Trapped By Mountain Lions / Live-Action Films

• Everything dealing with former reporter Steve Martin (played by Raymond Burr) and the American army in The Return of Godzilla. These scenes were filmed and written specifically for the American cut of the film, mimicking the original importation of Godzilla: King of the Monsters!, where Burr's character was much better integrated into the plot, mostly by essentially taking the narrative place of Hagiwara, a major character in the Japanese cut. But in Return, none of the American characters actually do anything, so we're left watching other people effectively watching the movie with us from within the movie.
• The lengthy "Broadway Melody" sequence in Singin' in the Rain seems to divide fans on the question of whether it is entertaining enough to justify leaving the plot on hold for over ten minutes.
• Ditto the long ballet segment in the middle of (the uncut version of) Ken Russell's film adaptation of The Boy Friend.
• The second half of A Day at the Races (1937) has an extended musical interlude which starts with Allan Jones singing "Tomorrow Is Another Day," which is followed by Harpo using his flute to summon a black chorus which sings "Blow That Horn, Gabriel" and "All God's Chillun Got Rhythm." The chorus has nothing else to do in the movie except reappear to sing the finale. Many Marx Brothers fans consider this sequence as objectionable on an Ethnic Scrappy level, while some say it's not really that bad by itself and the choir are very good, but it just stops the plot dead and its earnestness clashes painfully with the Marxes' usual slapstick and wisecracks.
  • There's also the water ballet sequence, which even the film historian on the DVD commentary advises you to skip!
  • Pretty much all of the MGM Marx Bros. movies have a disposable musical number or two - Races at least has the exceptional talents of Ivie Anderson and Whitey's Lindy Hoppers on full display. The funny thing is that these moments weren't so much filler as they were a throwback to old vaudeville variety shows, but it can be fairly jarring for modern audiences.
• The Transformers Film Series has a lot of this. The first movie has a subplot involving hackers that, in retrospect, does absolutely nothing to move the plot forward. (It didn't help that the scenes were a little boring and featured some spectacularly bad Hollywood Hacking.) The Romantic Plot Tumor in both movies tends to fit the "Why should we care?" aspect due to how jarring it is next to the action that everyone came to see.
• The original The Last House on the Left would occasionally cut away from the main plot to show the antics of a pair incompetent cops trying to get back to the Collingwood house.
• In The Matrix Revolutions, the machines are plotting to destroy Zion. They have done this six times before, and there is nothing special about this Zion. The only hope is that Neo can stop the machines at the source. This does not change that about 60%-70% of the movie is about the battle at Zion, with Neo's adventure as almost an afterthought.
• The subplot with the teenage couple in the car in Manos: The Hands of Fate is completely irrelevant to what's going on with the rest of the cast. It briefly appears to have gained a shred of relevance when the couple points the police in the direction of where the main characters are. The police go to investigate and even hear a gunshot... and then immediately give up ("Sound does travel a long way at night. It could be clear over in Mexico, for that matter.") thus making the subplot entirely pointless again.
• In Stealth, after Jessica Biel's character gets shot down, she manages to safely land in North Korea, meaning the audience has to be repeatedly subjected to scenes of her attempting to flee the North Korean army. The main plot of the film (about an AI fighter jet which goes rogue and attempts to instigate nuclear war) is pointlessly and awkwardly dropped off so that the climax of the film can be about saving her from North Korea.
• According to Roger Ebert, Pearl Harbor is about how on December 7th, 1941, the Japanese forces staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle. Especially baffling because none of the main characters are present for the initial attack.
• According to Kevin Smith, during the initial writing for a Superman film that never got made, Jon Peters demanded a scene about Brainiac fighting a polar bear, just to add another "action beat" to the movie.
• The cop subplot (if you can even call it that, considering how thin it is) from the original version of The Amityville Horror (1979).
• The excuse for the stunt flying competition in State of the Union is that the protagonist is an airplane tycoon. It's still strikingly irrelevant sequence for a political comedy, especially one based on a play.
• From Russia with Love has a lengthy subplot where Bond has to aid his friend Kerim Bay against an assassin making an attempt on his life. The original novel had this as well.
• Kaamelott: Premier Volet: King Arthur's Played for Drama flashbacks as a teenager have no relevance on the main plot and are little more than a distraction even in-universe when one prevents Arthur from killing Lancelot at the end (though they might set some things up for a sequel, that's in Wild Mass Guessing territory for now).
• The main plot of The Ledge deals with a love triangle between a Christian, an atheist and the former's wife. However, for some reason there is also the sub-plot of the cop discovering that his children are not his.
• Several scenes in Dario Argento's Deep Red focus on Rome's police department dealing with an officer's strike. While partially explaining why the protagonist must investigate the murders himself, these scenes are handled so perfunctorily they add nothing to the film.
• The film SST: Death Flight (one of the first films to be riffed by Mystery Science Theater 3000) is exceptionally guilty of this. The main plot is about a commercial plane suffering engine trouble with a contagious disease stored onboard, but there are innumerable subplots that have almost nothing to do with this: a guy and a wife discuss his possible job change, a woman and her lover (John de Lancie) meet her ex (Peter Graves) and tension ensues, a consultant on the plane has an old grudge against the pilot, a beauty contest winner doing PR work has gotten knocked up by the company's PR manager, the consultant has a budding romance with one of the stewardesses.
• Hollywoodland is about a fictionalized investigation into the (real life) suicide of George Reeves (the star of The Adventures of Superman), but approximately half the run-time is devoted to the investigator's troubled family life and another botched case that ends with a client shooting his wife — none of which has anything whatsoever to do with George Reeves's death.
• Interstellar's climax centers around the main character entering a black hole, which will either lead to an unparalleled discovery or a relatively exotic death. At the same time, the movie insists on focusing on the main character's daughter trying to sneak past her suddenly irrationally hostile but never actually dangerous brother into their family home.
• This happens a lot in the later films of The Hobbit, thanks to the massive amount of Adaptation Expansion going on.
  • The subplot of Gandalf investigating the Necromancer, originally explained in the appendices, pretty much goes nowhere and doesn't have any bearing on the overall story aside from tying into The Lord of the Rings (and it's a pretty loose tie, considering that the two plots have very little to do with each other). It reveals the orcs are working for somebody, but they already have multiple leader figures and a motivation for chasing the dwarves, so it's basically an answer to a question no one was asking. This is to be expected, as the entire plotline happened offscreen in the book (and Tolkien admitted the whole thing was just a throwaway excuse to get Gandalf out of the picture for a bit; he didn't envision while writing The Hobbit that the Necromancer and Sauron were the same person).
  • The subplot with the Legolas/Tauriel/Kili love triangle, completely added for the film. It has essentially no bearing on the overall storyline, to the point of two-thirds of its members being a Canon Immigrant and Canon Foreigner, but eats up a lot of screentime, to the point of overshadowing much more plot-relevant arcs in the third film. According to Evangeline Lilly, the entire love triangle was added in reshoots, over her objections and despite Peter Jackson's assurance there would be nothing of the sort. Quite tellingly, nearly any Fan Edit of the films that you can find will excise the whole subplot, often reducing Legolas to The Cameo at most, and it's astonishing how little it changes the overall story with Bilbo and the dwarves.
  • Even among the many messy subplots of the films, Alfrid's subplot in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies stands out. It goes as follows: Alfrid tries to steal something, Bard finds him out, Alfrid gives a halfhearted argument to his defense and promises he won't do it again, repeat three or four times. It strains disbelief that Bard wouldn't just shove him in a cell after the first time. Between Alfrid being The Load and a Canon Foreigner, and the fact that he never impacts the course of the battle (or anything, really), many found his scenes difficult to sit through - and keep in mind, this is in the middle of massive, epic, bloody war sequences. Even from the perspective of comic relief, it stands out as unnecessary because the series already had a number of comic relief characters. On top of that, in the theatrical cut, his arc has No Ending, and he just vanishes from the plot running away with an armful of gold. You'd be very hard-pressed to find a Fan Edit that keeps him in.
• The bulk of the criticisms around the Russian family subplot in Justice League (2017) centered on how they felt out of place with the rest of the movie and like they were tacked on for the sake of giving the League civilians to be concerned about (which they were, being purely a product of the re-shoots done under Joss Whedon). Tellingly, the "Snyder Cut" never had such characters around, and even Zack Snyder has made potshots against it.
• Saw V: The Fatal Five and their reasons for being tested have almost nothing to do with the "Strahm vs. Hoffman" plotline (other than Erickson arriving to their scene), or even Hoffman or John's backstories. You can feel that their trial was only added to keep the film's length from being too short in comparison to other Saw films. It was later confirmed by Kevin Greutert that they were meant to find evidence that would make them believe Strahm was the new Jigsaw Killer responsible for abducting them, adding to Hoffman's frame job in the ending, but this plotline was cut.
• While it splinters off from the main plot, Rachel and Randall's troubles in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) is given a fair amount of focus even though the whole point of the sideplot was mostly to frame the plot to apprehend Sonic at the wedding. This is while Maddie's efforts to free Sonic, Tails, and Tom from custody is given little comparative screentime. It's almost as if, because they introduced the events to the plot, Rachel and her fiancee had to be given closure in the story despite the fact that their involvement with the story proper stopped mattering immediately after it happened.
• Stripes: In the extended edition, John and Russell try to desert the Army during Basic Training, and somehow end up parachuting into somewhere in South America, before running into a group of rebels, accidentally dumping a bunch of LSD into their stew, almost getting killed, and sneaking off before getting put back on the plane and sent back to Basic. This was why, in the theatrical cut, Sgt. Hulka tells the platoon that some soldiers left the base without permission, and threatens to punish the entire platoon before John and Russell reluctantly fess up.

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