The whole Shandor thing was dumb as fuck. Why did you get JK Simmons to be in the movie for 30 seconds just to get ripped apart? Shandor is an already baked-in antagonist for any sequel that may come. He would be perfect either as the direct antagonist or the evil puppet master pulling all the strings. He's been name dropped a bunch of times in the franchise so to have him show up and leave like that was really disappointing.

Now, there's a high likelihood that something had to get cut. It was already a 2-hour movie and there were even scenes in the trailer that got cut (I definitely remember kids at school playing a prank on Phoebe involving an exploding chip bag that wasn't in the movie itself) so I'd be interested in knowing if that was the case because that made zero fucking sense.

Dunno, I always like the "bad guy who is trying to summon something evil gets immediately killed by said evil" trope. Cause it is like "yeah, duh, what did you expect to happen here"

If he had more back story or screen time where its established that he was a dolt what happened might make sense. The problem is they made it clear he was the opposite. He built that town and the building in NY. He was a historian who knew how to summon Gozer. His 30 seconds was nonsensical and a total waste.

It was akin to Cerci in GOT at the end where this intelligent schemer just runs away and gets crushed by a falling ceiling. While the characters aren't apples to apples their deaths and what they mean or potentially mean to the story they live in warrants more than a derp death.