Just so you know, some of the content in this post is a) gross, b) disturbing, or c) both. These scenes were cut for a reason so please proceed with caution.
1. According to the book John Hughes: A Life in Film, actors Molly Ringwald and Ally Sheedy, with the help of producer Michelle Manning, joined forces to get Hughes to cut a scene involving "gratuitous female nudity" from The Breakfast Club.
The scene involved the members of the Breakfast Club spying on an attractive gym teacher while she was topless. Karen Leigh Hopkins was cast as the gym teacher before Ringwald, Sheedy, and Manning pointed out that the whole idea was sexist.
Hughes listened and replaced the gym teacher with a janitor, who was originally played by Rick Moranis. But when Moranis played the character as a "Russian caricature," he was fired and replaced by John Kapelos. Apparently, the third time was the charm because Kapelos actually made it into the movie.
2. Kay Cannon, who directed Blockers, told Cinemablend that she significantly cut down a scene where a bunch of teenagers vomit all over a limo because it was "just too gross" for test audiences.
Cannon said, "There was a lot more puke and there was a lot more going on. Like Kayla [played by Geraldine Viswanathan] was having this whole drug thing where she thought the puke was confetti and there was just a lot happening. And it wasn't working."
While Cannon struggled at first with how to fix the scene, since it was both narratively essential and seemingly too gross for audiences, she ultimately drew inspiration from the film Baby Driver. Cannon watched the film and got "totally inspired" by it. She said, "I was like, 'I'm going to put this puke to music.' We trimmed it down and put it to music. And I tested it in front of an audience with the music and they loved it. And so that was really helpful."
3. Speaking of puke, director Paul Feig told Yahoo Entertainment that he cut one moment from the infamous food poisoning scene in Bridesmaids because everyone involved thought it went too far.
The moment involved Ellie Kemper's character projectile vomiting on the framed wedding photo of the woman who owns the fancy bridal salon she and her fellow bridesmaids are in the process of destroying.
Feig said, "We immediately went, 'OK, I think that was too much.'"
4. Feig actually cut another viscerally gross Bridesmaids scene, though this one got the chop before it was ever even filmed, thanks to The Hangover.
In this version of the script, the bridesmaids would've made it to Las Vegas. Feig told Insider, "We had this big scene in a male strip club where they are all drunk and Annie gets pulled onstage by this cowboy stripper. He has her lie down on the dance floor and dances over the top of her, but ball sweat drips into her open mouth as she's screaming."
But when The Hangover became a hit, Feig decided that to avoid comparisons to it, the bridesmaids needed to skip Vegas. Feig said, "We did not want to hear, 'This is the female Hangover. That was our kryptonite." Instead, co-screenwriter Annie Mumolo wrote the iconic scene wherein protagonist Annie's erratic behavior gets them all kicked off their flight long before they touch down in Sin City.
Fun fact: Mumolo actually plays the terrified woman who sits next to Annie on the flight.
5. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who wrote Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, told IGN that Marvel boss Kevin Feige shot down one Captain America moment from Infinity War for being too icky.
The scene involved Cap eating mashed potatoes following "a big fight with criminals." Falcon then points out, "You’re bleeding into your mashed potatoes." And lo and behold, Captain America would realize that he was, in fact, eating bloody potatoes.
Markus said, "I remember Kevin going, 'He’s bleeding into his mashed potatoes?! I don’t want to see that!' Yeah, maybe we went a little too…something.” Needless to say, the scene was never shot.
6. Somehow, there was a moment in a Black Mirror episode that was way too depressing, even for Black Mirror.
In "San Junipero," two women (played by Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Mackenzie Davis) fall in love in an artificial reality designed to allow the elderly and the deceased to enjoy youthful, happy, and permanent — albeit virtual — lives.
During a panel at Vulture Fest, creator Charlie Brooker said, "In 'San Junipero,' there was going to be a sequence in which Gugu’s character is spending some time in a kindergarten, and you realize subsequently that those were all deceased children she was spending time with. We realized that’d just be too sad." Notably, "San Junipero" is one of the few Black Mirror episodes that ends on an uplifting note, with the two lovers reunited in their paradise.
7. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything session, The Boys co-creator Eric Kripke answered the question, "What scene was cut from the show that you wish could have stayed in?" And, uh, it's a doozy.
Kripke wrote, "There was ONE SCENE that Amazon said, 'FUCK NO, you have to cut.' I couldn't quite understand why considering everything else we have in the show, but... Homelander, after being dressed down by Stilwell in Episode 2, was standing on one of the Chrysler Building eagles. He pulled his pants down and started jerking off, mumbling, 'I can do whatever I want' over and over again until he climaxed all over New York City. We shot it! Oh my god, Anthony [Starr] was the BEST in that scene. Amazon seemed to think it wasn't necessary. I thought it told me something about his psyche."
Kripke said the debate over this scene "may have been the ONLY fight" he lost during the first season of the show.
8. Zack Snyder told IGN about a chilling sequence from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice that got cut because it "represented this dark side" of a Superman constantly haunted by cries for help from people he doesn't have time to save.
Snyder said, "We had a scene that we cut from the movie where [Superman] tries to look for [his mother] when he finds out that Lex has got her. ... Because when he was looking for his mom, he heard all the cries of all the potential crimes going on in the city."
He went on, "I kind of like the idea that he’s taught himself not to look because if he looks, it’s just never ending, right? You have to know when, as Superman, to intervene and when not to. Or not when not to. You can’t be everywhere at once. Literally you can’t be everywhere at once, so he has to be really selective in a weird way about where he chooses to interfere."
9. And now, three stunts that were too extreme to air, even for Jackass. Longtime cast member Steve-O disclosed these on a 2021 appearance on Hot Ones' Truth or Dab show.
The first, simply entitled "Box Down Stairs," involved Johnny Knoxville sealing himself in a big cardboard box — along with a few pillows for, you know, safety reasons — before getting pushed down some cement stairs. Steve-O called it "violent as hell."
The second involved Knoxville shooting himself with a handgun.
And the third saw Knoxville announce, "I'm Johnny Knoxville and I'm going to get hit by a car real soon." His prediction came true and when he was asked what the hell he was thinking, Knoxville replied, "I wore two pairs of jeans so I'd be safe."
10. Aquaman director James Wan told Collider that one scene never made it out of screenwriter Will Beall's script because it was "out-there" and "a bit weird."
The scene involved Aquaman getting thrown into a "really awful prison deep in Atlantis" and promptly starting a prison riot. Needless to say, the prison guards are sharks and once blood gets drawn, it "starts a feeding frenzy." Things, presumably, got gorier from there.
Wan said, "It just went nuts. We’re talking like clouds of blood billowing everywhere and he uses that to escape. I was like, 'Holy crap, I don’t know if I can do that.'"
11. Director André Øvredal told Slate that he significantly changed one scene from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark because it was too graphic for the movie adaptation.
The scene involved Harold, a sentient and vengeful scarecrow, skinning some farmers alive. Øvredal said, "It wasn’t directly the ending of the story in the book but it related to the fact that the character in the story gets their skin torn off."
Øvredal continued, "Everybody I talked to who has a relationship to these books, they remember going to the Scholastic school fair and fighting over the books in the library when they were kids and discovering and reading them under the sheets in the bed. It just would be so unfair to the books if we made an ugly, ugly horror movie. That can sometimes be amazing and I love that myself, but that was never the meaning of this movie."
12. Director Christopher Nolan dropped Deputy Commissioner Peter Foley's violent death scene from The Dark Knight Rises because he thought it would've gotten the movie slapped with an NC-17 rating, according to Foley's actor Matthew Modine.
Modine said, "I remember I looked at Christopher Nolan when we shot it and his face was white."
13. A storyboarded scene from an earlier version of Zootopia showed a much darker version of the titular city, where predators and prey live in supposed harmony.
In the scene, protagonists Judy (a bunny) and Nick (a fox) find themselves at a "taming party," a twisted coming-of-age event wherein a little bear is outfitted with a shock collar designed to curb his predatory instincts.
In the behind-the-scenes feature Imagining Zootopia, the filmmakers discussed cutting the collars out of the story, which negated both the taming party concept and much of the work they'd already done on the film. When the folks at Pixar saw the collar version, they told the Zootopia team that the collars made it impossible to adore and admire the egalitarian promise of the city at the story's core. The filmmakers agreed and shifted the plot's focus to stereotypes and more subtle forms of bias.
14. And finally: Scar's death scene in The Lion King was almost way, way more upsetting.
In this version, Scar throws Simba off of Pride Rock after tricking his nephew into saving his life. Scar laughs maniacally before being consumed by flames while Simba, who actually survived the fall, watches.
This was evidently a lil' too dark for a Disney movie so the filmmakers went for the way more lighthearted "Scar is devoured by hyenas" ending.
