- 2 years ago
Remember that 'Penguin' scene in Fight Club?...Remember Ed Norton's breath? Yep, same breath as used two year prior in Titanic!
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00:00 It goes without saying that movies are primarily assembled
00:02 from shots shot specifically for that film,
00:05 usually at a great cost and great effort.
00:08 Yet sometimes, typically in order to save costs
00:11 or less generously cut corners,
00:13 slivers of footage might in fact be recycled
00:16 and repurposed from existing films.
00:19 For the most part, this reuse of previously shot material
00:22 will go undetected by the overwhelming majority of viewers.
00:25 But of course, there are always gonna be
00:27 those obsessives among us who manage to notice
00:29 even the sneakiest bit of Hollywood trickery.
00:32 I'm Jess from World Culture and here are 10 more movies
00:35 you didn't know recycled footage from other films.
00:38 Number 10, "Spider-Man's" dream sequence
00:41 lifted shots from "Darkman" and "The Beyond."
00:44 While Sam Raimi was editing 2002's "Spider-Man,"
00:46 he learned that there wasn't enough money in the budget
00:49 to create a more visually elaborate sequence
00:52 for Peter Parker's post-Spider-Bite nightmare.
00:55 And so he had to resort to repurposing existing footage
00:58 to his own ends.
00:59 Most notably, a shot of his synapse
01:01 is actually taken from Raimi's own 1990 movie, "Darkman,"
01:05 although it's been digitally altered and rotated a bit
01:08 and there's a bunch of spiders on there now.
01:10 Secondly, there's a fleeting glimpse
01:11 of a tarantula from above,
01:12 which is taken from Lucho Fulci's
01:14 cult classic 1981 horror film, "The Beyond."
01:17 The crucial link between all three of these films
01:20 is "Spider-Man" editor Bob Mirowski,
01:22 who also worked as an assistant editor on "Darkman"
01:25 and holds the US distribution rights for "The Beyond."
01:28 Raimi credits Mirowski entirely
01:30 with piecing the dream sequence together,
01:32 even if it wasn't how he originally envisioned it.
01:35 Given that 99.8% of people who saw "Spider-Man"
01:39 didn't notice the shot was recycled, I call that a success.
01:42 Number nine, "Back to the Future Part II's" cloud shots
01:45 were borrowed from Firefox.
01:47 "Back to the Future II's" opening credits
01:49 are set in front of breathtaking footage
01:51 of the DeLorean soaring through the clouds
01:53 in first-person perspective.
01:54 Though you probably assumed a production
01:56 as well-minted as this, rocking a $40 million budget
02:00 over double that of the original,
02:01 probably just strapped a camera to an aircraft
02:04 and flew it into the heavens,
02:05 that actually wasn't the case at all.
02:07 Instead, director Robert Zemeckis reused footage
02:10 that appeared in the 1982 Clint Eastwood
02:13 action thriller "Firefox,"
02:15 where Eastwood played an American pilot
02:17 tasked with stealing the titular high-tech Soviet aircraft.
02:20 Legendary Hollywood aerial cinematographer Clay Lacy
02:23 shot most of the in-air footage for "Firefox,"
02:26 which appears prominently
02:27 during the film's various dogfight sequences,
02:30 and was then seamlessly used again seven years later
02:33 in "Back to the Future Part II."
02:35 Possibly as a wink to this,
02:36 but also probably to the Western genre as a whole,
02:40 Marty McFly actually used the pseudonym Clint Eastwood
02:43 for the Western-themed "Back to the Future Part III."
02:46 Number eight, "Unstoppable" took a speedometer shot
02:49 from "Gone in 60 Seconds."
02:51 Tony Scott's "Unstoppable" is an absurdly entertaining,
02:54 dead-simple action flick about two working-class men
02:57 attempting to stop a runaway train.
02:59 And per the late Scott's typical hyperactive style,
03:02 it rarely lingers on anyone's shot for too long.
03:05 That certainly helped disguise the fact
03:07 that Scott used a shot
03:08 from another vehicle-centric action film
03:10 released a decade earlier, "Gone in 60 Seconds."
03:13 In "Unstoppable's" climax,
03:15 Weldon Ned is pursuing the locomotive in his pickup truck.
03:18 And as he speeds up to reach the front of the train,
03:21 for a fleeting second,
03:22 we catch a glimpse of the speedometer.
03:24 However, car enthusiasts might have noticed
03:26 that this definitely isn't the speedometer
03:28 of the Ford F-350 that Ned is driving.
03:31 That's because this insert shot was taken
03:33 from a scene in "Gone in 60 Seconds,"
03:36 where protagonist Randall speeds away from the police
03:38 in an entirely different car.
03:40 Number seven, "All the Money in the World"
03:42 reused a helicopter shot from "Black Hawk Down."
03:45 Helicopter shots are so often used for establishing shots,
03:48 and they're so generic at this point,
03:50 they're probably not gonna stick in an audience's mind
03:53 for too long.
03:54 Nevertheless, while watching Ridley Scott's
03:55 more recent dramatic thriller, "All the Money in the World,"
03:58 some viewers noticed that an establishing shot of Morocco
04:01 was actually pulled from Scott's own 2001 war classic,
04:05 "Black Hawk Down."
04:06 This is a clever and interesting use of existing resources,
04:09 given that "All the Money in the World's"
04:11 Morocco-set interior scenes
04:13 were actually shot in Suffolk, England,
04:16 while "Black Hawk Down,"
04:17 despite being set in Mogadishu, Somalia,
04:20 was actually filmed in Morocco.
04:22 Scott had filmed large portions
04:23 of his previous film, "Gladiator," in Morocco,
04:25 and evidently had an affinity for the region.
04:28 And given that, "All the Money in the World"
04:30 ended up costing $50 million.
04:32 That is a high price tag for a drama
04:34 which didn't contain any lavish visual effects,
04:37 so it makes sense that they'd save some money
04:39 where they could.
04:40 Number six, "The Limey" repurposed
04:42 young Terrence Stamp scenes from "Poor Cow."
04:45 Steven Soderbergh's terrific 1999 neo-noir, "The Limey,"
04:48 was produced for a fairly svelte 10 million bucks.
04:52 And when it came to assembling flashbacks
04:53 to the earlier life of Terrence Stamp's protagonist, Wilson,
04:57 the ever-creative Soderbergh devised an ingenious way
05:00 to do it on the cheap.
05:01 Rather than assemble a shoot with a younger actor
05:03 who resembles Stamp, Soderbergh instead
05:05 just dug back into his career to see what he could use.
05:08 He settled upon "Poor Cow,"
05:10 the 1967 feature debut of the legendary filmmaker,
05:14 Ken Loach, where Stamp portrays Dave,
05:16 a criminal who's sent to prison following a botched robbery.
05:20 Clips of Dave romancing the film's protagonist, Joy,
05:22 and her subsequently visiting him in prison
05:25 are used to depict Wilson's younger life
05:27 with his dead daughter's mother
05:28 and his own stint in "The Slammer,"
05:30 lent context by Stamp's added voiceover.
05:33 It's a clever trick because it does certainly feel
05:35 like we're watching Stamp in those flashbacks.
05:37 The footage being three decades old at the time
05:40 and from a movie many viewers won't have seen
05:42 makes it easy to accept
05:44 that we're just seeing a young Wilson.
05:46 Number five, "Fight Club" used breath effects from "Titanic."
05:50 Now this is where recycled film effects
05:52 get pretty darn creative.
05:53 And if anybody's gonna do it,
05:54 you'd trust David Fincher to be the one.
05:56 You probably remember a scene early in "Fight Club"
05:59 where the narrator imagines himself entering an icy cave
06:03 and discovering his power animal,
06:05 in this case, a CGI penguin that tells him, "Slide."
06:08 The narrator's icy breath is visible
06:10 throughout this brief experience.
06:12 And while you might freely assume the VFX-heavy film
06:15 simply concocted the breath from scratch in post,
06:18 this actually isn't true.
06:19 The recently defunct animation studio, Blue Sky Studios,
06:23 who created the Ice Age films,
06:25 worked on both "Fight Club" and James Cameron's "Titanic."
06:28 For "Titanic," they created a bunch of bespoke breath effects
06:31 for when Jack and Rose are out on the water.
06:33 These effects were actually reused in this "Fight Club" scene
06:36 with the very same animations being imported,
06:39 manipulated, and tracked onto Edward Norton
06:42 as he moved throughout the cave.
06:43 While some online reports claim that Leo DiCaprio's own breath
06:46 was replicated in "Fight Club,"
06:48 this hasn't ever been officially confirmed by the VFX artists.
06:52 The breath elements were indeed recycled, though.
06:55 Number four, Six Underground recycled a shot
06:58 of a house from "Pain and Gain."
07:00 Say what you want about Michael Bay,
07:01 but as mega-budget filmmakers go,
07:03 the guy has a surprisingly economical sensibility,
07:07 frequently recycling shots throughout his filmography.
07:10 You're probably aware that car chase footage
07:12 from the island was reused for "Transformers Dark of the Moon,"
07:15 albeit with 500% more CGI robots.
07:19 And you probably also know that clips
07:21 of an aircraft carrier from "Pearl Harbor"
07:23 reappeared in the original "Transformers."
07:25 But you might've missed a subtler act of recycling
07:28 in his recent Netflix action flick, "Six Underground."
07:31 Midway through the film, one played by Ryan Reynolds
07:34 delivers a monologue about his past,
07:36 accompanied by a dizzying montage of footage.
07:39 When he mentions cleaning house,
07:40 we literally get a shot of a house being sold,
07:43 the very same house that was featured
07:45 in Bay's 2013 action comedy, "Pain and Gain."
07:48 In that film, the exact same house is being used
07:51 for the scene where Adrian and Robin buy a home,
07:53 which they then ecstatically roll around in front of.
07:56 While the specific shot of the lawn is different
07:58 in that it doesn't contain Anthony Mackie or Rebel Wilson,
08:01 it was clearly excess material
08:03 left over from "Pain and Gain's" shoot.
08:05 Rather than Bay returning to the same location again
08:08 to capture what is essentially, basically,
08:10 a throwaway image of a house.
08:12 Number three, "Cars 2" recycled the jungle from "Up."
08:15 Back in early 2020, a post on the movie details subreddit
08:19 went viral after a user reported
08:21 that his seven-year-old son had realized
08:23 that footage from "Cars 2" was recycled.
08:25 Early in the film, we learn that "Ultimate" antagonist,
08:28 Sir Miles Axelrod, attempted to circumnavigate the world
08:31 without using a GPS, as caused him to run out of fuel
08:35 at a rainforest and be left for dead.
08:38 The forest locale is actually copy-pasted,
08:40 basically wholesale, from the South American jungle scene
08:43 in "Up," released two years earlier in 2009.
08:46 The precise similarity is best noticed in the scene
08:49 where Carl throws a tennis ball into the forest
08:51 in the hopes of losing golden retriever Doug.
08:54 Though Disney has a history of recycling animation
08:56 in its 2D animated classics,
08:58 Pixar generally does a much better job
09:00 of concealing any corner cutting.
09:02 Enough that only a kid who obsessively watches these movies
09:06 ad infinitum had much of a chance of ever noticing.
09:09 Number two, "Transformers," the movie,
09:11 altered animation from "Fist of the North Star."
09:14 If Disney catch all the flack for recycling animations
09:17 and sequences to save money,
09:19 then they're certainly not the only ones.
09:21 Toy animation were also caught out
09:23 while producing 1986's "Transformers," the movie.
09:26 The scene where Unicron devours the planet
09:28 contains a distinctive shot of Unicron going full ham.
09:32 That's actually a variation on an extremely similar visual
09:35 from "Fist of the North Star,"
09:37 another animated film from Toei
09:39 released just five months earlier.
09:41 Releasing in the blurry VHS era of 1986 as these films did,
09:45 Toei presumably figured that nobody would ever notice
09:48 or that folks would one day scan through
09:50 high-resolution re-releases frame by frame
09:52 looking for this sort of thing.
09:54 But of course they did, and when viewed side by side,
09:56 the similarities are pretty impossible to dispute.
09:59 Number one, malevolent lifted car chases
10:02 from "The Corruptor" and "Marked for Death."
10:04 While certainly the least known movie on this list,
10:06 the 2002 Lou Diamond Phillips
10:09 starring action thriller "Malevolent"
10:10 so brazenly recycles footage
10:12 from other much higher profile films
10:14 that it absolutely deserves a mention.
10:17 Watching this totally pedestrian genre film
10:19 might give you a strange feeling of familiarity
10:21 you can't quite put your finger on,
10:23 beyond it being a totally garden variety actioner, of course.
10:26 That's because in order to curb costs,
10:28 this 95-minute film is bookended with car chases
10:32 that are just straight up lifted out of other movies.
10:34 The opening chase is a chopped up version
10:36 of the memorable chase from the 1999
10:39 Chow Yun-Fat Mark Wahlberg film "The Corruptor."
10:42 And the finale similarly reuses a car chase
10:45 from the 1990 Steven Seagal vehicle "Marked for Death."
10:48 Hilariously, in the latter case,
10:50 it's clear that Lou Diamond Phillips
10:52 isn't even driving the car,
10:54 and anyone who squints will surely be able
10:56 to make out Steven Seagal behind the wheel.
10:58 A lot of people might be complaining
10:59 about those shady geezer teaser action movies
11:02 that are being made nowadays,
11:03 but at least they're not completely pulling scenes
11:05 from other movies.
11:06 That's the end of our list,
11:07 but do let me know down in that comment section
11:09 if you can think of any other movies
11:11 that recycle footage which most people don't know about.
11:14 As always, I've been Jess from WhatCulture.
11:16 Thank you so much for hanging out with me.
11:18 If you like, you can come say hi to me
11:20 on my Twitter account, where I'm @JessMcDonald,
11:22 but make sure you stay tuned to us here
11:24 for plenty more great lists.
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