There’s an art to making a great movie trailer. It needs to be exciting. It needs to tell you a little bit about the movie. It needs to entice viewers enough that they want to buy tickets. It also needs to contain footage that is actually in the movie. Because a lot of films are sometimes still being completed uncomfortably close to the release date, especially these days, early trailers can include a little bit of footage that never shows up in the final product. A little bit is to be expected, but there have been times when the stuff in the promotional material overshadows the movie itself. Countless viewers go in expecting to see their favorite shots or hear the coolest lines of dialogue, only for none of that to be in the final cut.
This phenomenon varies based on how “done” a movie is when it comes time to advertise it to the public. Some super early teasers barely feature anything from the movie at all, simply because it’s not done yet. Others use footage that, oops, ended up being cut due to reshoots prior to release. A lot of this is innocuous fluff, but bits and pieces can slip through the cracks. People become convinced that a certain scene or line was in the movie, when the only place it appeared was in that one teaser you kept seeing on TV.
Here, we’ve compiled a list of these would-be-iconic movie moments that, sadly, don’t count as movie moments at all. Some of them can be found as deleted scenes. Others are basically lost media, pieces of a version of a movie the world never got to see. At least we’ll always have the trailers.
10 Famous Movie Moments That Were Only in the Trailer
If only these scenes hadn’t been cut! People still remember them though, despite the fact that they weren’t in the actual movies.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
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