In days gone by, a standard trick, even in pretty big budget movies, was to edit in generic stock footage to pad out scenes where they could get away with it.
Has the practice gone by the wayside in recent times? I can’t think of any examples of it recently. What was the last big-budget Hollywood movie to use stock footage in the movie itself (rather than some secondary purpose likes TV footage in the movie, or a backdrop to the credits)
There are whole YouTube channels devoted to showing re-used clips in today’s big budget pics. Just type “reused footage” or some such into the search.
It is extremely common.
This is an industry that still revels in re-using the Wilhelm Scream.
Yes, though reused footage is not the same thing as stock footage.
More reused, but Blade Runner used leftover footage from The Shining for the happy-crappy theatrical ending (the green hills).
I’m sure they’re not the most recent uses, but Star Trek II made re-use of many effects scenes from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, presumably to keep costs down. They didn’t even try to hide it.
Airplane used stock footage in some shots, and as background in the driving scene. But, of course, that was a comedy, and the use was pretty obviously intentional.
Open to correction but didn’t Micheal Bay famously reuse a scene from “The Island” in one of his transformers movies, a scene on a highway with a car getting destroyed, with various details changed through CGI. So it certainly still happens.
News footage of then-President Bill Clinton was used in both Contact and The Siege in such a way as to make it seem that he was reacting to the fictional events of the films.
Not the most recent, I’m sure, but I know Apollo 13 (1995) used stock footage. There’s a featurette where they talk about editing together stock footage with new footage they made for the movie.
Not stock footage per se, but scenes from the 1967 film Poor Cow with a young Terrence Stamp were used for flashbacks in the 1999 film The Limey with a much older Terrence Stamp.
I know this isn’t entirely what you meant, bu the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck
used archival footage of Joseph McCarthy in order to depict him.
Forrest Gump anyone?
Slightly related, relatives of sailors who died aboard HMS Barham complain the crew has to die over and over, without credit even, as the video is often used to depict the sinking of some other warship.
The 2014 Godzilla used a lot of stock footage in the opening credits. My favourite is The Hunt For Red October when an F-14 Tomcat turned into an F9F Panther just before crashing. Wave off! Wave Off!!!!!! - YouTube
Eh, it’s not like an F-14 is a particularly distinctive-looking plane. I’m sure nobody will notice.
More recently, Star Trek: Generations reused the same footage of the exploding Klingon bird-of-prey as Star Trek VI.
Years ago I was watching a friend editing a film. The bits he was putting together featured a plane taking off and being destroyed by a bomb. Although I was watching closely for a long time, he had to point out to me that the two planes had different livery and were from two other movies.
We are specifically looking for movies that used stock footage in a kind of subtle sneaky way, right? Ones that slipped it in hoping no one would notice. Not movies that used old footage like Forest Gump, which incorporated it in.
Transformers 2 used stock footage from the Island, another recent Michael Bay movie. And they tried to slip it by, too.
Or an F9F, for that matter. :rolleyes:
There was stock footage of a bicyclist getting flipped over the top of a car?
Didn’t a recent trailer also use old footage? I think it’s the Spider-man Homecoming movie and they used old footage of a crowd reacting in…Spider-man 2 or 3.