Quote:
Originally Posted by Skybird
Not true. Often the theatrical releases are crippled versions against the will of the director, because producers fear the audience is too dumb to understand them, bringing revenues down. And this dumb version then is what fails to impress the crowds. "Kingdom of Heaven" on my mind as a very prominent example. Theatre version: bad; extended version: benchmark movie. Dirctor's Cut of Blade Runner sees the film being even shorter than the theatre release, and cutting the end scenes that against the director's will had been introduced to the theatre version to make the movie more digestable for the stupid crowd (it is footage Scott got from Kubrick, from Shining).
Regarding Alien, there was "Alien, and "Aliens" - and then nothing anymore. Third and fourth part simply were extremely bad movies.
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Hey Skybird thats why I said "ALMOST ALWAYS".
There are exceptions to this rule, and as you note I agree with you on the fact that Kingdom of Heaven in its 3+ hour original length is the correct version. To be honest, some cinemas in europe actually projected the whole film instead of the canonical 2 hours.
Also lets not forget 2 points : one is the director eliminating footage because its bad and would ruin the film independantly of the length of the movie. And in this case the director is always correct, so when we see reinstated footage that should have been on the cutting floor we are seeing nothing more than a marketing edition and most of the time the extended version will be bad.
The other issue is of course the fact that some directors comply with this stupid 2 hour rule so they have or are obliged to leave on the cutting florr footage that actually is part of the movie (and isn't bad footage in any case). So when you see the extended edition you're actually seeing the whole damn film. Now mind you, in europe cinemas and people are not so obsessed with this 2 hours rule as americans are. So we get to see movies for the most part unaltered in length, although most cinemas yes tend to impose a stupid 2 hours screen time to maximize the number of viewings per day.