The Greatest Movie Scenes That Almost Never Happened

In 1969, Midnight Cowboy expanded the subject matter a Hollywood movie could handle, exploring the grittier, seamier side of New York City through the eyes of Jon Voight as a sex worker and Dustin Hoffman as his pimp. It's fondly remembered for many reasons, but there's one scene in particular that's become the signature of Midnight Cowboy and New York itself. While taking Joe Buck (Voight) across town, Ratso Rizzo (Hoffman) nearly gets run over by a cab. Most of us would be shaken, but Rizzo slams on the hood and yells, "I'm walkin' here!"

It's an iconic moment that's been referenced everywhere from Rick and Morty to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But if things had gone according to plan, it might not have happened at all. As Hoffman told the National Post, "It was a low-budget movie. ... Consequently, on Sixth Avenue, there was no money to stack it with extras. ... The first take a cab jumps the light ... I wound up saying, 'I'm walkin' here!' But what was going through my head is, 'Hey, we're makin' a movie here! And you just f****d this shot up.' But somehow something told me, you'd better keep it within the character." 

To Hoffman's surprise, director John Schlesinger loved the ad-lib and told him to redo it every take. This means there's some disagreement about whether it was an ad-lib, but the most likely explanation is in the middle — Hoffman improvised the line and then reused it for the take that appeared in the film, complete with an extra driving a different cab.

Francis Ford Coppola launched his career and a whole bunch of others with his Oscar-winning blockbuster, The Godfather. That included relaunching the career of '50s star Marlon Brando, who got the most iconic role of his filmography as the Mafia patriarch Don Vito Corleone. Even if you haven't seen the film, the character should be instantly recognizable, with his swollen cheeks, thin mustache, and the cat he strokes in the memorable opening scene. In it, he's sitting in his office during his daughter's wedding, and according to Mafia tradition, he can't refuse any request on this special day. And so, a man begs Vito to send some goons to rough up his daughter's rapist. 

That violence lurks behind their conversation about etiquette, and Vito's affectionate handling of the adorable kitten sums up the contrast. It's hard to imagine the scene without the cat, but it was never part of the plan until the feline introduced itself onto the set. In fact, Coppola described the cat's presence as a spur-of-the-moment decision, saying, "I saw the cat running around the studio and took it and put it in [Brando's] hands without a word." Brando apparently didn't miss a beat and made it an inseparable part of his performance. The crew had more trouble, though. The cat purred so loud it nearly drowned out Brando's lines, and some technicians were worried they might need to add subtitles!

When Rogue One: A Star Wars Story came out, fans enjoyed the story of a team of Rebel guerillas stealing the plans for the Death Star, but what they really couldn't stop talking about was a scene near the end where Darth Vader boards a Rebel ship to get them back, carving his way through soldier after soldier like a horror movie villain. Before we even see him, we hear the familiar, nightmarish sound of his machine-assisted breathing in the dark. Then, he's hellishly illuminated in the red glow of his lightsaber, and he begins mowing down the Rebels. He shrugs off laser blasts and disarms and thrashes the good guys without even touching them. One frantically bangs on the door, begging for help, and many viewers felt his terror. After the disappointment of his underwhelming origin story in the prequels, this moment was a potent reminder to fans of why they loved the Sith Lord in the first place.

And they almost never got to see it. Editor John Gilroy told Yahoo! News that the scene wasn't added until after the primary shoot was finished. That was when he came in to put together the new footage his brother, Tony, had shot along with director Gareth Edwards. One of their goals was to reshape Vader's role. Edwards had originally conceived of him as a threatening background presence. But in the reshoots, he and the Gilroys realized that threat needed to pay off. And it certainly did, with a scene that still terrifies fans years later.

The Room has developed a reputation as not just one of the worst movies ever made but one of the most fascinatingly bizarre, too. Writer/director/star Tommy Wiseau seems to exist in a different reality from the rest of us, and few scenes show that better than the one where his character, Johnny, goes to pick up some roses for his girlfriend, Lisa. Johnny has a head-spinningly rapid-fire conversation with the florist, full of baffling dialogue ("That's me!"). It all builds up to one memorable and meme-able moment where he says, basically all in one breath, "Here you go, keep the change. Hi, doggie." And then he pets an ugly little pug sitting on the counter.

Not only was the pug not in the script, Wiseau had already done multiple takes without even seeing it there. In his book, The Disaster Artist, Wiseau's costar Greg Sestero remembers, "It wasn't until one of the very last takes that Tommy noticed something that none of us had, which was the tiny pug dog sitting on the counter. The little guy hadn't moved at all since we'd come in. Not once. He just sat there, motionless. When Tommy finally noticed the dog, it was in the middle of a take. Going with it, Tommy patted it on its tiny, wrinkly noggin and said, 'Hi, doggie,' and walked away." Then again, maybe it isn't surprising. Could anyone really write a scene that strange and awkward?

Director Mel Brooks followed up his Western-spoofing Blazing Saddles with an even more successful take on the horror genre in Young Frankenstein. Here, he reteamed with Gene Wilder, who played Frederick Frankenstein ("It's pronounced 'Fronkensteen!"), a successful American doctor who wants nothing to do with his family name until he's called back to the ancestral castle in Transylvania, where he ends up recreating his grandfather's famous experiment.

Like all of Mel Brooks' spoofs, Young Frankenstein packs in hundreds of gags. In fact, there are so many that Brooks ended up throwing in more on the fly. In one scene, the local police inspector unexpectedly drops in on Frederick just after he's reanimated the monster. Frederick tries to distract the inspector with a friendly game of darts, but the conversation gets tense when the inspector brings up the question of Frederick's monster-making heritage. So tense, in fact, that Frederick ends up throwing his darts everywhere but the dart board. One of them apparently hits a cat, who lets out a hilarious scream. 

That was all Mel Brooks, who threw in the sound effects from off-screen. He also appeared earlier as a howling wolf when Frederick arrives in Transylvania. ("Werewolf?" "There wolf. There castle.") These animal-themed ad-libs were actually the only way Mel Brooks could appear. He told The A.V. Club, "That was the deal Gene Wilder had. He says, 'If you're not in it, I'll do it.' ... He says, 'You have a way of breaking the fourth wall, whether you want to or not.'"

If there was ever a labor of love in the great director Martin Scorsese's career, it was The Last Temptation of Christ. Inspired by his childhood love of biblical epics, he spent nearly a decade trying to bring it to the screen. The movie stars Willem Dafoe in an unconventional version of the life of Christ, culminating with the namesake temptation, where Jesus walks off the cross. He lives a long, ordinary life before realizing it's all a satanic illusion, and he begs God to let him go back and die for the sins of the world. It ends with Jesus embracing his duty and triumphantly shouting, "It is accomplished!" as the film seemingly breaks down, flooding with light and color. Is it a vision of heaven? A statement that this moment of God sacrificing himself for humanity is so earth-shattering that the film can't even contain it?

All those interpretations are valid, but Scorsese didn't have any of them in mind. He told Richard Schickel, "It was exposed by mistake. ... I was upset until I realized that it was the perfect ending." It's hard to think of a more perfect one. Most directors work their whole lives without ever filming a conclusion as brilliant as Scorsese did by accident. Maybe that's because they don't have the eye for it. Last Temptation's ending is a shocking moment of experimentation and abstraction that has no place in most movies. And few directors are flexible enough to accept a "mistake" like this instead of redoing the scene as they'd planned.

If you want to explain the record-breaking success of Avengers: Endgame, look no further than the shocking cliffhanger to the previous Avengers movie, Infinity War. Not only does the bad guy win despite the efforts of nearly every hero who'd ever appeared in a Marvel movie up to that point, he causes a true worst-case scenario, killing half the people in the entire universe, even some of its most beloved characters. And none of them got a more heartrending send-off than Tom Holland as Spider-Man, who collapsed into dust while tearfully begging Iron Man for help. 

Even the most spoiler-averse fans started working "Mr. Stark, I don't feel so good" into their everyday vocabulary, and it's stayed there even years later. Putting all the jokes and memes aside, this dialogue has stuck with viewers because it's so powerful in its simplicity. Holland's performance as Spider-Man has always emphasized his youth and his surrogate-father relationship with Iron Man. And this moment is pure, childlike vulnerability.

But as it turns out, that was another last-minute addition. At a Q&A with high school students, co-director Joe Russo revealed that Holland came up with the unforgettable line as they were shooting his final scene. The Russo Brothers are big believers in improvisation, and they encouraged Holland and Robert Downey Jr., who plays Iron Man, to ad-lib in the death sequence. They gave Holland some very simple instructions, simply telling him that Spider-Man doesn't want to leave. Holland filled in that bare framework with pure heartbreak.

One of the longest-running movie franchises was in a tough spot in 2006. Pierce Brosnan's run as James Bond had played up the camp and sci-fi elements to diminishing returns with both fans and the box office, finally culminating in the invisible car-driving, Golden Raspberry-winning Die Another Day. Casino Royale was something totally different, a new origin story with a new star in a grittier, more realistic world. Fans were skeptical, dismissing Daniel Craig as "James Blond" because he looked so little like the previous stars. But Casino Royale proved the Bond series could do something new but still remain grounded in the franchise's history with the iconic scene of Craig raising out of the ocean just like Ursula Andress did as the very first Bond girl in the very first Bond movie, Dr. No.

But neither Craig nor director Martin Campbell had Dr. No in mind at the time. The star told The South Bank Show, "Where we filmed, off the Bahamas, it's just one of those places where there is a sand shelf, and the sand shelf happens to be three feet deep. Because the idea was, I was supposed to swim in and sort of float off, but I swim in and stand up. And it just was one of those things." It took a second for Craig to realize his accidental callback, but he owned it with such confidence that it turned him from a relatively unknown character actor to a superstar sex symbol.