8 Movies That Missed Out The Money Shot
No flag for Neil Armstrong?! Captain America didn't die for this!
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00:00 Movies love playing with audiences expectations. Directors know what you want to see and often will spend 90 minutes or more
00:07 hyping up one big moment.
00:10 However, sometimes that moment or the money shot as I'm going to refer to it from here on out is either cut out or
00:17 purposefully withheld, leaving audiences just kind of scratching their heads. With that in mind then I'm Josh from WhatCulture.com
00:25 And these are eight movies that missed out the money shot. Number eight, the heist Reservoir Dogs. Now yes, of course
00:31 It's the entire point of Reservoir Dogs that you don't actually get to see the heist that the entire rat's nest plot
00:38 blossoms around. But that doesn't mean that it's not a hugely conspicuous absence nonetheless.
00:43 Quentin Tarantino has often been accused of self-indulgence in the amount of dialogue that he stuffs into his films.
00:50 But he also usually balances it with action and copious lashings of hyper violence.
00:56 But in stark contrast to his later films which unflinchingly crowned those violent sequences as the jewels in the story,
01:02 early Tarantino preferred to instead keep some of his cards hidden. And like I said,
01:08 it somewhat suits the story since it means that it's harder to tell what the true story of what went down is and
01:13 so we have to follow Mr. White's lack of clarity.
01:16 It would have been a delightfully Tarantino-esque sequence after all given the testimonies about it.
01:22 Number seven, Frank Abagnale's last escape, Catch Me If You Can. Catch Me If You Can is a pretty packed story already,
01:29 with some of Frank Abagnale's exploits leaving jaws firmly on the floor.
01:33 But what if you were to find out that Abagnale's greatest ever moment and his most
01:38 unbelievable criminal achievement didn't actually make it into the film?
01:43 Well, you need not wonder on that reality much longer because that is exactly what happened in this film.
01:49 So in the real world after his arrest, somehow
01:52 Abagnale had his detention commitment papers forgotten and was then mistaken for an undercover prison inspector
01:58 with all the inherent privileges that come with that.
02:02 Naturally, he took advantage of this and got an accomplice to pose as his fiancee to smuggle him a business card
02:09 belonging to a so-called
02:11 Inspector CW Dunlap of the Bureau of Prisons that she had stolen.
02:15 So all Frank had to do from there on out was reveal his undercover
02:19 secret, show his card and give the doctored card to his guards as proof of his handlap.
02:25 Then his accomplice would answer and she was able to organize an unsupervised meeting allowing Abagnale to flee from
02:32 Washington where he again evaded escape when he was recognized by claiming to be an FBI agent.
02:37 So yeah, it's a mad, mad story and surely one that deserved to be in the finished film.
02:43 Number six, The Kraken's Death - Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End.
02:47 Just like we had a little game of imagination in the last entry, this time
02:51 I want you to imagine a world where a film franchise sets up an absolutely unstoppable force
02:56 so powerful that it's able to kill the lead character part of the way through his own film series and
03:02 then the next time that we see the same deadly force, it's just a corpse washed up on a beach somewhere.
03:09 Well, that's exactly the sad frustrating tale of the Kraken from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise
03:15 which ended a dead man's chest eating Jack Sparrow and settling his debt to Davy Jones in the process.
03:21 After we'd watched the beast outmuscled Jaws and take out ships like they were made of twigs on the high sea,
03:28 its killing of Sparrow was the perfect escalation and confirmation of its threat.
03:33 This was clearly the real deal and we had a whole other Pirates film to see how the Kraken would be defeated.
03:40 But then the legendary beast was just sacrificed in order to make the East India Trading Company look more formidable and uncompromising.
03:48 So the Kraken went from a legendary figure to just an afterthought dumped on a beach
03:53 and we didn't get an answer to dead man's chest's most pressing conundrum.
03:58 Number 5. The victory at Orleans. Joan of Arc.
04:01 Not only did George Millet basically invent special effects and cinema as we know it,
04:06 just so that someone could eventually get Scary Movie 5 made. Hooray, I guess.
04:11 But he also invented intelligent restrained filmmaking as well.
04:16 In 1900, the grandfather of film made Joan of Arc, shooting over 200 meters of film and 12 different sets,
04:23 which was a huge amount back then, but even he knew his limits.
04:27 Thanks to the prohibitive cost then, Millet was forced to leave out one of the single most definitive moments in Joan of Arc's entire life.
04:35 But you know, her death. That being the victory at the siege of Orleans.
04:39 Truthfully, the director just realized that he didn't have the space nor the budget to do the battle justice,
04:45 so he simply left it out.
04:46 And yeah, this one might have been the better choice as better to leave us wanting more than to give us an unsatisfying replacement.
04:53 Number 4. The wolf fight, The Grey.
04:55 On the surface, The Grey looked as though it was going to be a fairly conventional man vs beast creature film,
05:01 with a group of survivors relentlessly pursued by a pack of man-eating wolves,
05:05 until a smaller group of them fought back, with Liam Neeson winning the day.
05:09 In reality though, it's far more of an exercise in philosophical musings and a harrowing experience
05:15 that builds towards a crescendo that never actually arrives, at least not fully anyway.
05:21 See, Neeson's casting was very much designed to foreshadow him being the ultimate survivor,
05:26 who would take the fight to the wolves.
05:28 And then, in the final flick, that climactic fight between man and wolf simply didn't happen.
05:34 We got to see him preparing by making his weapon, yeah sure, but then the movie cuts to credits,
05:40 and all we see afterwards in the stinger is the sight of the combatants lying in the snow.
05:45 Number 3. Taking out the bullet farmer, Mad Max Fury Road.
05:49 In George Miller's exceptional Mad Max reboot, the titular character is very much a man of few words
05:55 and lots of action, even when it's sometimes fairly reluctant.
05:58 If he's forced to do extreme things to save situation, or the wives in his and Fury's protection,
06:04 he absolutely will, and it'll usually end up being pretty violent.
06:09 Or at least, that's what you'd expect if you knew the character from the older Mad Max films.
06:14 In actuality, Fury Road consciously refuses to show Max's biggest opportunity for a violent flourish.
06:21 When threatened by the bullet farmer when the war rig ends up stuck in the mud,
06:25 Max takes it upon himself to deal with the threat,
06:28 taking a knife and a can of fuel, and walking towards danger into the fog.
06:32 But instead of us seeing him take on insurmountable odds,
06:36 all we get to see is Furiosa watching an explosion in the fog,
06:40 and then seeing Max walk back out of it covered in the blood of his enemies,
06:43 and dragging a haul of weapons.
06:45 That was Max's big moment, and it ends up being completely hidden.
06:49 Sure, again, the gag works in the context of the movie,
06:52 but it still does feel like we missed out on a seriously good time.
06:56 Cyclops may be an enjoyable character in the comics,
07:05 but in Fox's original X-Men series, he was a little dweeb.
07:09 Actor James Marsden did do his best with the material,
07:12 but the writing just wasn't there,
07:14 and the team's supposed leader was continually sidelined in favour of Wolverine.
07:20 It's no surprise then that Marsden wasn't too bothered about the role,
07:23 and opted to star in Superman Returns when the opportunity came up.
07:28 This meant that his character had to be written out of X-Men 3,
07:31 and thus Cyclops became the first real victim of the Dark Phoenix, aka Jean Grey.
07:37 In the movie, when Cyclops sees his presumed dead lover and moves to kiss her,
07:41 Jean uses her Phoenix powers to obliterate him mid-snog.
07:46 Sadly, though, the movie cuts away before the actual act,
07:49 cutting to Cyclops' sunglasses with his body nowhere to be seen.
07:53 In the context of the movie, it's such a throwaway death the way it's filmed,
07:57 as it's not even given the grandiosity of happening on screen.
08:00 Like, come on guys, this could have started the movie off with a bang,
08:04 but instead it just leaves everyone scratching their heads.
08:07 Number 1 - The Flag, First Man
08:09 After breaking the entire world's hearts with the devastating end of La La Land,
08:13 Damien Chazelle took the next natural step in his Price of Dreams trilogy,
08:18 which I have unofficially just titled literally just this second,
08:22 and managed to upset a smaller but far more vocal group of people.
08:26 Chazelle's big crime happened when he decided to leave out the American flag
08:30 planting scene from Neil Armstrong's first walk on the moon.
08:34 Now, the flag does appear in some shots, but the actual planting of it is omitted
08:39 as a conscious decision, as Chazelle has explained in interviews, saying,
08:43 "I show the American flag standing on the lunar surface,
08:46 but the flag being physically planted into the surface
08:49 is one of several moments that it chose not to focus upon.
08:52 To address the question of whether this was a political statement, the answer is no.
08:56 My goal with this movie was to share with audiences the unseen,
08:59 unknown aspects of America's mission to the moon."
09:03 Now, regardless of the reason, it is pretty obvious that the flag planting
09:07 is a big money shot of the entire sequence, arguably,
09:11 and it was one that was intentionally skipped over.
09:14 So, that's our list. I want to know what you guys think down in the comments below.
09:17 What do you think about not getting to see these moments?
09:19 Do you think it was a missed opportunity, or do you think it actually makes the films better,
09:23 leaving it up to our imagination?
09:25 Let us know, and while you're down there, could you also please give us a like, share, subscribe,
09:28 and head over to whatculture.com for more lists and news like this every single day.
09:33 Even if you don't though, I've been Josh, thanks so much for watching, and I'll see you soon.