Contractual obligation, maybe? "We haven't used Phoenix yet. Fly her around in a few circles and make her scream in front of a camera, and we'll send it to theaters in the summer."
So okay, I was thinking about that special subgenre of action film where a retired special ops officer gets his hamster kidnapped, and decides that it's time to make a straight, bloody line to the perpetrator, gruesomely dispatching anyone in his way with his special ops skills, because their allegiance to the villain justified their deaths. You know, John Wick, Taken, The Equalizer, Charles Bronson movies, etc. I don't know if there's a specific name for this subgenre, but I think "Justice Porn" fits as a description.