I’m not talking about things like George Lucas’ “special editions” of the Star Wars films, or the “Extended Editions” and “Director’s Cuts” of movies. Or the way Disney re-released The Lion King with added animated fotoage of “Morning Report” after that song showed up in the stage musical. There’s plenty of that sort of thing these days.
No, I’m talking about something that generally happens with old films, and usually pretty bad ones. Where the running length is just a little too short, and they want it to run as a major feature. Or they need to lengthen the film for the 90 minute TV market. The “new” footage is often made by other people, and doesn’t match the original
Madmen of Mandoras/The Saved Hitler’s Brain – a 1963 film that ran just a little too short, about a bunch of Nazis who saved der Fuhrer’s Face . Pretty good acting and sets (although their swastikas didn’t look right). But it was too short, so someone else several years later shot a lot of padding to bring it to 90 minutes. And gave it the catchier title. I grew up reading about this in the monster movie magazines, but I didn’t see the film until a few years ago. Pretty awful
Sam’s Song /The Swap – or How to repurpose your Robert deNiro footage into another movie. I haven’t seen this one.
Dark Star – This was a student film by John Carpenter, Dan O’Bannon, and others as a 45 minute long student film. Producer Jack Harris agreed to distribute the film if they’d cut out the boring parts and shoot new footage to bring it up to a decent length. The scenes with O’Bannon dealing with the alien “beachball” were apparently all added at this point. (Interestingly, the depiction of a "monster loose on a space ship: was the whole point of O’Bannon’s later movie Alien, although here it was all played for laughs.). A weirdly inconsistent but fascinating cult film. At least in this case it was the original actors and creators involved, so the new scenes don’t clash with the old ones.
The Alien Factor – low budget 1978 film starring nobody you’ve ever heard of. They had to add extra footage to this to pad out the time. Notable because stop-motion animator Ernie Farino (he animated the endoskeleton in the first Terrminator movie, among other things) had to add animated things into the film AFTER the original footage had been shot (and with no thought off adding special effects afterwards). A real challenge.
Is “on the last day of shooting, in a panic” close enough to qualify?
On the last day of filming, Guest realised that the movie was coming in at 72 minutes, three minutes short to qualify as a feature, so Howerd improvised a scene in a phone box.
A Dudley Moore starring film about a man designing parts for a new type of military tank. It bombed. So they added scenes with Eddie Murphy as a tank commander trying the new tank in its first combat mission. The Eddie Murphy scenes were arguably the best part. Still not enough to save the film, though.
They filmed extra scenes with Raymond Burr for the American release of Godzilla.
Not a movie, but the ST:TNG episode “Future Imperfect” was running short, so they hurriedly wrote and filmed an extra scene with Cmdr. Riker and his son. Turned out to be a great scene, which gave the episode some further emotional resonance.
I don’t know if you are only looking for bad films, but Duel was originally was originally made as a TV movie, but it proved so popular extra scenes were added and it was given a theatrical release. IIRC, they were the school bus scene and the railroad crossing scene. If you look closely, you can tell it’s a different truck in those scenes.
Roger Corman loved to take finished films from Directors working under him and add gratuitous sex and gore he shot himself to make the films “more marketable”, often without the original Director knowing. Humanoids from the Deep was one such film that Corman later added in a bunch of extremely gratuitous rape scenes of fishmen raping human women much to the original casts disgust.
Similarly the Italian film Island of the Fishmen with Barbara Bach for international release was given a completely new 10 minute opening with Cameron Mitchell that was entirely an excuse to add in a bunch of gore at the start to keep audiences interested.
Yes. Even as a kid I noticed that in the scenes where Burr’s “Steve Martin” interacted with the major actors from the original film, they always had their backs to the camera, so you couldn’t se their faces.
They reportedly wanted to take this same route with the second Godzilla movie, shooting extra scenes with “western” actors, but they ultimately decided that it was too much work, and simply released it dubbed as Gigantis the Fire Monster.
When they released Toho’s third kaiju movie, Rodan, they tacked on an opening segment using footage of atomic bomb tests to suggest that atomic testing was somehow responsible for Rodan’s re-awakening, something missing from the Japanese version. They also recut the film, took out one scene, and added a long soliloquoy about an honorable death over the death scene of the Rodans. In the original Jap[anese version, there’s no such voicde-over.
How about a short subject? Disney’s Dad… Can I Borrow the Car? was padded to fill a 60-minute slot – over twice its original length – for their “Wonderful World of Disney”. Both versions are on YouTube.
According to Wikipedia, the extra footage was shot after the first cut was made, but before the film’s release. Spielberg did more editing for the 1980 Special Edition and his 1998 video “Director’s Cut”, but these didn’t require any extra shooting.
I’d consider CE3K as the “modern films” exempted from this category, but I was vague about definitions, and the Special Edition came out well before Lucas’ Special Editions of the original Stsar Wars Trilogy that I used as examples.
Rocketship X-M was a 1950 movie about a trip to the moon deliberately rushed into production to beat Destination Moon (based on a story by Robert Heinlein, and with good special effects and Chesley Bonestell paintings) to the theaters. As a result, they didn’t have time to add a lot of special effects, and had continuity errors
The shot at the very end of Batman Returns of Catwoman rising up from out of frame to look up at the Bat-signal in the sky was added at the request of the studio to clarify that she had survived; it cost them an additional quarter million dollars. That’s not Michelle Pfeiffer in the costume.
How can this be economically viable? It seems to me that the effort and cost would be way more than any financial gain made. I noticed that some of the movies mentioned were ones I never even heard of, so the financial gain had to be minimal.