Sharp-Eyed Redditor Spots Recycled ‘Spider-Man 3’ Footage in the ‘Life’ Trailer
Life is full of crazy coincidences. But in Life, nothing is coincidental.
One sharp-eyed Reddit user posted a pair of images that had recently caught his attention to the /movies board, noting a strange similarity between a shot of streetside onlookers gazing up at some great cataclysm in Spider-Man 3 to a nearly identical shot in the trailer for the upcoming not-Alien sci-fi film Life. See for yourself — first, the shot in question from Spider-Man 3. It comes about 35 minutes into the movie, during the scene when Spider-Man saves Gwen Stacy as she falls out of a damaged skyscraper (you can watch the moment in question right now on Hulu):
And the corresponding shot from about 25 seconds into the Life TV ad:
The angle and color-grading have both slightly changed, but images share the same basic cast of characters: shocked guy in grey tie (Really, Life trailer? A dude using a flip phone in 2017?), curly-haired woman, tall guy, lady in sunglasses.The stupefied-looking guy with the mustache from the Spider-Man 3 shot has vanished, sadly, but the shots have very clearly been recycled. (And you’ll note that the photo credits above both come from the same studio, Columbia Pictures.)
It‘s a neat catch, but it prompts a far more urgent question — how did Reddit user toomuchsoull identify this? One of two things must have happened: Either he or she had such an intimate familiarity with Spider-Man 3 that they were stricken while checking out the Life trailer, or they‘ve seen the Life trailer so many times that while revisiting Spider-Man 3, the footage stuck out. Either way, it’s a testament to the incredible potential of the human brain as repository for loose factoids and useless information. You are now free to continue going about your day.