After The Snyder Cut, Twitter Is Begging For 4-Hour Versions Of These Films
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Whether you like the final product or not, Zack Snyder's four-hour recut of Justice League, now streaming on HBO Max, represents a new era of fan involvement. Snyder stans successfully harangued a multimillion-dollar corporation into respecting one auteur's vision. We won't know the full consequences of this campaign for years, but in the meantime, Devon Sawa is having some fun. The actor-turned-Twitter personality asked his 200k+ followers what movie they'd most like to see recut into a four-hour-long opus. The answers were ... interesting.
One of the most popular responses was "none." Canadian puppet character Ed the Sock argued that a movie that long is "just a director unable to see through his/her ego" and that someone with true vision should be able to kill more of their darlings. It's true that blockbuster movies have been getting longer, but whether that's due to changing norms or a lack of vision isn't statistically apparent.
Important pieces of art have been longer than the Snyder Cut. Andy Warhol's first movie, Sleep, for example, was five hours of his then-boyfriend sleeping. Here's what other films Twitter users thought were worthy of a super-extended edition.
We want more Mummy
Twitter was eager to see another movie on HBO Max get supersized: 1999's The Mummy. The film series has been getting a lot of love online of late — thanks to the Brendan Fraserssaince, the comparative dislike of the Tom Cruise reboot, and the way the 1999 film led the way to a bisexual awakening for many.
The Mummy is a remake of the 1932 classic Boris Karloff feature. Universal updated one of its V.I.M. (Very Important Monsters) by adding more action, more comedy, and more hunks than previous iterations of the franchise. The titular mummy (Arnold Vosloo) was a priest named Imhotep. His backstory remains very similar to Karloff's version of the character: His forbidden romance with a princess named Anck-su-namun results in his mystical mummification. In the '20s, Imhotep is revived. He then plans to revive his lost love by killing the film's resident damsel. The Mummy starred Brendan Fraser as adventuring scalawag Rick O'Connell, Rachel Weisz as action librarian Eve Carnahan, and Oded Fehr as Medjai officer Ardeth Bay.
An R-rated cut of Mrs. Doubtfire
One Twitter user wants to honor the artistic vision of one of the greatest improvisers of all time: Robin Williams. "I just read recently that Robin Williams ad libbed so much in Mrs. Doubtfire that there could be rated R, and NC-17 cuts," she wrote. "I would love to see that." Williams was always known for straddling the line between family-friendly and filthy. He was a huge star in all-ages fare like Aladdin, yet one way he was courted by Disney to make that film was somewhat NSFW. To entice Williams to lend his voice to the Genie, animators at the studio drew the Genie performing Williams' very un-Disney standup routine. Enchanted by the possibilities, Williams signed on.
Robin Williams was known for improvising on set and on stage. Well into his career, he would still occasionally show up at improv theaters and play with house teams. But was there enough improv on the set of Doubtfire to make a filthier movie? Director Chris Columbus told Entertainment Weekly that the rumors were true. "The reality is that there was a deal between Robin and myself, which was, he'll do one or two, three scripted takes. And then he would say, 'Then let me play.' And we would basically go on anywhere between 15 to 22 takes, I think 22 being the most I remember," he said. Columbus also said that a Williams Cut of Mrs. Doubtfire is possible, after a fashion. "I would be open to maybe doing a documentary about the making of the film," he said, "and enabling people to see certain scenes re-edited in an R-rated version." No NC-17 version, though. We can't have everything.
Titanic: the door float cut
A tweet in favor of a four-hour cut of Titanic, specifically for a version that goes into greater detail on how the two leads wound up in the water with only Rose floating on wreckage, got over 1,000 likes. "20 mins of it will be them trying to get on that damn door together," they wrote.
Jack and Rose's door situation has been a source of consternation for Titanic fans since the movie came out. Mythbusters tried to solve the Door Problem in 2012, and Leonardo DiCaprio was badgered about it by his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood co-stars in 2019. Director James Cameron maintains that the door could never have fit both Jack and Rose, but not because of its size. "The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down," he told Vanity Fair in 2017. "It's called art. Things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons."
Exploring more Shimmer in Annihilation
Multiple tweets expressed a desire to see a longer exploration of the world in Annihilation. The 2018 film was a middling success at the box office but earned raves for its bold visuals. Annihilation follows Natalie Portman's Lena, who journeys into the Shimmer — a section of America that has been infected with some sort of alien life. Lena investigates the Shimmer for evidence of what happened to her husband while he was there previously.
The movie was based on the first book of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, so there's plenty of material with which to pad additional hours of film. But, unfortunately for those looking for an extended look at the Shimmer, Annihilation's director Alex Garland has no interest in making a sequel. "All the way through I was clear with everyone, from the studio to the cast. I told everyone that I didn't really see it as part of a franchise. My goal was to make this film and do the best job I can. I didn't even conceptualize it as the start of a trilogy," he told IndieWire. "Sequels are just not something I'm interested in doing. It's like when you don't like steak, you don't make the decision not to eat steak, you just don't eat steak. I just don't do sequels." A recut of existing footage may be the only way fans would ever get more time in the Shimmer.
Cutting the Hobbit trilogy down to four hours
Multiple tweets expressed interest in a four-hour saga that would actually reduce the number of hours devoted to an IP. Many respondents to Sawa's tweet said they wanted the three Hobbit movies cut down into one four-hour flick. "Just take out the idiot Hobbit/elf love story," wrote one.
While successful commercially, the three Hobbit films were nowhere near the critical darlings that The Lord of the Rings trilogy were. Maybe that's because there simply wasn't enough story for three movies. The Hobbit was originally intended to be split into two movies, with The Shape of Water's Guillermo Del Toro directing. But when Del Toro left the project, Peter Jackson picked it up, and two films suddenly morphed into three.
A trilogy has been cut down into one long movie before, though not by the original creators. That '70s Show actor Topher Grace recut the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy into one 85-minute movie. Grace took the saga down from three movies over 7 hours to 51 minutes shorter than even the shortest of the prequels, The Phantom Menace. Someone ask Ed the Sock what he thinks.