Concerning the trailer footage - I’m not sure if there’s an effort from some involved in the movie to dismiss/tell porkies about certain things that were originally filmed, or not…but from the way Gareth worded his comments in the second last paragraph mentioned in this article, it sounded to me like marketing certainly thought that some of that discarded footage was excellent… -
In the same Empire interview, Edwards talked about the fact that the movie trailers featured so much material that wasn’t in the actual finished version. “There was a bit of a process to refining the third act in terms of specific shots and moments, and certain things just fell away,” he explained. “What happened was marketing loved those shots and said, ‘Oh, we’ve got to use that.’ And you say, ‘Well, it’s not in the movie,’ and they said 'It’s okay. It’s what marketing does, we just use the best of whatever you’ve done.”