Padding in live-action films.
open/close all folders
Filmmakers/Multiple
- A frequent complaint of the God Awful Movies crew is that Christian filmmakers in general seem to think their audiences will be shocked and appalled if they are asked to infer absolutely anything from context. Character needs to be in a new location? Best show them getting into a car, driving, pulling up and parking, getting out, walking up to the door, and knocking, or the audience will go full Torches and Pitchforks on you. Need to cut back to a location you've established before? Best establish it again, just in case. Need an answer to the Problem Of Evil? (Crickets, Eli shouts "JINGLY KEYS!", film moves on without a word.)
- Judd Apatow has made a career out of this. Many of his movies (produced or directed) run over two hours (rare for the comedy genre) and as a result will feature many things that could have easily been cut. A prime offender is Funny People, which pads its near-150-minute run time with many celebrity cameos and an additional thirty-minute subplot after the main revelation that Adam Sandler's cancer has gone into remission. Supposedly, the film's extended versions are even worse. It's not even the storyline mentioned above that's the most annoying part, that actually makes some sense, it's several useless storylines - namely the entire subplot involving Seth Rogen's love interest as well as his roommate's sitcom career- and scenes (the celebrity cameo festival in the middle film would have been a deleted scene in almost ANY other movie because of how little it has to do with the plot and how long it drags on) that should have ended up on the cutting room floor. Hell, one wonders if there even was a cutting room floor.
- Why, Guten Tag, Uwe Boll... To pick just one film from his oeuvre, Bloodrayne III opens with five minutes of stock footage and flashbacks to the first movie, then cuts to shots of moving trains that noticeably repeat, many times. The title character doesn't appear until minute ten. There are two pointless sex scenes and a pointless fight scene that have zero impact on the plot. The movie runs a total of just seventy-eight minutes, and could easily be cut down to half thatnote without losing one damn thing.
- Michael Haneke has been known to be one of the worst abusers of this trope. He often aims for the Nothing Is Scarier angle with the looooooong static shots where nothing happens, and in some cases, it succeeds (the static shots of houses in Caché), but most cases, it just serves to drag the movie out.
- Caché, aside from the house shots, pretty much is filled to the brim with pointlessly long shots, the worst offenders being one scene where we hear Georges have a conversation with his TV show crew that serves no purpose to the plot whatsoever and a 3-minute long scene where we watch a character undress and go to bed.
- Funny Games. You could argue that pretty much everything that happens from the death of the protagonists' child to when the killers return could be cut out with no consequence to the plot, however, even still, there's a whopping ten minutes where the female protagonist struggles to leave a single room.
- Amour is also no different, where we are treated to a ten-minute scene of a woman reading a book. This is only one of many scenes to abuse the trope.
- The works of filmmaker Nick Phillips are chock full of padding, to the point where sometimes lines are said twice for no discernible reason. Many of his films, such as Crazy Fat Ethel, Death Nurse and Death Nurse 2 use common Stock Footage from one of his first movies, Criminally Insane, and Death Nurse 2 features Stock Footage from all three previous films. Its predecessor, Death Nurse, also dedicates a lengthy amount of time to showing a character pulling some food out of his fridge and eating it.
- Oh, Roger Corman. There's a reason why his original B&W film The Little Shop of Horrors is largely overlooked. It didn't need padding, but got it anyway - whole, superfluous, boring, kitchen sink dialogue scenes of it. His theatrical version of The Pit and the Pendulum didn't have it, but it needed to be longer for the TV airing - so he grabbed the only available cast member of the film and shot a new opening to act as a Framing Device.
- Mackenna's Gold: The movie drags on a lot longer than it needs to, such as by having Tibbs needlessly bargain his way into the gang (which goes nowhere), lots of riding through the desert, and some of the more underwhelming fight scenes dragging on.
- The Phantom of the Opera (2004) uses the musical's Framing Device of the opera house first being shown as a ruin - before the chandelier rises above the audience and shows the building restored to its former glory. In the stage version, this opening is there solely to allow any latecomers to get to their seats before the chandelier rises. It's not needed in a film naturally, and the attempts at Adaptation Expansion to make it tie into the story just result in Padding instead.
- Umberto Eco has an essay
about pornographic films, in which he explains that you can recognize one if it spends a few minutes showing one of the characters going from point A to point B via bus. - That old '70s-'80s exploitation movie tradition of seeing the characters drive their car... to the location of the scene... park it... step out of the car... walk over to the scene... and repeat the whole process in reverse when they leave.
- Similar to the endless driving montages seen in Mexican lucha libre films. Cut those out, and a two-hour movie collapses to forty-five minutes.
- Then there's The Mexican, which showed those traditions still hadn't died in the 2000s.
- Quentin Tarantino applied this theory to his Grindhouse movie Death Proof. It was widely criticized for having too much dialog and not enough action. Tarantino countered that the film's talkiness is intentionally in the style of grindhouse films that padded out their length with dialogue due to having No Budget.
Specific Films
- Of the four leads' individual stories in 4.3.2.1, only Jo's and Shannon's are really essential - Cassandra's jaunt to New York City adds exactly nothing to the story and is only really there as an excuse for cameos (and for a Tamsin Egerton Lingerie Scene).
- The Found Footage Film Alien Abduction: Incident in Lake County's first draft of the script was only forty-five minutes. Word of God is that he hurriedly wrote "about twenty new scenes" in four days to pad it out to ninety minutes. Showing that this is not always a bad thing, one of them is the aliens screwing with the household appliances - one of the film's most memorable moments. Other examples are the aliens somehow influencing two members of separate couples to make out under the belief they're kissing their actual partner, and Tommy giving a confessional to the camera.
- The Slasher Movie April Fools, which is overflowing with slow motion, pointless scenery shots, constant flashbacks to the intro, and random dance numbers.
- Around the World in 80 Days (1956) was exquisitely padded with Scenery Porn, cameos by any actor who wasn't otherwise busy at the time the film was being made and a six-minute Creative Closing Credits sequence produced by Saul Bass. It won the Oscar for best picture that year, and the backdrops are quite breathtaking, so perhaps Tropes Are Not Bad. (On the other hand, it also inspired a slew of big-budget celebrity cameo parades over the next ten years or so, and some of them were God-awful.)
- Avatar: The Way of Water runs half an hour longer than the original, reaching the three hour mark. Mostly it's Shoot the Money showcasing the impressively realistic alien world and the newfangled underwater scenes, with articles soon appearing warning when those without a Bladder of Steel could go to the bathroom and not lose parts that actually advanced the plot.
- Blade Runner had this in the first director's cut. The narration added for the theatrical release was gone, but the scenes lasted longer than they needed to. This was fixed in the "Final Cut."
- Half of Boogeyman II is made up of footage from the first film! As Starburst's Tony Crawley pointed out, "It's bad enough when a sequel is the same old story, but when it's the same old footage the feeling of being ripped off is somewhat more acute."
- A frequent criticism leveled at the (first half of the) of Breaking Dawn - since the filmmakers decided to split the book into two movies, despite how the novel could have been easily squeezed into a single film, Part 1 is packed to the brim with montages to pad out the running time to just under two hours.
- The Brown Bunny features many loooong sequences of the main character simply driving his van across country or riding his motorcycle across the salt plain. The much-longer rough cut that screened at Cannes sparked a notoriously hostile response, apparently against what must have been interminably padded scenes.
- Carrie (2002) is a Made-for-TV Movie of Stephen King's novel, and had to increase the running time to fit a three-hour broadcast (minus commercials, it's only a 133-minute run time). Additional scenes include Sue meeting Carrie at the mall and trying to be nice to her, Chris antagonising Carrie when she finds her using Miss Desjardin's phone, some commentary on religion by both Sue and Carrie, a scene of Chris's father trying to sue the school (which to be fair is in the book as well) and a sequence of Carrie going into a trance and losing control of her powers in class (which is mild Foreshadowing for the prom disaster). Writer Bryan Fuller even said it could use forty minutes cut from it.
- Darling Lili was padded to be as long as the other lavish big-budget musicals that were slowly falling out of favor in Hollywood at the time. These include some extended comedy gags, musical numbers that run well over three minutes, dating montages between Lili and Bill, lengthy aerial dogfights (which was a case of Shoot the Money as these were the most expensive scenes to film) and most egregiously a random scene of Bill and Lili running into a chorus of French schoolgirls and joining them singing. Blake Edwards recut the film in the 90s and dropped 29 minutes of footage from it.
- Django Unchained has a lot of scenes and shots that run overlong and increase the film's run time to well over three hours.
- A comedy scene involving members of the Ku Klux Klan. After the plot-relevant information that they're going after Schultz and Django is conveyed - they then argue about the practicality of the hoods they wear.
- Schultz pours two glasses of beer, and we see every mechanical process required in that action.
- Candie takes two plates of white cake and walks all the way across the room to hand them to Schultz and Django.
- After the shootout at Candyland, Django has to talk a group of Australians into helping him before we go straight to the climax. According to Word of God, the shootout was the original ending, but this part was added to make it less formulaic.
- Djinn: Two Arab guys and an American friend visit the Djinn's dwelling grounds, with two of them getting killed but the third managing to strike a Deal with the Devil. This scene has precisely zero bearing on the A-plot of Sarah and Khalid, and never becomes relevant again.
- Double Down, would be roughly 30 minutes long had the director not made extensive use of stock footage and not inserted unused takes of previous sequences throughout the runtime.
- Drive (2011) would be an hour long if it weren't for all the shots of characters staring off into space for long periods of time.
- Dear God, Electroma. The total runtime is for 72 minutes, but it can actually be coherently condensed into nine.
- The public information film The Finishing Line has this during the final task which all children cross the railroad tunnel. The camera films ALL the children walking into the tunnel passing by the camera and even leave it running filming nothing for a good number of seconds after last child passed by. This padded scene lasted about a minute.
- Fire Maidens of Outer Space barely runs 80 minutes, yet still manages to wear its plot really thinly. Filmmaker Cy Roth had to Leave the Camera Running in a lot of scenes, and there are endless sequences of the men sitting around and smoking and of the maidens dancing to Borodin.
- Edgar Wright admitted that when his very first film, the indie Fistful of Fingers, came out to be 71 minutes long, he went back and created more content to pad out its length an extra 7 minutes, including an extended opening credits sequence and a whole new scene in which characters talk to each other in the dark over an entirely black screen.
- Friday the 13th (1980) actually has several:
- There's an out-of-nowhere sequence where Alice discovers a snake in her cabin, and the other counsellors band together to kill it. To be charitable, it might trick the audience into thinking Bill is The Hero and Alice is more fragile, to prop up the tension when Alice is the one left alone with the killer, but the sequence wasn't in the script and thought up on the spot by make-up artist Tom Savini.
- Jack and Marcy have a conversation by the lake, where the latter starts talking about her frequent nightmares; one ominous dream has her describing rain turning to blood. It seems like a flimsy attempt at a 'character moment' and does little to foreshadow that anything bad is going to happen since Annie has already been killed and the scene began with Ned following a mysterious stranger into a cabin.
- There's also a lengthy scene where all the other counsellors have vanished, and Alice makes a cup of coffee. For audiences at the time, it might have been to draw out tension whether the killer might strike while she's unaware.
- Friday the 13th Part 2 opens with Alice Hardy, the Final Girl of the previous film, having nightmares about said film's events. And then we're shown about five minutes' worth of extended flashback to her confrontation with Mrs Voorhees.
- The Green Horizon, which was Jimmy Stewart's last live-action theatrical appearance, is essentially an hour and a half of scenery porn and about 20 minutes of story.
- The first part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While it keeps pace with the book, the first half of the book could have been compressed easily, resulting in what many find a tedious movie, commonly mocked as Harry Potter Goes Camping.
- Hercules Against the Moon Men, as mentioned above. The lack of music and dialogue is what really makes the scene a drag to watch. Adding to the MST3K presentation is that the climax of the scene has Hercules come up against a rock face:Crow: THERE'S GONNA BE ROCK CLIMBING!! AAAAAH!
- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1. Some fans weren't happy with the book being split into two films and resulting in a lot of the first film just hanging around in the bunker waiting for the real story in Part 2. At times you can tell there wasn't enough material for two movies made of the book. In fact, much of the bunker scenes in Part 1 could be lost with little to no consequence.
- The second Ju On film made, Ju-On: the Curse 2, begins its 80-minute runtime with a 25-minute recap of the events of the first film.
- Jurassic World Dominion: A major and frequent criticism of the film is just how superfluous most of the dinosaur scenes are to the overall story, sometimes described as though it were an unrelated movie script that had several dinosaur scenes awkwardly pasted in at random intervals in order to make it into a Jurassic Park movie. Most of the dinosaur scenes could be cut without affecting the plot, but then the movie would only be about half as long and far fewer people would care to watch it.
- Zack Snyder's Justice League is four hours long, mostly due to a plot intended to be two movies, but sometimes for having integral versions of scenes that the theatrical cut cut to a minimum (the build-up to Wonder Woman's museum rescue, Flash driving to the Kryptonian ship), and the director indulging in his beloved slow motion, with 10% of the film shot in Overcrank.
- King Kong (2005), and Avatar, both have this in way, way too much Scenery Porn. This creates severe padding, even if there's a reason for this. One film critic even said "the fight between Kong and the V-Rexes goes on so long, even Kong seems like he's getting bored."
- The Irish indie film Life's a Breeze, about a grandmother's life savings being in a mattress her children have disposed of, has two:
- The grandmother and her granddaughter trick the Jerkass of a son that he's won the lottery via use of a recording of that week's broadcast. It was foreshadowed when the children's surprise home renovation included a TV that could do that, but it puts the plot on hold for five minutes. Given that the son was played by Pat Shortt, the only other name in the cast besides Fionnuala Flanagan as the grandmother, it may have been to pad his screen time out.
- For the grandmother's birthday, all her children hire a male stripper and then bicker with themselves over who's going to pay him. It does little to further the plot and the gratuitous Fanservice is especially jarring with the movie's Slice of Life tone.
- Lost Continent has twenty minutes of people climbing rocks. The Mystery Science Theater 3000 cut is notable for being one of the few occasions when the mad scientist nearly succeeded in breaking Joel's mind:Joel: C'mon. Hey you guys, calm down. Hey, it's only a movie, we can handle it, okay?
Servo: Okay, I guess you're right.
[Beat]
Joel: WHO ARE YOU, WHERE ARE WE? CAN WE GET A FRAME OF REFERENCE OR SOMETHING? PLEASE! - Manos: The Hands of Fate had several of these, including the opening driving montage (which was supposed to go under the opening credits), the prolonged running-around-at-night shot, the girdle-wrestling scene (which took place simultaneously with the running-around bit), the cops-hassling-the-making-out-couple scene.
- The James Bond movie The Man with the Golden Gun was guilty of this in spades. Was there really any point to the martial arts school and its ensuing boat chase, the latter feeling like a retread of the boat chase in the previous film, other than producers saying "See, we saw Enter the Dragon, too!"?
- As a review of Meet the Spartans pointed out, the movie itself ends at 67 minutes, and there are then 19 minutes of credits and gags.
- Parodied in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a scene is drifted by many characters discussing trivia... which are then cut short by crowd scenes yelling 'Get On With It!".
- On the Buses reuses plot points and jokes from the show, like Olive getting a job in the depot canteen and having trouble with the kitchen, or Stan needing to do his laundry on his route and accidentally taking a woman's bag, to reach eighty minutes. Neither really adds much to either plot of the movie.
- The Night of the Hunter is hailed by critics as one of the best movies ever made, and rightly so. However, it runs for only 93 minutes, barely feature-length, and that running time includes a 20-minute coda after the main story is over where nothing much happens.
- Radar Secret Service - take the tedium of the driving scene from Manos, and the tedium of people sitting around doing nothing to advance the plot from Fire Maidens from Outer Space, and you get this film, which the Mads from MST3K advertised as containing "Hypno-Helio Static Stasis" (containing X-4!).
- Although Red Eye averts padding in terms of story it manages to pad out the end credits, which are considerably slower than the norm, in larger type than usual and with bigger spaces between the cast member/crew member and his/her character name/job title (and the film still comes in at only 85 minutes).
- Rescue from Gilligan's Island was quite bad about this, given that the plot was recycled from an episode of the show they never filmed.
- Robot Holocaust opens with a fight to the death between two beefy guys... but it's so overlong & boring that it's practically another example of, "Rock climbing, Joel".
- The Room:
- Nothing between the second sex scene and the birthday party has any actual effect on the plot.
- There were at least two or three establishing shots during one scene that took place in the same setting.
- Probably the most obvious form of padding used is that of having characters essentially repeat scenes with only a few details changed. This is especially obvious when it comes to Lisa and Claudette, whose conversations with each other are always about virtually the same thing, and with Johnny and his friends tossing the football back and forth.
- One odd scene from the middle of the party lasts only a few moments, and is just a shot of the city with the theme music playing. It has no bearing on anything and might have been used just to denote that time had passed.
- Saw IV: When the police and the FBI show up to the classroom with Morgan and Rex's corpse, Strahm saves Perez from getting hit by a spike which accidentally shot out from a crossbow that a forensic officer was dusting, only for an unnamed photographer to get impaled by it instead. This moment was criticized by many viewers as a gratuitous kill that adds nothing to the movie, for reasons including that the photographer was too much of a minor character to even have a death, her being placed there simply to have someone else get killed in place of Perez, and the fact that the rest of the police react with a minor Oh, Crap! before simply moving on with the investigation as if nothing happened. It seems to only have the double function of adding another death after the last one happened a while ago, and making the scene a bit longer.
- Shandra: The Jungle Girl has two longish scenes that could be removed without affecting the plot in any way. The first where Karen sits in her bath watching a Jiggle Show on television. The second is where Shandra goes to the strip club in search of a victim and there is an entire striptease act shown before she attacks the fat patron outside.
- The Sidehackers. This includes overly long images of a couple rolling around in the flowers, a character's dramatic and unnecessary walk through various locations (including what appears to be an oil refinery), ridiculously slow or just plain irrelevant dialogue, and the "sidehacking" itself.
- Most of the first half of Silent Night, Deadly Night Part 2 is scenes from the first movie.
- Sleepy Hollow High contains countless close-up shots of a creek that serve no purpose beyond extending the running time.
- This is played for laughs in Spaceballs in the very first scene, where you see a never-ending shot of just one huge spacecraft. Hilarity Ensues when the weird shaping of the ship makes you think that finally the end is coming, when it isn't, until it does actually finally - Oh, Wait!! ... But now it is!
- And then we get to see the opening scene again when Colonel Sandurz has the Instant Cassette of the movie played. Fortunately, though, the entire scene is fast-forwarded through.
- Spice World does this by putting in Imagine Spots everywhere:Nicole: Just wait until you lot become mothers...
- The Starfighters, a movie about Air Force pilots training on a new type of jet, featured long sequences of planes simply cruising set to elevator music. At least a few of these sequences were lengthy shots of planes refueling.
- Star Trek: The Motion Picture, or in some circles, The Motionless Picture. A script for a one-hour pilot for a new Trek series that never came to be was made into a two-hour-plus movie by the addition of a little extra chatter and a lot of establishing shots of truly insane length, such as our first look at the new Enterprise, as well as when V'Ger is revealed. 2001: A Space Odyssey moves at light speed by comparison. Fortunately, Jerry Goldsmith was on hand right from the very first shot (before even the Paramount logo) - which consisted of a minute and a half of a black screen, as it's the only Trek film with an overture, which was extended to three minutes of backing away from wherever we had been before in the Director's Editionnote .
- The Enterprise drydock scene does get cut some slack from die-hard fans, particularly those who consider the refit Enterprise one of their favorite versions of the ship, though even they can admit the scene could have been trimmed down a bit.note Fans are less charitable about the Cloud and V'Ger Flyover sequences, as since as they occur back-to-back, they end up taking up a good ten minutes of run time with almost no dialogue or plot advancement.
- Among its many sins is the fact that the already short run time of A Talking Cat!?! is blatantly padded out with random scenery interludes, set to execrable and repetitive music.
- The epically painful 1987 Kokomo-filmed Terror Squad features an unbelievably long and boring car chase between the squad in question and the police which seems to last for around a quarter of the movie.
- Tickles the Clown: Expect the cast to do a lot of talking, oftentimes just to stretch out the movie's run time.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sure, it was Visual Effects of Awesome back in the day but still. Probably the most egregious bit is the scene where the camera just sits still for several minutes watching an elevator slooooooowly move downward. There's quite a few similar scenes of spacecraft moving with agonizing sluggishness for minutes at a time.
- In War of the Worlds (2005), the scenes with Tim Robbins could be seen as padding — they could easily be removed or drastically shortened. As it is, the film gets particularly bogged down during that plot sidetrack. Of course, some consider these scenes to be the creepiest and most effective in the movie, and Tim Robbins being beaten to death at the end certainly helps.
- Waterworld is filled with sequences involving mechanisms (contrived or not) which take up most of the movie.
- The Disaster Movie When Time Ran Out... features an infamous sequence where several characters cross a bridge for over twenty minutes.
- The main characters of White Christmas are stage performers, and part of the plot is that they decide to use General Waverly's lodge for rehearsals. This does not really justify three song-and-dance numbers (the Minstrel Show, "Choreography" and "Abraham") that each go on for minutes apiece and don't contribute anything substantial to the plot. Granted, all three are impressive on their own, so it's basically an extended case of The Cast Showoff.
- Erotic Film Wild Cactus has a scene where Alexandria and David, driving cross-country, stop in a hotel for the night. It doesn't affect the story at all, but it does provide time for a sex scene.
