4 Deleted Marvel Scenes That Patched Giant Holes

4 How Black Widow Got Away

The prequel Black Widow, released in 2021, takes place after 2016’s Civil War, so it starts with Natasha Romanoff as a fugitive. At the end of the movie, she and her family have defeated a bunch of bad guys, and the family drive off, as she says she’ll be able to deal with the authorities alone. We see the police closing in around her, and the scene ends. Then there’s a quick epilogue showing her on her own again, because we know she’ll be on the run again at the start of the next movie in the timeline, Infinity War. 

Cutting the police scene where they did is a baffling choice. First, it’s baffling because the last shot was also the first promotional photo released for Black Widow. The photo seemed to tease action that came next, but that exact pose turned out to be the very end of the movie.

And it’s baffling because they then jump to her on her own again without showing how she got out of that situation. Not that we need to know how she got away, from a plot perspective. Presumably, the answer is just some version of “she got away.” But why place her in that predicament if not to show her getting out of it? It can’t be to leave us on some open ending, because we already know what comes after this prequel, and because that epilogue scene gives away what comes next as well.

Well, it turns out they did film how she dealt with those police. In a deleted scene, we see her surrender, and recurring character General Ross confronts her. They take her into custody, she covers up for her fleeing family, we get an elaborate closing monologue and then she picks the locks on her cuffs and slips out. 

We should have gotten that, and the movie should have ended there. There was no need for the epilogue scene we did get, where some forgettable character from earlier gives her a plane. Apparently, this epilogue set up that that this whole movie took place before the final scene in Civil War, and she’s going to go break half the Avengers out of prison. If you didn’t pick up on that, well, that says something about whether the scene was effective at all. 

3 Peter and His Peter Tingle

Spiderman: Far From Home originally started with a series of scenes that were so polished, they got repackaged on DVDs as a short film called Peter’s To-Do List. Peter carries out a bunch of errands to prepare for his European trip. He pawns some stuff for money (setting up that he wants to buy MJ something), picks up his passport (with help from his spider powers) and then, as the final errand on this list, he takes down a mob family. 

It’s all good stuff. Also, did you notice how we got six movies with this Spider-Man and only one of them had him actually doing any normal Spider-Man crimefighting duties? With these scenes included, it would have been two movies having him do any normal Spider-Man crimefighting duties. 

Plus, these scenes would have better set up one orphaned plot in the movie we got. Peter’s spider sense (called his “Peter tingle” in the movie) isn’t working, until the end, when it returns. We get no real explanation for this, but the mafia shoot-out reveals he’s out-of-practice dodging danger because he’s been over-relying on his bulletproof iron suit. 

Perhaps these scenes were cut because their light tone conflicts with how Peter feels at the start of the movie we got, in which he’s mourning the death of Tony Stark. Due to how these movies were made, it’s possible these scenes were written or even filmed by people who had yet to learn what happens in Endgame. Still, this is the same movie where Peter is wackily caught pants-down with a German dominatrix, so “consistently somber tone” was never on the table. 

2 The Black Panther vs the King

When we first meet T’Challa in Civil War, he is already the Black Panther. Then, during the movie, his father dies, and he realizes he’ll have to also take up the mantle of king. He says a few words about how these were two separate roles, which makes for an interesting concept.

Well, that all goes out the window in his own movie, where the title of the king and the title of the Black Panther are passed simultaneously, by winning the same trial-by-combat.

There might be no way to totally reconcile the ideas presented in the two different movies. But one deleted scene from Black Panther made a decent attempt at it, acknowledging how the two roles are sometimes separate. T’Challa talks about how his father had both roles once and then passed the Panther role to him while remaining king. 

Even besides that explanation, the scene works with the rest of the movie, as it’s about the relationship between T’Challa and T'Chaka and how views can change over time. The movie could easily have found room for this scene. It serves a larger purpose than, say, that scene explaining T’Challa's new silent shoes, which go on to play no part in the remaining story. 

1 A Plot Hole Retrospective in ‘Endgame’

When characters discuss plot holes in their own movies, that sometimes grates on us. Pointing out a plot hole isn’t the same as fixing it, and sometimes, the movie doesn’t even frame the criticism correctly. Avengers: Endgame is a little different because the whole movie is built around that sort of thing. Endgame acts as a retrospective of the concluding movie series, and almost every time they look back on a previous movie, it’s to say, “Well, that was dumb.” 

Other than one exception (a single indulgent shot of the heroes standing in a circle from the original Avengers movie), every look back at past adventures is commentary on how silly they were. And it’s not to undermine the weight of what we’re now watching. Instead, these are all about characters looking back and saying that they’re more mature and more smart than they once were. As a result, two deleted scenes in which characters address past plot holes actually fit thematically with the rest of the movie.

In the first, Rhodey talks to Steve about the end of Captain America, in which he sacrificed himself by crashing a plane loaded with bombs into the ocean. Rhodey points out that Steve could have jumped out of the plane before crashing it, which is just one of several alternate solutions that fans noted could have gotten him out of that jam. 

That clip has circulated quite a bit online, and the movie had another such scene. In the next one, it’s Rocket offering analysis — an incompletely animated Rocket, since they never quite finished work on this scene. 

In The Avengers, notes Rocket, they could have defeated the alien army by simply firing at their ship. Which, you’ll note, is sort of what they ended up doing with that missile Tony carried, but they stumbled into that solution. As fans pointed out, blasting the ship through that wormhole should have been Plan A, rather than blasting New York and having Tony divert the nuke to a better target just to get rid of it. 

Does it undermine that earlier movie, having a character reveal that the Chitauri are “the suckiest army in the galaxy”? Sure, a little, but we should have come to the same conclusion ourselves, seeing how easily those guys fell to arrows and punches. The scene also goes some way toward hyping up the next threat. Based on the movie we got, did you assume, like we did, that Thanos’ invading army could also be destroyed with a missile pretty easily? Don’t be so sure any other armies could, hints this scene. 

And these scenes offer a pretty strong counter to a whole genre of nitpick — why didn’t characters just try this easy solution? Answer: They didn’t think of it. Boom, issue resolved. 

Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for more stuff no one should see.