James Gunn is sticking to his guns! The director reveals the one scene he refused to cut from Superman, even in spite of protests from his team.
For the complaints fans do have about Superman, they can’t say that the film isn’t tight. Some would argue too tight, with James Gunn packing the project to the gills with concepts and characters to the point that it can sometimes get confusing when it comes to the granular details of the film’s conceit.
While James Gunn did make some cuts to the final product, it seems as though there was one scene he refused to modify when it came to the final cut. The scene in question? The short moment where Superman saves the squirrel from a kaiju. Gunn reveals that he got a lot of pushback about the scene, before ultimately deciding to keep it in the film.
“[This] was probably the second- or third-most hotly debated moment in the movie,” Gunn told the Rolling Stone. “Because we showed it to test audiences and some people did not like the squirrel. They’re like, ‘Why the [frick] is he saving a squirrel? Why is he taking time out, saving a squirrel?’
“There was a cut where I cut it out and I’m like, ‘I really miss the squirrel. He’s gotta save the squirrel.’ In addition, there were also some geographic problems with where he ended up if I didn’t have him fly over with the squirrel. So I put the squirrel back in despite the protestations of some of my people on my crew.”
The Cut Scenes Of Superman
Despite the film having been out for less than a month, fans already know quite a lot about what was cut from the film. Infamously, James Gunn cut a scene of Ultraman hitting Krypto the Superdog after negative reactions from test audiences. And even though the director capitulated in this case, it was likely for the best not to show the internet’s most beloved pooch getting spiked into concrete.
However, one controversial cut made from Superman wasn’t a scene, but a series of overlays. James Gunn originally put title cards denoting when each day started during the course of the film. While ultimately scrapped, some fans wished the scenes made it into the final cut, serving as an interesting pacing tool that many modern films push to the wayside.
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