Films that that had added footage AFTER completion

[Robot_Arm]

@Gatopescado

We never got to see the film however.

Worth it for a cool story like that.

I hope you saw it eventually; it’s a great movie.

[Gatopescado]

@Robot_Arm

I hope you saw it eventually; it’s a great movie.

I finally did. I actually didn’t care for it too much. But what do I know?

[Robot_Arm]

Interesting. I’d have thought anyone who was a big enough Gilliam fan to go to an advance screening would enjoy it. It’s not a lighthearted romp like Time Bandits, but it’s Gilliam’s style writ large.

You might try to find the version that Sheinberg ordered the editors at Universal to create. It’s sometimes referred to as the “love conquers all” version.

[Dropo]

@CalMeacham

Madmen of Mandoras/The Saved Hitler’s Brain… Pretty good acting and sets…

It’s also surprisingly well lit and photographed for such a low-budget flick. The cinematographer was Stanley Cortez, who in better days had done The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and The Night of the Hunter (1955) - to say nothing of the 1959 Cinemagic epic, The Angry Red Planet - and in less better days, this movie and The Navy vs. the Night Monsters (1966).

IIRC, the creation of new footage after a film’s completion happened in the case of several pre-Code films, e.g., Baby Face (1933) - “In 2004, when Michael Mashon, a curator of the motion picture division at the Library of Congress, received a request for a print of this film, he discovered two negatives of the film: the original camera negative and a “duplicate negative” that was longer. The duplicate negative was the pre-release (uncensored) version of the film that was submitted to the New York State censorship board in 1933 for approval.” - Baby Face (1933) - Trivia - IMDb

Another reason new footage is shot is because some idiot executive thinks it’s a good idea. Re: A Fistful of Dollars (1964):

“When the film first aired on American TV (ABC) in August 1977, a network executive ordered the creation of a new prologue (directed by Monte Hellman) to give a moral justification for the lead character’s killings: a prison warden (Harry Dean Stanton) commutes “The Man With No Name’s” sentence if he goes to San Miguel and restores order to the town. Neither Eastwood or Leone participated in this new sequence (“The Man With No Name” is seen only from the rear.), and this distortion of Leone’s creative vision has reportedly been dropped from subsequent presentations.” - A Fistful of Dollars (1964) - Alternate versions - IMDb

[Czarcasm]

At the premiere of Exorcist II, Richard Burton’s character gets killed at the end of the movie. Director John Boorman pulled the film immediately after and reshot some scenes, including the ending, so that Burton’s character lives and walks off into the night hand-in-hand with Linda Blairs’s character. This is the version most people saw in the theaters.

[CalMeacham]

Lucky Lady (1975) didn’t have its new scenes and edit after the release, but apparently it was awfully close:

In the original script, the two male leads were killed by government agents and the final scene happened ten years later with Liza Minnelli’s character married to a boring businessman remembering the men she once loved. The writers said when they sold it, “The studio loved the script, and at that point no one objected to the ending.”[8]

“One of the first images in our minds when we began to work on the script was the ending,” said Katz. "The idea of this woman remembering the two men she loved. We worked backwards from that. To us, the romance of the piece was in the idea of separation and loss.[8]

Because the film was booked in for a Christmas release, Donen only had three months to edit the film. During this time Donen became concerned about the ending, feeling that the film had become much lighter than originally intended, and tried several different ones, including simply cutting off the final ten minutes. He eventually decided the film needed a happy ending and Fox agreed to finance a reshot scene. Because Minnelli was filming A Matter of Time in Rome, Donen, Hackman and Reynolds flew to Rome in November and shot a new ending.[8] The ending consisted of the three characters in bed together ten years later.[18]

Huyck and Katz wrote the new ending, albeit reluctantly. “To us the original ending made a comment about the choices a woman has to make. But instead of making it the story of this woman, Stanley has made it a story of three people. That’s valid. It’s just different from what we originally intended.”[8]

Garth Wigan, a Fox executive at the time, later recalled, “We previewed the movie nine times. The 2-hour, 30-minute version was wonderful. Burt Reynolds and Liza Minelli died at the end and everything was set up for them to die. But market research told us they shouldn’t die, so we started chopping a bit here, a bit there. We took the seriousness out. The only good preview we had was when the film broke, and Stanley Donen, the director, did a dance for the audience while it was being spliced.”[19]

It was decided that the new ending was not suitable, in part due to poor make up. So a third ending was used, which cut off the last ten minutes of the film.[18]

Minnelli later criticized Donen for taking “out the part that made you feel like the three of us are in peril. I saw the finished picture and I never once was afraid for us. Most of the serious moments were removed too.”[14]

Reynolds and Minnelli both criticized the new ending, requesting that the studio show the three different endings to the press. Donen refused and since he had final cut the studio backed him. Donen called Minnelli an “emotional child” for this criticism.[18]

Lucky Lady

[CalMeacham]

One film that was re-edited after its release (although no new footage was added, AFAIK), was Ralph Bakshi’s animated version of Lord of the Rings I saw it shortly after its premiere in New York, then saw it again several months later (I’m a masochist), and the order of the scenes had clearly been changed.

By the time Bakshi was done animating, he had only four weeks left to cut the film[16] from a nearly 150-minute[31] rough cut. Restoring a piece of animation where Gandalf fights the Balrog (replaced in the finished film by a photomontage), Eddie Bakshi remarked that little of the film was left on the cutting room floor. Bakshi asked three additional months to edit the film, but was declined.[16] After test-screenings, it was decided to re-cut the end of the picture so that Gollum would resolve leading Frodo and Sam to Shelob before cutting back to Helm’s Deep, so as to not end the film on a cliffhanger.[20][22]

The Lord of the Rings (1978 film)

[RealityChuck]

On TV, Pushing Daisies had wrapped up shooting for their second season before they learned it was cancelled. Bryan Singer shot a new scene to give the show some closure.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

Kubrick re-edited 2001: A Space Odyssey pretty aggressively after underwhelming preview screenings in Washington, DC and NYC, cutting IIRC almost a fifth of the original version.

[Peter_Morris]

But that is footage removed, not footage added.

[Robot_Arm]

@Elendil_s_Heir

Kubrick re-edited 2001: A Space Odyssey pretty aggressively after underwhelming preview screenings in Washington, DC and NYC, cutting IIRC almost a fifth of the original version.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before. Is there any information on what was in the deleted scenes? Kubrick being Kubrick, I assume the footage does not still exist.

[Smapti]

The “motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane” scene in Snakes on a Plane was added after production was complete, once the early publicity about the film started going viral and people were joking about Samuel L Jackson having a line like that.

[Asuka]

They actually added a bunch of new scenes involving nudity and gore to the movie because originally it was PG-13 and they thought upping everything to an R rating would attract more people to watch.

[whitetho]

[quote=“WildaBeast, post:8, topic:988973”]
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.
[/quote]My understanding is that the extra scenes were needed to increase the run time to the minimum needed for European theatrical release.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Robot_Arm

@Elendil_s_Heir

Kubrick re-edited 2001: A Space Odyssey pretty aggressively after underwhelming preview screenings in Washington, DC and NYC, cutting IIRC almost a fifth of the original version.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard that before. Is there any information on what was in the deleted scenes? Kubrick being Kubrick, I assume the footage does not still exist.

See here: 2001: A Space Odyssey - #126 by Elendil_s_Heir. I see I misremembered: he cut about 12%, not 20%. And yes, I believe it’s now lost footage. I highly recommend that book, Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece by Michael Benson.

[Robot_Arm]

Very interesting. Thanks.

I came up with another example that I don’t think has been mentioned, Earthquake. According to IMDb, the original film was too long to be shown in a two-hour timeslot, so NBC decided to air it in two parts over two weeks. That meant it was too short. Originally, they wanted to add some of the original unused footage, but that included a subplot of Ava Gardner’s character having an abortion. In order to fill the runtime, new scenes were filmed. An entire arc of a married couple flying to Los Angeles, and their plane trying to land during the height of the quake, was shot and added for television.

[Mahaloth]

@Asuka

They actually added a bunch of new scenes involving nudity and gore to the movie because originally it was PG-13 and they thought upping everything to an R rating would attract more people to watch.

This movie and Cocaine Bear were movies that sold themselves on their title and premise alone. Snakes on a Plane was a lot better.

[RealityChuck]

Freaks was massively cut by the studio due to audience reactions to it. The resulting film was too short, so a prologue was added.

[CalMeacham]

According to Goldner and Turner’s excellent book The Making of King Kong, after the movie was edited, and many interesting scraps of film and bits of business that slowed the story down had been tossed out (including the Styracosaurus, the two-horned Rhino, and the infamous Spider Pit sequence), the resulting film came to 13 reels.

“I’m not going to release a movie in three reels!” declared director Merian C. Cooper. So they shot a completely new and not really necessary sequence – the one where the rampaging Kong, having broken out of the New York theater and re-found Ann Darrow – menaces an elevated railway ('subway car"). It’s special effects tour-de-force, in which you can make out multiple layers of effects (the miniature Kong and the train, the people looking out of upper-story windows, the people down in the street running past), and I’m glad it’s there, but it’s not really needed. And I’d rather have the Spider Pit, to be honest.

Colorized version of Kong attacking the El:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwgdgD_BDHE

Here’s Peter Jackson’s recreation of the Spider Pit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOMKnhN7ABs