Movies That Had To Be Re-Edited After They Were Released

Most of the time, a film is shot, edited, and released theatrically, then that same film gets a home media release without any major alterations. That's not always the case, though. The history of cinema is full of fascinating stories in which films are, for one reason or another, re-edited even after they've been theatrically distributed in some form. Sometimes it's because of a disagreement between a director and a studio, sometimes it's because of censorship in a foreign country, and sometimes it's just because a filmmaker decided they wanted to tweak a few things. Whatever the case, whenever these recuts happen, cinephiles and casual moviegoers alike often take notice of how and why.

There are, of course, dozens of examples of this phenomenon, from simple DVD director's cuts to battles between filmmakers to entirely different versions of the same film released years apart. There are even cases of filmmakers going back to make changes after their films have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Check out these fascinating stories of films that were re-edited even after they were released.

Peter Jackson's adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy was famously recut into a series of extended editions upon DVD release, stretching the already epic runtime of each of the films into something even larger, with additional scenes that helped to flesh out Tolkien's world. The third installment, The Return of the King, is particularly noteworthy, as new material was shot after the film had already swept the Academy Awards and taken home the prize for Best Picture.

In the behind-the-scenes appendices for the film, Jackson revealed that three weeks after the Oscars ceremony in 2004, he and his crew returned to a New Zealand soundstage to shoot a few seconds of additional footage that was required for the extended cut. You can find the footage in the "Paths of the Dead" sequence, when Gimli looks down to see a series of skulls rolling into the dirt in front of him — an auspicious addition to a movie that had already claimed cinema's most prestigious honor.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is one of the great science fiction masterpieces in the history of cinema, still pored over and analyzed by everyone from diehard cinephiles to full-on philosophers five decades after its release. One thing the film has never been accused of being, though, is a fast-paced thrill ride. Kubrick realized this, but after its world premiere in April of 1968, even he was concerned that the film was making his audience a bit too "restless."

The restlessness of his audience was thanks in part to the age of the film's first audiences, which skewed a bit older than the young counterculture following it would later attain in wide release. Kubrick didn't foresee this, though, and made the decision to head back into the editing bay to cut nearly 20 minutes from the film for its wide release. Kubrick and his editor, Ray Lovejoy, trimmed the film together over four days of work, and instructions on how to cut the shipped prints of the film were sent to theater owners who already had their longer copies. This likely led to some discrepancies in what was actually cut, and the film may have varied from theater to theater. While the "lost" footage allegedly exists in the Warner Bros. vaults, it's unlikely to ever be seen, out of respect for Kubrick's wishes regarding deleted scenes from his films.

The Chinese government is well-known for censoring films from other countries before they can be shown to Chinese audiences. These edits happen for a wide variety of reasons, but one of the most amusing came in 2012, when the Chinese State Administration of Radio, Film and Television opted to alter one of the most famous scenes in James Cameron's Oscar-winning epic Titanic. 

Titanic, of course, was originally released in 1997 to massive box office success and a record-tying award season run. The 2012 release was for Cameron's 3D conversion of the film, and the scene in question was the moment in which Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) draws Rose (Kate Winslet) as she poses nude for him. Why? Well, Chinese censors said that "considering the vivid 3D effects, we fear that viewers may reach out their hands for a touch and thus interrupt other people's viewing."

To hinder these attempts at fondling a 3D image from a movie released 15 years earlier, China showed the nude scene from the neck up.

Few films have ever received quite as much re-editing attention — or fan interpretation of the various re-edits — as Blade Runner, the 1982 sci-fi classic about future cop Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunting rogue synthetic humans known as replicants. The original theatrical version of the film was not the version director Ridley Scott wanted you to see, as it contained various voiceovers by Ford in an attempt to help explain the backstory, as well as a studio-mandated happier ending.

In 1992, a new version of Blade Runner was released that dropped both the voiceover and the happy ending. Dubbed the "Director's Cut," this version of the film popularized the fan theory that Deckard is actually a replicant himself, as the new cut helped emphasize the thematic ambiguity Scott had always intended.

Sadly, despite its improvements, Scott himself did not fully supervise the "Director's Cut" of the film, and in 2007 he opted to remedy that with what's become known as the "Final Cut" of Blade Runner. With Scott's direct supervision, this cut of the film further plays up the Deckard-as-replicant interpretation, adds in some scenes previously only seen in international releases, and features a full restoration done under Scott's watchful eye.

The story of the prequel to The Exorcist is not so much the tale of a film being re-edited after its release as it is the tale of an entirely new movie emerging after the first film's release, which is made even more complicated by the fact that the second film to be released was actually the first film.

It breaks down like this: screenwriter William Wisher and director Paul Schrader teamed up to make a prequel to The Exorcist centered on an exorcism that Father Merrin (played by Stellan Skarsgård in the prequel) performed in Africa right after World War II. The film was meant to be a cerebral drama with supernatural elements, but when James Robinson, owner of Morgan Creek Entertainment, began seeing footage from Schrader's film, he grew worried that the project wouldn't be a success. Schrader was ultimately fired, and director Renny Harlin was brought in for what started as reshoots, but soon became an almost entirely new production with many of the same story beats, cast members, and sets. 

Harlin's film was released theatrically as Exorcist: The Beginning, but Morgan Creek was not yet done with the property. Perhaps hoping to recoup their full investments, which now included two productions, the studio called Schrader back in to recut his own footage (with a bit of Harlin's thrown in) to finish his original film. Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist was later released on DVD. Neither film was particularly well-received, but the making of them both is quite a story.