Glass started out life as a 150-page script, which is M Night Shyamalan's longest screenplay
to date.
And he did film that whole script, which gave him a first cut of three hours and twenty
minutes.
Over an hour of footage from that early cut was deleted as the movie was edited down to
around two hours and ten minutes.
Given that Shyamalan financed much of the $20 million budget of Glass himself, it's
understandable that he wishes he'd been a bit 'harsher' during the writing process and
pared down the script before shooting began.
Still, that means we've got some interesting deleted scenes to talk about!
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, I'm Jan and in this video I'm going to reveal and explain
seven intriguing scenes that were deleted from Glass including an alternate ending.
Spoilers ahead if you haven't seen the film yet.
One of the most striking deleted scenes from Glass takes place in the corridors of the
psychiatric hospital.
In the cut scene, we see several of the hospital's other patients approaching the Beast, and,
as they do so, he seems to be laying hands on them, as if they're having an almost religious
experience.
The Beast believes that only those who've suffered are pure, so it's natural that he
would see the other patients at the hospital as his followers.
Shyamalan has said he chose a mustard colour for the Beast's clothing because it's associated
with religious ceremonies and he regards the Beast as "an evangelist, a preacher who wants
to help save The Broken."
And remember that a number of Kevin's personalities, including Patricia and Dennis, talk about
the Beast in religious terms, for example, referencing his prey as "sacred food".
Dr Staple even refers to Patricia as a kind of 'high priestess' and when doubt about the
Beast finally creeps in, Patricia says that her 'horde is losing faith'.
It would seem logical, therefore, if the full deleted scene also showed us the Beast preaching
and converting the patients to his cause.
In the final film, we see David Dunn, aka the Overseer, demonstrate his superpowers
just once before the story moves on to him tracking down and battling the Beast.
That scene in the movie takes place in the home of two men who randomly attacked a passer-by
on the street then uploaded a video of the attack to the internet.
However, another scene of David's crime-fighting exploits in the city was deleted from the
movie.
In this trailer footage that didn't make it into the final film, you can see the Overseer
slamming someone up against what looks like it could be a subway wall.
If you look carefully at the clip, you can also see someone lying on the floor with the
contents of their handbag or purse spilled out on the ground beside them.
All of which points to the person on the floor having been assaulted or mugged by the guy
being thrown against the wall by the Overseer.
This scene looks like it's part of a longer introduction to Dunn's vigilante activities,
and so I expect it was cut to get to the main action of Dunn versus the Beast more quickly
and also trim down the movie's run-time.
Shyamalan made good use in Glass of several deleted scenes from Unbreakable including
one with young Elijah at a fair and another with Joseph telling David that he knows his
secret identity.
But those weren't the only deleted scenes from the nearly 20-year-old film that the
director was going to include in the final part of his trilogy.
Originally, a deleted Unbreakable scene where David speaks to a priest was also going to
feature in Glass.
In the scene, which takes place in a church, David tells a priest that he feels the fact
he was the sole survivor of the train wreck means something important, however, the priest,
who also lost family in the crash, tells David in no uncertain terms that his survival is
no "hand of God, miracle" moment.
"You were chosen?"
"I don't think so."
Shyamalan has said he decided to cut this powerful scene from Glass at the last moment.
I think the scene probably was going to appear just after the group therapy session, when
we see David Dunn sitting alone in his room, looking despondent.
It would have fit perfectly there as David is clearly shaken by Dr Staple's words about
how all his supposed superpowers are just a matter of intuition and tricks.
So, it makes sense that he might think back in that moment to someone else from his past
– the priest – who likewise doubted that he was special.
"It was luck."
"What do you mean?"
"Random, without meaning."
Actor James McAvoy also had an extended scene with the cheerleaders at the beginning of
the movie.
The final film starts with Dennis and Patricia off-screen, discussing people's lack of belief
in the Beast; then we see Patricia introduce herself to the four abducted girls.
"Now, who'd like a PB and J sandwich?"
However, according to Shyamalan, in the original script, the opening sequence with Patricia
was much longer.
The director thought he needed to explain how Kevin had multiple personalities, and
so the cheerleaders were going to go through a similar set of scenes like Casey and the
two girls did when they were first abducted in Split.
In the end though, Shyamalan realised he was just repeating things people had already seen
in that film and that he didn't need the extra scenes in Glass to properly re-introduce the
audience to Kevin Wendell Crumb and his various identities.
Kevin has a total of 24 personalities including The Beast.
In Split, we saw eight of those identities on display either in person or via the video
recordings on Kevin's computer.
But while Glass showed us many more personalities, James McAvoy has confirmed that although he
filmed 23 of Kevin's identities, only 20 of them made the final cut of the film.
I've compared the list of characters that McAvoy's credited for in Glass against the
full list of Kevin's identities revealed on his computer in Split.
It looks like the missing characters in Glass are Bernice, Rakel, and Ansel, as well as
Orwell, who we did see a clip of in Split.
Shyamalan has said that because he was originally going to include 23 out of Kevin's 24 identities
in Glass, at one point he "was going to do a contest to tell [him] which character is
not in the movie".
Anyway, I'm hoping on the Blu-ray we get to see an extended scene of Dr Staple meeting
Kevin's multiple identities which shows us the remaining personalities not seen in either
film.
There's also an interesting little moment with David in the group therapy session that
ended up being scrapped: "So you're not going to shake my hand, and
let me walk on out of here."
He's talking here to Dr Staple, and had this clip been in the final film, it would have
been a chilling bit of foreshadowing of how, towards the end of the movie, Dr Staple holds
David's hand and watches on while he's drowned in a puddle by one of the secret society's
henchmen.
I wonder if the ultimate decision to scrap this brief clip was partly because Shyamalan
felt it tipped its hat a little too early to the fact that David Dunn would find out
something sinister about Dr Staple by touching her hand.
The finale of Glass has proved divisive among fans, but Samuel L Jackson has revealed that
initially the movie had a different ending.
In an interview with Digital Spy, he explained that the original ending was "changed because
of the way society is and what's going on in the world and what it would have looked
like."
Jackson's comments are rather vague, but one possibility is that originally the black-clover
secret society suppressing super-powered individuals was meant to be a covert agency of the government,
rather than a group whose affiliations are never clearly stated.
When Dr Staple's henchmen arrive, they're dressed and labelled like regular law enforcement
officials or SWAT teams.
Given that Glass is set in the present, if the twist was going to be that it was the
government that was secretly repressing and assassinating supers, then it might have felt
the movie was trying to make a deliberate political point.
Another possibility is that the final twist was changed as it ended the movie on an even
darker note, which was also the reason that Shyamalan changed the original ending of his
previous movie Split.
Of course, the three main characters are killed off in Glass, but what if after Elijah's mother,
Joseph and Casey released the footage to the world, it ended up being dismissed as "fake
news" by the government or the media?
During the final scene, we hear Mr Glass say, "Whoever these people are who don't want us
to know the truth, today they lose."
But I wonder if an earlier draft saw the government discrediting the footage and covering up the
whole affair.
I don't know if Shyamalan had anything like that in mind, but it would have been a pretty
depressing ending and again given the movie a more overtly political ending.
Apparently, also at a Q&A event for Glass, Shyamalan talked about how the distributors
Disney and Universal offered him a larger budget to make a more climactic ending.
It's possible that their idea was to actually have that big show-down at the Osaka Tower.
Shyamalan turned down the offer, however, as he says he's not as comfortable making
films with huge budgets and feels he works better with smaller ones, so he kept this
film down to $20 million overall and its CGI budget was only $800,000, a tiny amount for
a superhero movie.
Either way, if you want to know more about the actual ending in the movie and who the
black-clover secret society really represent, then tap here to watch my Ending Explained
video or check the link in the video description below.
Now, if you could have had any ending to Glass what would you have liked?
And do you wish any of these other deleted scenes had been in the movie?
Let me know in the comments below.
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Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers!