Suicide Squad was released in a state I am sure no one wanted.
The fil of Star Trek – The Motion Picture was finished when it was released to theaters, but there were several scenes that were incomplete they wanted to include, but didn’t. They showed an “enhanced” version on TV with some of these scenes, but without the full effects added. Later on, a “Director’s Cut” was released, with effects added.
From the Wikipedia article:
I heard that it was studio, not Bakshi, that insisted on changing “Saruman” to “Aruman” because they were convinced the audience would confuse him with “Sauron”.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say:
I have to observe that I first saw this film in new York City, shortly after it was released.
I went back and saw it at a different theater, in a different city, several weeks later. (What can I say, I knew it was a disappointment, but I’m a masochist.)
The version I saw the second time was very different. Scenes had been re-arranged, and the film ended on a different scene than the one I’d seen the first time. Neither Wikipedia nor IMDB notes this change in the cutting of the scenes. This is NOT simply the changed voice-over at the end between the TV version, movie version, and the DVD, but an actual difference in the film during its initial release.
The Neverending Story was under 2 hours long.
Huh. Well, he did a nice job with it. I liked it as a kid and just watched it again a few months ago with my young ones and it holds up.
This movie was my first thought when reading the thread title but I didn’t know if it counted since it wasn’t “We never finished the effects and put everyone in front of posterboard” level unfinished. But they did do a bunch of splicing in jokes after audiences all liked the preview (that had every instance of humor in it) and someone said “Oh shit, we’re going to need more of this”. The result was a horrible edited film where it was glaringly obvious each time they opened a slot and shoved a joke in there that was obviously filmed and pushed in after the original scene was complete.
According to Bill Warren’s book about 1950s SF movies, Keep Watching the Skies, the released version of Forbidden Planet is essentially a rough cut. It was given a sneak preview, largely to gauge audience reaction to the electronic score. Audience response to the film was so enthusiastic that MGM decided to go ahead and release it exactly as it was, despite the fact that they hadn’t yet done the final edit. To quote Warren, “this explains many awkward scenes and some draggy pacing.”
I find this hard to believe – I expect that Warren’s exaggerating a bit. The effects work on FP, which must have taken the most time, and I would expect to be the gating feature, is definitely completely done. There are some scenes that were cut (like the trip on Robby’s “speedster”), but I think that was because they were thought not to work well. Certainly they cut out (or maybe never filmed) a couple of scenes (there was supposed to be one where Morbius asks Altaira to “make a choice” – it’s referred to in the existing film, but no such scene exists), but I can’t say that I find any of it “draggy”. And I don’t find them awkward.
The same story is told in Louis and Bebe Barron’s Forbidden Planet: A Film Score Guide by James Wierzbicki–although admittedly, Wierzbicki cites Warren as one of his sources. Most of the people involved are no longer living (including Bill Warren), so it would be hard to figure out the truth at this late date.
I admit that Warren’s book is the first place I read this, and apart from Wierzbicki (who, as I said, relies on Warren), I’ve never seen this story anywhere else. I offer it for what it’s worth.
Speaking of Bakshi, he was called in to finish the second Cannonball Run movie.
Heath Ledger died during the filming of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. I suppose the film wasn’t technically left “incomplete,” but it was certainly finished differently than originally planned. I saw it only once, 11 years ago, so details are fuzzy. But I recall finding the ending – in which Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law each take a turn playing Ledger’s character – to be confusing and rather unsatisfying.
I presume Blade Runner counts? I suppose it depends on what you mean by “incomplete” - but the film had the “wrong” ending* (for example) at the time of its original release (1982). I think I’m right in saying that the correct ending was only reinstated for the Director’s Cut in 1992 (though there had been earlier unauthorised screenings of the 1982 workprint, which did have the right ending). The tinkering only stopped with The Final Cut in 2007, 25 years after the original release.
j
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- The studio changed the final scenes of the movie to give it a happy ending; the correct (ambiguous) ending was later reinstated.
The original theater release of Clue could be considered unfinished. Each showing only showed one of the three endings. The idea to do this existed from the beginning of production as a way to simulate playing the game, but was terrible in practice. Thinking it would cause repeat viewings, audiences were upset they didn’t see the entire thing.
The home video release finally put all three together with title cards after the first two saying those were hypothetical. It allowed all the gags from each ending, plus made some uninteresting lines to become running jokes.
That’s even worse than the effect where the spaceship actually crashlands, it goes past the same rocks several times, before finally sliding to a halt in a completely different setting.
Obviously the film-makers learnt their craft from watching Wil-e-Coyote chase the Roadrunner past the same f***ing cactus and rockpile for hours.
While the silent film Sadie Thompson was released it its entirety, the film was lost for many years and when rediscovered, the final reel was badly damaged. When released for DVD, they completed the final years with stills from the original production and the 1932 remake.
Bad idea? Maybe? Incomplete film? No.
Clue was a finished product when released. I agree the home release version is the best since you can see the entire story, but the movie released to theaters was finished.
Orson Welles is basically the master of unfinished projects. He delivered The Magnificent Ambersons as a rough cut which the studio rejected, renegotiated his contract to essentially remove him from the production, and then cut nearly an hour of the film and reshot a different ending, then destroyed the cut footage. The resulting film is complete in the sense that it comes to a conclusion but Welles regarded it as butchered and incomplete. His rendition of Othello was shot over three years with several stoppages and had to cut several planned scenes due to budget and loss of actors or sets, as well as an incomplete audio track. His version of Don Quixote was under constant revision for almost three decades and only released after his death by schlock horror director Jesús Franco in a hacked together form, and The Other Side of the Wind was caught up in ownership rights and financial problems after the fall of the Shah regime and the Iranian investors who backed it, and was only released in 2018 after being reconstructed from legacy and found footage. I don’t even know how to describe F for Fake; it isn’t coherent enough to even call it complete. Welles was brilliant and unforgettable, but between his inability to work with studios and his constant toying with projects with no apparent aim to complete them, it is amazing he ever produced anything that made it to the screen.
Stranger
Here is the scene in question with the cardboard cutout. It is pretty obvious:
I remember when Clue was in theaters and the movie listings listed if it was the A, B or C ending. I didn’t get to see it until it came out in video, so I could see all the endings.
Foodfight! was an animated movie featuring Charlie Sheen, Eva Longoria, Hillary Duff, Chris Kattan, Christopher Lloyd, Wayne Brady and others. Originally slated for a 2003 release, the hard drives containing the digital assets for the film were stolen and they started changing animation style while recreating the film, missing release dates and defaulting on a loan. Finally, the film was auctioned off and slapped together into an absolutely horrible unfinished state just so it could get pushed out the door and squeeze some money out of it… in 2012, only nine years late. It had a very limited theatrical release then quickly went to video.
It is absolutely terrible, looking like a bargain-bin Playstation 1 game and the rest of the movie’s aspects aren’t any better. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube if you hate yourself or just skip around for a minute to see what a trainwreck it is.