Director's Cut - Extended Cuts and Special Editions

Extended Cuts and Special Editions

A related concept to the "Director's Cut" is that of an extended or special edition. An example is Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. While Jackson considers the theatrical releases of those three films to be a final "director's cut" within the constraints of theatrical exhibition, the extended cuts were produced so that fans of the material could see nearly all of the scenes shot for the script to develop more of J. R. R. Tolkien's world, but which were originally cut for running time, or other reasons. New music and special effects were also added to the cuts. Opinion remains divided on which cut is superior; Peter Jackson and his writing partners, the main cast and Weta Workshop as a whole, regard the Extended Edition as the superior cut, while detractors believe such scenes were left out for a reason. Another example is Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now Redux, which, like the original film, polarized the audience, with some fans considering the original version to be the definitive cut.

In rare instances, such as Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, John Cassavetes's The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Blake Edwards' Darling Lili, scenes have been deleted instead of added, creating a shorter, more compact cut.

Special editions such as George Lucas's Star Wars films, and Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, in which special effects are redone in addition to a new edit, have also caused controversy. (See List of changes in Star Wars re-releases and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: The 20th Anniversary).

Extended or special editions can also apply to films that have been extended for television and video against the wishes of the director, such as the TV versions of Dune (1984) and the Harry Potter films, and the DVD editions of Ridley Scott films Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, and American Gangster.

More recently, a slightly different take on the re-cutting of films was seen in a 2006 revision of the 1980 film Superman II. Most releases that contain the label "director's cut" or "extended edition" include minor changes and/or scene additions not seen in a film's theatrical release, but that do not tend to greatly affect or change the plot, story or overall product. However the new version of the second Superman film (known as The Richard Donner Cut) restores as much of the original director's conception as possible, making it a considerably different picture. More than half of the footage filmed for Superman II by the originally credited director (Richard Lester) has been removed from the film and replaced with Donner footage shot during the original principal photography from 1977–1978. There are also several newly filmed shots and many new visual effects, and Richard Donner is credited as director of the film instead of Richard Lester. Another example of this is Brian Helgeland's Payback. Possibly the most infamous collection of cuts, edits, reversions and modifications to a single film falls to Caligula. The film exists in at least 10 different versions ranging from a sub-90 minute television edit version of TV-14 (later TVMA) for cable television to an unrated full XXX pornographic version exceeding 3.5 hours.