Now that HBO Max has relented to the collective tantrums of fanboys and fangirls around the world and announced the upcoming release of the mythological “Snyder Cut” of 2017’s Justice League, we thought of a few more hashtags we’d like to see trending, and a few more movies that we’d like to see the original versions of. (And no, the world doesn’t need another version of Cats. “Butthole Cut” or otherwise.)
Back in the year 2000, Stuart Baird (Star Trek: Nemesis, U.S. Marshals) was summoned by Paramount to save what they hoped would be one of the year’s biggest hits, M:I-2. The movie was stuck. John Woo and his editors were having a tough time stitching the movie together and shrinking its runtime.
Enter Baird, the editor’s editor, who was reputedly responsible for tweaking the movie’s climactic shootout as to avoid an R rating, as well as finding the emotional core of the story. He also cut the movie down to a more palatable 123 minutes.
And it worked. Audience testing for M:I-2 gave Paramount the highest approval scores of any movie in the studio’s then history. The movie also went on to rake in well over US$500 million globally, making it the highest grossing movie of the year, and the biggest Mission: Impossible movie until Ghost Protocol eleven years later.
And while it worked out well for everyone (critics notwithstanding), we would love to see what an unfiltered John Woo Mission: Impossible movie would really look like, with it’s mayhem, destruction, and bloodied bodies riddled with bullets. We would love to see what was in that 210 minute workprint that Baird was forced to pare down.
Back in the early 1990s, David Fincher was known only for his music videos. The celebrated auteur behind Se7en, The Social Network, and Zodiac was then a new player in Hollywood and someone the powers that be over at Fox thought would be a more pliable alternative to writer/director Vincent Ward whom they had recently fired from Alien 3.
Ward’s version of Alien 3 – which involved Ripley and the Xenomorph on a wooden planet populated by monks – was reworked significantly by Fincher who set the story in a mining colony full of convicts.
The problems between the studio and Fincher began with an unfinished script and escalated allegedly due to the director’s arrogance. He was apparently not very good at following studio mandated schedules and budgets. Fox eventually shut down the production, insisted on extensive reshoots, and altered the story to such an extent that it caused Fincher to disavow any involvement with the movie.
The designed-by-committee end product marks the exact moment at which the Alien franchise lost its way. The series never quite recovered from the muddled mess of a movie that was Alien 3. The “Assembly Cut”, which was released on DVD, skews somewhat closer to Fincher’s vision, and is living proof that the studio should have forgone filmmaking protocol and just let him do his thing.
Note: There have been many other versions of Alien 3. All of them discarded drafts of screenplays that we’ll never see on the big screen. One of these, written by acclaimed author William Gibson, was recently released as an audio drama by Audible, with both Michael Biehn and Lance Henriksen reprising their roles as Hicks and Bishop. It’s brilliantly directed by Dirk Maggs, and is as gripping as those first two Alien movies. It’s definitely worth your time.
We loved Pixar’s Brave. But the Brave we loved wasn’t the Brave that was envisioned by its original director. The movie, which was initially called “The Bear and the Bow”, was set to be the first female led movie from Pixar, and Brenda Chapman, who created the story, had a much darker vision in mind. She was fired from the film over “creative differences” in 2010, and replaced by Mark Andrews who apparently lightened the tone significantly, and changed Chapman’s gloomier snowscapes to lush greens in order to appease the Scottish tourism board.
A couple of months after the movie was released, Chapman spoke out about her experience of being fired in an article she wrote for The New York Times. “This was a story that I created, which came from a very personal place, as a woman and a mother. To have it taken away and given to someone else, and a man at that, was truly distressing on so many levels.” And while Chapman did add that ultimately her “vision came through in the film”, we would still love to see what her version of Brave would look like. Especially that different colour palette.
Fox’s 2015 reboot of Fantastic Four was a spectacular failure (it has a 9% score on Rotten Tomatoes). It was a box-office bomb that remains, to this day, at the rock-bottom of the superhero genre. The movie had its fair share of problems right from the get go – from clashes between the studio and director Josh Trank over casting, to his allegedly erratic behaviour on set, to stylising the movie as FANT4STIC.
Calling this Josh Trank’s movie, however, wouldn’t really be accurate. It really is Simon Kinberg’s movie. Unhappy with the assembly cut of the film, the studio had Kinberg step in to write and direct extensive reshoots which changed the arc of the film, made it lighter in tone, and added some really terrible jokes.
Things then escalated, one day before Fantastic Four was released in cinemas, when Trank tweeted: “A year ago, I had a fantastic version of this. And it would’ve received great reviews. You’ll probably never see it. That’s reality though.” Trank’s version, which remains unseen, has since been praised by insiders as a superior film.
Fans know what to expect with The Fantastic Four now that the franchise is safely ensconced within the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But we would love to see Trank’s darker, broodier reimagining of Marvel’s first family.
Note: This one’s dedicated to our colleague Iain McNally who, for some reason, didn’t hate Fox’s disastrous reboot of Fantastic Four as much as the rest of the world. #ReleaseTheMcNallyReview (You can tweet him @McNastyPrime to find out what this is about.)
This is just our catch-all hashtag for everything Star Wars that’s locked away in a Disney vault somewhere in Burbank. We want to see Gareth Edwards’ original cut of Rogue One before Tony Gilroy practically reshot the whole thing. We want to see what Lord and Miller had planned for Solo. Just take Colin Trevorrow’s Episode IX script and make it into an animated film. Or if that’s too much to ask, could we just give all of the raw footage of The Rise of Skywalker to Rian Johnson and see if he can string together a better movie?
Listen up Disney, we’re not difficult to please, just release the original untouched trilogy and let us watch it as God intended, and not Lucas.
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