The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Deleted Scenes From the Trailers

If you'll remember back a couple of years, The Amazing Spider-Man was a very different movie than it was originally planned to be, teased to be or promoted to be via the trailers. Well, it happened again this time. Let's be clear when we say it's not entirely uncommon for this to happen. Movie like Ghostbusters, The Incredible Hulk and Star Trek have had them, and it's in fact so common that sites like Cracked, TV Tropes and io9 have written articles around the phenomenon. But in the case of The Amazing Spider-Man franchise, it seems particularly pronounced.  Two movies in, we have what seems to be fairly major surgery, including some tonal changes and even a character death or two, that have been conducted between the trailer phase and the finished product both times. The explanation for that, in a nutshell, was the the overall arc involving Peter Parker's parents got expanded from one movie to three when Sony became so hot on Marc Webb's film that they believed they could build a franchise from it. This happened during the filming or editing process, and it forced a number of changes to the film.

Back when the first movie came around, we and other wondered "what's with the cut scenes?" and looked at what they were and could have meant...and why they could have ended up cut.  We're wondering the same this time around... So what happened to this movie between the trailer and the theater? Well...that's the question of the day... In almost every one of the handful of trailers for the film, Harry Osborn revealed to Peter that he had been under surveillance by Oscorp. Quizzed as to why, Harry responded, "Isn't that the question of the day?" It's a question that's never posed in the theatrical cut of the film, which makes it prominence in trailers somewhat baffling. The Oscorp filing system was a treasure trove of Easter eggs, and maybe we'll even find out down the line that observing Peter and May was part of their mission statement...but the reality is, this scene never made a lot of sense.

After all, if Oscorp were watching Peter, wouldn't they have known he was Spider-Man pretty much immediately? Wouldn't he -- in this super-science world -- have popped up on facial recognition software when in the first movie he stole somebody's student ID to listen to Gwen lecture the interns? That may very well be the key issue -- that they decided Harry couldn't know from the outset that Peter was Spidey. Maybe it's as simple as a desire to play with their friendship from the comics...something that would be hard to do if capturing and killing Peter was already in Harry's head when they first reacquaint themselves. Why do we think that's the most likely explanation? Norman's "We have plans for you, Peter Parker," which also appeared in trailers and TV spots along the way. It certainly seems that they were building up an ominous "I know what you did last summer" vibe whereby Oscorp would be working against both Peter and Spider-Man. We can see how deadly that often proves to be in films like The Dark Knight Rises and Iron Man 3, or even just in the current season of Arrow. It does, though, seem more like a third-act maneuver by the villains (it was the third film in each of the aforementioned film franchises and came to fruition well after the midseason premiere on Arrow). Some of the lines that were cut from the film served the trailers quite well, but you can see why they might not have worked as well in the finished movie. May Parker's admonition that while secrets have a cost, "the truth does, too" has been used as one of the recurring themes of the movie, but it's also been mocked online for basically sounding like doublespeak. Norman Osborn didn't need to come right out and say "not everybody has a happy ending" in order to establish that he's a bad, dangerous man, so leaving the line in could have been redundant. (Credit where it's due: that last paragraph features two quotes I didn't even realize were missing. They were pointed out by somebody on Reddit's r/movies subreddit.) It isn't nearly as pronounced this time out as it was last time, but the through-line here seems to be the ongoing conspiracy at Oscorp. As more and more movies are added to the franchise and the scope of the larger story gets bigger and bigger, it seems the filmmakers need to keep reflecting those expansions. It's the same reason they filmed, and then cut, appearances by Mary Jane Watson (Shailene Woodley) before deciding that Gwen's arc should be played out over the whole movie: when they think they've got a good thing, apparently they want to give that thing as much time as they can to stretch its legs and get comfortable.