything that might have been.
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See, I see the film completely different. I see Superman Returns as the completion of Singer’s mentor: Richard Donner’s Superman and Superman II; essentially the Superman III that should have been made in the 1980’s. I don’t think he was trying to rip Donner off at all but finish his story
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I did not mean to imply it was a rip-off, because the movie was clearly made with love and respect. But (and I have not seen the film since it first came out, so my memory might be shaky on some of these points)…
Superman arrives
Superman returns
Helicopter scene
Airplane scene
Montage as Superman is made known to the world.
Montage as Superman is reintroduced to the world.
Lex has the same real estate plan in both movies, except that more people will die in SR.
In both films, Lex steals kryptonite from a museum to use against Superman
Lois and Superman go flying
Lois and Superman go flying, at the same point in the movie
Kryptonite hung around Superman’s neck, and he is left to drown
Kryptonite inserted into Superman, and he is left to drown
Superman saves the day by changing the rotation of the Earth (manipulating a giant mass of land in outer space)
Superman saves the day by getting rid of Lex’s pesky continent or whatever it was (manipulating a giant mass of land in outer space)
Kitty foils Lex’s plan, Lex winds up in prison
Kitty foils Lex’s plan, Lex winds up imprisoned on an island
That’s just some of it. The parallels go on and on. I am huge fan of Donner’s Superman and his director’s cut of Superman II, and while I understand what Singer was trying to do, I don’t think he made the movie Donner would have. I think that after years of trying to get a new Superman movie made, and the lunacy surrounding that Tim Burton movie that never got made (THANK GOD) the studio leaned too heavily on the past with this one.
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I understand the parallels, but storywise, I think it continues where Superman II left off and Donner and Singer are close so I would not be surprised if he talked to him about it. It actually did better at the box office than Batman Begins (nowhere near as good; just saying) so the WB overreaction and criminal casting out of Routh, like he was the problem will always rub me the wrong way. I have a theatrical poster of the film signed by the cast (Jan liked to get those as Christmas presents for me; my Star Wars OT Special Ed poster signed by the whole cast is probably my movie memorabilia highlight). I’m glad Routh landed back in the DCU TV universe as Ray Palmer/The Atom. I like Henry Cavill’s Superman too (from Man of Steel), I just hated how all the blame seemed to land on him. Singer hasn’t really been the same as a director since.
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I like Valkyrie because of the subject matter (I was glad that someone finally got around to making a movie about those guys, because their story needed to be told) but the director who made Usual Suspects (one of my all-time faves) and the first few X-Men was not the same, you’re right about that.
I think that the fallout from Superman Returns would not have been so bad if WB had not spent a decade, and a SERIOUS ton of money, trying to give birth to a Superman movie before they decided to go with Singer’s vision. I mean, they ended up giving Tim Burton five million dollars, and he produced nothing, other than a sketch of Brainiac’s head resting on a triangle, and a bunch of ideas that sounded like they were fueled by LSD. But the fact that Routh’s career was affected was a bit bewildering, he did not create much of an impression of his own, but I still thought he was a fine Superman. I think that sometimes the Hollywood people go for the easy target, the easy answer. The less they have to dig, the less they will discover about their own culpability, or the culpability of the guy they just hired to helm that 200 million dollar prequel to something.
I envy you because of those posters, but I can’t allow myself it dwell on it. A long time ago I swore off memorabilia, and I need to stay strong.
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