For some fans, watching the deleted scenes or hearing the filmmakers talk about their original vision for a movie can be just as entertaining and informative as watching the movie itself.
Quite often, what was cut out gives you a better idea of what happened behind the scenes than what is in the final polished product. Sometimes it can be frustrating to see a perfectly good scene cut out. However, on the other hand, there are some deleted scenes that would have arguably made their movies actively worse had they been included.
It should be no secret by now that comic books are super weird sometimes. As superhero movie adaptations have literal decades of stories and events to draw from, it would make sense that some of our favorite movies nearly had some truly weird and wonderful additions.
In fact, there were so many scenes worthy of a mention, we had to make a special extended list to accommodate them all.
With that said, here are the 21 Superhero Scenes We Never Got To See.
21. Justice League - The black Superman suit
The deleted scenes that have come out of Justice League tell a fascinating story of what might have been. There are already big hints that the movie was a very different beast before it was reworked by Warner Brothers and Joss Whedon.
However, one of the cut sequences that hurts the most is a brief moment where the recently revived Clark walks past a black version of his suit in the resurrection chamber.
This, of course, is a nod to Superman’s reappearance after the Death of Superman story and it suggests a more faithful take on the material than what we ended up getting.
There’s a lot of Snyder’s signature style in the short clip and the Hans Zimmer Man of Steel theme kicks up the epic feel by a couple of hundred notches, so it’s a real pity that we never saw this in theaters. If the mythical Snyder cut is ever released, including this scene would be a no-brainer.
20. Thor: Ragnarok - The exiled All-Father
In the first act of Thor: Ragnarok, Thor finds out that Loki has put Odin under a spell and banished him to Earth to rule in his stead. Later, both Loki and Thor catch up with Odin in Norway, thanks to the help of Stephen Strange.
However, many fans noticed that the scene in which Hela destroys Mjolnir takes place in a Nordic field, not the city streets of New York, as seen in the trailer.
Coupled with set photos of Anthony Hopkins goofing around in New York City, this suggests that the Odin scenes were changed fairly late on in the process. Odin is dressed as a homeless man, presumably the mortal guise that Loki conjured for him.
Director Taika Waititi explained that the scene was too much of a “bummer” seeing Asgard’s noble king living on the streets, so it was changed to something more thematically fitting.
19. Iron Man 2 - Teetotal Tony
Iron Man 2 opens with Mickey Rourke’s Ivan Vanko putting the finishing touches to his long-gestating revenge against the Starks. Tony, meanwhile, dives out of a plane to the strains of AC/DC and lands on a stage in front of a wildly cheering audience, where he is backed by scantily-clad dancers. Talk about a tonal shift.
However, the alternate opening to Iron Man 2 shows that Tony isn’t just a ridiculous egomaniac, but he’s suffering too and he’s putting on a brave face.
The alternate opening scene starts with Tony drunkenly vomiting and bickering with Pepper in between bouts. Tony seems pretty rattled in his inebriated state (suggesting that he already knows his arc reactor is poisoning him) and even tries to abort the air drop.
Pepper convinces him otherwise and Tony asks for a kiss for good luck. She kisses the mouthpiece of the Iron Man helmet instead and tosses it out the back of the plane, leaving Tony to shout “you complete me!” as he dives after it.
18. Captain America: Civil War - Cap vs. Widow
There’s a lot going on in Civil War, with both new and old heroes picking sides and fighting against each other. It should serve as no surprise that there were significant chunks cut out of the final product to make it more streamlined.
One of the more interesting bits of business to hit the cutting room floor was a planned fight between long-term allies Black Widow and Captain America.
The fight took place in amongst the surrounding chaos at the airport. The pair clash on a rooftop and Romanoff soon realizes that Steve isn’t going to stop his crusade. They grapple, but Rogers has an answer for everything she throws at him.
Cap checks that she has her gear on before he overpowers her and throws her off a rooftop.
Natasha is forced to use a grappling hook to save her skin, landing on the ground below.
Steve looks down from the rooftop and nods before turning tail and running. It’s a great sequence that reinforces Nat’s later decision to allow Steve and Bucky to escape, but it was unfortunately cut due to time restraints.
17. The Dark Knight Rises - Bane’s training
There are plenty of interesting omissions from The Dark Knight Rises, but one of the most surprising wasn’t included in any of the official deleted scenes.
Costume designer Lindy Hemming accidentally let slip that there was a big flashback to Bane’s League of Shadows training. She talked about the evolution of Bane’s look and detailed several sequences that never made it to the final cut.
Hemming described the training as very similar to Bruce’s in Batman Begins and said that there was even a scene that explained where Bane got his signature mask from and why he wears it.
While most critics liked The Dark Knight Rises, Bane was generally considered to be a lesser villain than Batman’s previous foes and it seems like a few sequences detailing his connection to Batman could have gone a long way to fleshing the character out more.
16. Doctor Strange - The death of Strange’s sister
Director Scott Derrickson is a massive comic fan and it shows in his work. Doctor Strange (2016) is a pretty faithful adaptation of the Sorcerer Supreme’s origins, but comic fans will know one missing element – the Strange siblings.
It’s understandable why the filmmakers would want to leave out big brother Victor (who died, was frozen, and came back as a vampire). However, it seems odd to leave out the death of Donna Strange, one of the instrumental factors for Stephen wanting to become a doctor in the first place.
This wasn’t the original intention, though. Derrickson wanted to include this significant part of Strange’s backstory in the movie, but for one reason or another, it just didn’t come together.
He gave more details in the press junket leading up to the movie’s release: “We shot that scene. I loved that scene, it was a really great scene. It just didn’t fit in the movie, it didn’t work.”
Despite several sequences featuring Donna apparently being filmed, the deleted scenes have yet to materialize in any form so far.
15. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 - Norman Osborn’s frozen head
In the years since its release, it’s become clear that The Amazing Spider-Man 2 had a rocky production. The fact that several massive plot-altering scenes made it all the way up to filming before they were cut speaks volumes about the conflicting directions the movie was pulling in.
The most famous of these deleted sequences is the surprise reveal that Richard Parker is still alive, but he wasn’t the only father coming back from the dead.
In a deleted scene intended to be the post-credits stinger, the mysterious Mr. Fiers walks through the secret Oscorp lab.
Fiers passes a bunch of prefabricated Sinister Six suits and enters into a room containing Norman Osborn’s cryogenically frozen head in a box.
Fiers says “Time to wake up, old friend” and boom– cut to black. Whether Chris Cooper was signed on for another film is unknown, but we’d be lying if we said we weren’t curious about how much of a role he was originally going to play in the threequel before the scene and the entire series was canned.
14. Justice League - A heart-to-heart with Martha
Justice League’s behind the scenes drama gets more and more interesting by the day. We know that Zack Snyder had to step away from the project for tragic personal reasons, leaving Joss Whedon to be hired in his place and try and fill in the gaps.
Many fans didn’t respond well to the final product and several are calling for the Zack Snyder cut to be released. Not much is known about how much of the movie Snyder managed to complete, but there seems to be new scenes being revealed with regularity thanks to Zack re-engaging with fans on social media.
For International Women’s Day, Snyder dropped a tranquil shot of Lois Lane and Martha sharing a moment of downtime over a hot drink at Lois’ apartment, a scene not present in the theatrical version.
The scene looks like it could have been a nice, quiet, and introspective counterbalance to all of the movie’s louder action sequences and could have given us a deeper insight into both characters. U
nless Warner Brothers decide to #ReleaseTheSnyderCut, we may never know what the two most important ladies in Clark’s life were talking about.
13. Avengers: Age of Ultron - A Hulk “fist pump” moment
We actually don’t know the specifics of this cut scene, but there’s a very good reason for that. When he was scripting Age of Ultron, Joss Whedon ran into a brick wall with an element of the final confrontation in Sokovia.
He described a “great gag” involving the Hulk that would have been an awesome fist pump moment for audiences. Whedon says that they were building the fight around this one scene, but couldn’t find a way to justify it.
Joss has been coy with any further details because there’s a good chance thatit will show up in future Avengers movies.
He talked with the studio and said, “You can use this in another movie! Hold on to that!” Several hardcore Marvel fans have already theorized what this Hulk moment may be, some believing that it’ll appear in Infinity War due to leaked images of the toyline. Time will tell with this one.
12. X-Men - An explosive Gambit cameo
Back in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the superhero landscape was a lot different. Blade had managed to become a solid crossover hit and the old guards of the genre and Batman and Superman seemed unlikely to return to the big screen any time soon.
Bryan Singer’s X-Men became one of the biggest hits of the year in 2000, introducing movie audiences to Professor X’s team of mutant marvels.
Nowadays, references and even cameos are practically expected from our superhero entertainment, but the millennium was a very different time.
Singer apparently wanted to add a quick glimpse of Gambit in the movie.
He described a short scene where a young student is seen playing with a basketball which then blows up. He took the scene out because he felt that audiences would be confused and jokily suggested that they would question what was up with the basketballs.
To date, the character’s only full live action appearance is in X-Men Origins: Wolverine and we all know how that went. Save us Channing Tatum, you’re our only hope.
11. Man of Steel - Baby Clark screams the place down
Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel kicked off the DCEU back in 2013, delivering an assured, but divisive take on Superman’s origins. The movie spends a lot of time flashing back to Clark growing up with the Kents and learning his morality from his adopted Earth parents.
One of the cut sequences was meant to happen early in the movie and had Ma and Pa Kent taking their newfound infant son to a paediatrician. Jonathan and Martha are concerned about some of Clark’s abnormal behavior and take him in for a check-up.
The doctor runs some tests, including one to test Clark’s hearing. The doc amps up the volume and baby Kal’s superhearing takes a battering. He screams out and it shatters the clinic’s windows.
Weirdly enough, although the sequence was never filmed, it did make it into the movie’s tie-in educational book Superman’s Superpowers: I Can Read.
10. Batman - Robin’s debut
Batman (1989) is notable for not only bringing a dark and moody Dark Knight to the big screen, but also for dropping many of the sillier elements of the popular ’60s take on the character.
One of the biggest casualties was the loss of Robin, a crucial part of the character’s history from the early days, with the young teen in tights deemed incompatible with Tim Burton’s vision.
However, Burton did consider bringing the dynamic duo to the screen at one point. A Robin origin sequence made it to storyboarding before the whole idea was scrapped.
A cut chase scene had Joker driving through a Flying Graysons stage show. Joker blows up a fireworks truck and the resulting explosion collapses the rigging, bringing several unfortunate Graysons with it.
Dick survives and dives onto the Joker’s van, but fails to notice the vehicle careening toward a low-clearance tunnel. Batman grapples the young Grayson to safety and the two meet for the first time, already sharing a common enemy. This was almost certainly going to set up the sequel, but Burton went his own way with the story and it was not to be.
9. Logan - Sabretooth returns
Most X-Men fans agree that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was an all-time lowpoint for the series and the character. One of the few bright spots in the movie was Liev Schreiber’s Sabretooth, who did solid work as Wolverine’s brother, despite the script’s shortcomings.
Logan (2017) is like the anti X-Men Origins, making a right decision for every terrible choice that Origins made and delivering the uncompromising, brutal Wolverine story fans had wanted for decades.
One of the more interesting tidbits to come out about Logan’s production is that a Sabretooth cameo was considered at one point.
According to the movie’s co-writer, Scott Frank, director James Mangold floated the idea of Logan, Xavier, and Laura finding themselves in a small gambling town and coming across Victor Creed, who aids their cause.
Mangold ended up dropping the sequence because he didn’t want it to detract from the loneliness of the story and wanted to keep other mutants to a minimum. We’ll never know if Schreiber was slated to play Victor again, but it would have been fun to see him reprise his role. Still, it’s hard to argue with James Mangold’s reasoning.
8. Green Lantern - A Clark Kent cameo
Several of the writers responsible for the Arrowverse had shared universe ambitions from day one. When Greg Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim were hired to write a script for a Green Lantern movie back in 2007, their original draft had a lot of references to the wider DC universe.
There were rumors at the time that Superman, or at least his alter-ego Clark Kent, was going to make an appearance, which Guggenheim later confirmed.
Eventual director Martin Campbell decided to do away with most of the script’s references and Easter eggs when he signed on to the project. In an interview with MTV, Campbell flatly stated that he’d cut the scene and that no other DC character would be making an appearance.
You could argue that it would have taken much more than a brief glimpse of Clark to fix Green Lantern, but it could have been a worthy addition if handled correctly.
7. Spider-Man - Mechanical webshooters
The first Spider-Man movie was stuck in development hell for many years before Sam Raimi took the reigns. James Cameron famously wrote a script treatment that featured Arnold Schwarzenegger as Doctor Octopus.
The script was largely ignored, but one of Cameron’s ideas – for Spidey to create webbing organically as part of his powers – was taken forward and adapted.
However, very early versions of David Koepp script did feature the mechanical webshooters in some capacity. While Peter created the webbing biologically, he used his scientific skills and smarts to create mechanical nozzles to help aim and control the webbing, making the devices out of dismantled lighters, watches, and old jewelry.
This is a pretty decent middle ground between the two takes on the issue, but it was dropped in later versions in favor of simplifying the whole process.
6. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice - “Communion”
Mere days after Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was released in theaters, Zack Snyder wanted to give fans something to look forward to. This took the form of a deleted scene called “Communion,” which was released online in answer to Marvel’s post-credits stings.
In the short sequence, a team of armed soldiers investigate the birthing matrix that Lex Luthor used to create Doomsday.
The men stalk the structure and come across Lex, sitting in a trance-like state across from a vision of Steppenwolf, Justice League’s lead villain.
The image fades as the men zero in on Luthor and the sequence ends with Lex looking up at the men who have their weapons trained on his back. It’s a short scene, so the reason why it never made it into the theatrical cut is rather puzzling, especially as it adds connective tissue between the movie and Justice League.
The scene was later added back in to the Ultimate Cut, which many fans believe to be the definitive version.
5. Fantastic Four - More clobberin’ time
Perhaps the most diplomatic word to use to describe Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four is “compromised.” The behind-the-scenes drama reached boiling point before the movie was even released, and when critics and audiences finally got a look at the final result, it wasn’t pretty.
The studio was allegedly in full-on meddle mode with the movie and after a disappointing test screening, they decided that they needed more action.
The trouble is that they’d already cut a big action beat that had been teased in the trailer. The sequence featured The Thing being air dropped into an enemy camp full of armed bad guys.
The scene was featured at the end of practically every trailer, but Fox had deemed it too expensive. They then changed their mind about it after the screening, greenlit the sequence and then bafflingly shot it without any of Trank’s input. The footage shot didn’t match the pre-visualization nor the planned digital effects, so Trank cut it entirely.
4. Iron Man 3 - Harley’s bully
In Shane Black’s Iron Man 3, Tony finds himself without a friend in the world and stranded in rural Tennessee. He ends up meeting a local kid named Harley Keener. Tony correctly surmises that Harley is bullied and makes a deal with Keener for his help in exchange for a flash grenade from his Iron Man suit.
This is paid off later when Harley uses it to escape Eric Savin, but it was originally part of a bigger story. In the deleted scenes, we actually meet Harley’s bully, a kid named EJ. EJ gets a hefty dose of karma when he’s caught up in the water tower collapse that wrecks a large area of Rose Hill.
Once Savin has been taken care of, Stark starts a frantic search for EJ. Harley pulls him from the water and Stark resuscitates him using some improvised wiring and shocking him back to life. It’s easy to see why the sequence was cut, but it does give Harley a nice arc and proves that Tony is a hero with or without the suit.
3. The Incredible Hulk - Arctic suicide
The Incredible Hulk (2008) almost opened in a dramatically different way. The original opening scene was of Bruce Banner hiking up to some isolated ice shelf in the Arctic and attempting to take his own life.
When Banner reaches his destination, he pulls a revolver from his pants and tries to end it all. The Hulk isn’t having any of that and Banner transforms, with his giant Hulk hands crushing the gun like it was paper.
This will sound familiar to anyone who remembers Banner’s line in The Avengers, when he confesses that he got low and put a gun in his mouth only for “the other guy” to spit the bullet out.
Whether or not this is the moment that Banner is referring to is up for debate.
The jury’s still out, but it seems unlikely as very few (if any) deleted scenes are considered part of the official canon.
2. Deadpool - The Amy Winehouse running gag
Deadpool (2016) was a refreshingly violent and tasteless take on the Merc With a Mouth, and found huge success in being as immature as possible.
In an early version of the script, there was a running joke where troubled British singer Amy Winehouse, then just as famous for her addiction problems as her music, was an entry on the bar’s “dead pool,” with patrons taking bets on who will die first.
This wasn’t intended to be a throwaway line, either. There were going to be entire scenes where Amy Winehouse (almost certainly not played by the singer herself) would avoid all sorts of bizarre fatal accidents.
Eventually, “Amy” would get hit by a bus during the credits, causing Deadpool to quip “you would have thought it would be an overdose.” When the singer tragically passed away due to alcohol poisoning in 2011, the idea was quickly dropped and subsequent rewrites never referenced it again.
