No one would argue that making movies isn’t hard work, but it’s sometimes hard to fathom exactly how much effort goes into them. What we see in theaters is the result of hundreds of people working countless hours and the filming itself is a just a small fraction of time nestled between months and sometimes years of pre and post production. But what happens when filming has been completed and you still need a certain shot to make something work? Well, sometimes editors can dig into older projects, re-use some footage, and no one’s the wiser. Well, maybe that was the case before the internet.

A certain eagle-eyed Redditor spotted one such re-used shot in a trailer for the new sci-fi horror flick, Life. They pointed out there’s a reaction shot in the trailer showing a line of people that is almost identical to a moment in 2007’s Spider-Man 3. Some may think this is some sort of uber-fan with 100% recall of every movie they’ve seen, but we’re calling shenanigans on spotting this organically. Our guess is they know someone who worked on the film and heard an anecdote of an editor’s day because this is just far too random to spot. 

Now, the angle and color have been shifted slightly, but it’s still very much the same line-up of people—seemingly innocuous enough until you realize there’s a guy using a flip phone. Since both films are owned by Columbia Pictures there’s no doubt an editing team needed a shot and dug into the archives looking for something that would work.

Funnily enough, the practice is actually more common than you may think. Older animated Disney films are notorious for re-using animated sequences in an effort to save time or—more likely—money. And then there are action scenes too good to use just once like with Michael Bay’s The Island and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

And while Redditors continue to call this practice lazy or cheap, we see it as using all the parts of the animal. Sometimes (maybe not with Michael Bay’s films) you need to make ends meet and do what you have to do to get things done. And in this case, using a shot from Spider-Man 3 in Life still makes the trailer work.

Wait a minute. Life is about an rapidly growing alien evil blob thing and Spider-Man 3 is about the Symbiote! Are we seeing some sort of Spider-Man 2.5 here?! Let’s discuss in the comments below!

Images: Columbia Pictures