kewlfish said:
A lot of people (including myself, so bias) have worked on keeping this portion of the movie in… so if we remove it all together… all that work we did goes into the trash. Just so we can cut a minute out of the movie.

I get that - and I don’t want it to seem like people’s work is unimportant, but conversely, you just also essentially argued that you did a ton of work to enhance one minute of film that can be just as effectively summed up and easily removed with a line of text in the crawl. It’s why this one beat is such a 50/50 for so many people looking in here 😃

Is it in there because it looks cool? Because it looks cool and provides “breathing room?” Can it be made to look even cooler? Those are all good and valid reasons to put a lot of time and effort and remarkable, impressive work into saving that one minute, and there are a ton of great options and possibilities for that sequence, either making it a little longer, or chopping it up and putting it in other places, etc.

But I would argue that using the sunk cost fallacy to fuel editing decisions can lead to some pretty rough creative dilemmas as well.