'The Godfather Coda' and Top Five Director's Cuts

The Godfather 1972

The Godfather Part II 1974

The Godfather Part III 1990

The much-maligned original, covered on a Rewatchables 'flawed rewatchables' episode. Both agree it wouldn't crack a top-300 list the way the first two crack most people's top five.

The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone 2020

Coppola's recut. The reordered opening drops the Vatican ceremony and starts on the Immobiliare business deal instead, which Sean says reframes the whole film around Archbishop Gilday rather than Michael. Chris finds the Mary Corleone/Sofia Coppola scenes trimmed and easier to sit through, but says the last 40 minutes are still an operatic, hard-to-follow mess.

Heaven's Gate 1980

Michael Cimino's follow-up to The Deer Hunter, blamed for sinking United Artists and the New Hollywood era of director control. Sean has revisited the Criterion cut (about three and a half hours, down from Cimino's five-hour first assembly). Steven Soderbergh has his own unreleased 90-minute recut.

Brazil 1985

Terry Gilliam's fight with Universal exec Sid Sheinberg over the cut is the other go-to example of a director going to war over final say.

All the Pretty Horses 2000

Billy Bob Thornton's four-hour cut, scored by Daniel Lanois, that Matt Damon calls one of the best movies he's been in. Miramax recut it and Lanois won't release his score, so the director's version may never surface.

Aliens 1986

James Cameron's extended cut adds a roughly 15-minute sequence of the colonists finding the alien hive before Ripley arrives, giving Newt's family an introduction before the survivors are found.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind 1977

Spielberg's cuts are mostly minor trims, except for the version that withholds the interior-of-the-mothership shot he later couldn't resist adding back in.

Alexander 2004

Oliver Stone's Colin Farrell epic exists in four different cuts, with 20 to 40 minutes of difference between them, which Chris says makes it one of the few where you can actually tell what changed.

Justice League 2017

Recorded just before the Snyder Cut's release; Sean frames the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement as fans willing an alternate version into existence, a tactic he traces back to the post-Last Jedi backlash.

Superman 1978

Shot back to back with its sequel, which complicated who actually directed what.

Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut 2006

Richard Lester took over Superman II from Richard Donner and made it goofier; roughly 20 years later Donner got to reinsert Marlon Brando as Jor-El and restore scenes Lester had cut.

X-Men: Days of Future Past 2014

The Rogue Cut restores an entire Rogue storyline that's barely in the theatrical version, which neither host can really explain.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi 2017

Where Sean says this kind of fan campaign really started.

The Informer 2019

Sean's joke pitch for a nonexistent 'Clive Owen cut' restoring 40 minutes of his character.

Star Wars 1977

The 1997 theatrical re-release added digital creatures and new effects (and amended the Greedo shootout), which Sean remembers as his first real experience of fan backlash, played out on the Ain't It Cool News message boards.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace 1999

Chris jokes Lucas still owes the world a cut with more Galactic Senate.

Raiders of the Lost Ark 1981

Steven Soderbergh's black-and-white, dialogue-free recut scored with The Social Network's music, meant to demonstrate the film's visual storytelling works without sound.

2001: A Space Odyssey 1968

Also recut by Soderbergh, alongside Raiders, as part of his habit of re-editing films he loves.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant 1972

One of the Fassbinder titles pulled from Soderbergh's public daily watch-and-read list.

The Draughtsman's Contract 1982

The Peter Greenaway film also spotted on Soderbergh's list.

Den of Thieves 2018

Chris's answer to 'what would you recut' is to make the diner scene 40 minutes long, in real time.

The Little Things 2021

The then-forthcoming Denzel Washington thriller; Chris already knows Jared Leto's character is named Albert Sparma.

Triple 9 2016

Ava 2020

Unknown 2011

The Liam Neeson film, cited as more proof that anything in the genre auto-climbs the Netflix top 10.

The 2nd 2020

The Ryan Phillippe thriller Bill is apparently excited about. TMDb's title for it is 'The 2nd.'

The Hateful Eight 2015

Netflix's version is chapterized and extended, presented more like a miniseries than the roadshow cut Sean and Chris saw theatrically with an overture and intermission.

Doctor Sleep 2019

Mike Flanagan's director's cut, over three hours, went straight to HBO Max as if it had always been the plan; both hosts think it's the better version, and that Rebecca Ferguson's character makes more sense in it.

The Irishman 2019

The film that got Chris thinking about people watching movies in sections.

Das Boot 1981

Wolfgang Petersen's U-boat film has a roughly three-and-a-half-hour director's cut and a much longer TV cut that Petersen doesn't consider canonical.

The Dark Tower 2017

An example of a movie/TV hybrid rollout that never came together.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie 2019

A working example of flipping between the small screen and the big screen to close out a story.

Godzilla 2014

Gareth Edwards's entry in the shared Godzilla/King Kong universe.

Kong: Skull Island 2017

Godzilla: King of the Monsters 2019

Michael Dougherty's sequel, which Chris admits he never actually saw.

Godzilla vs. Kong 2021

The then-upcoming Adam Wingard crossover, brought up as proof these franchise universes are getting hard to track without knowing the whole extended-cut history.

Apocalypse Now 1979

No. 1. Coppola's 2001 Redux reinserts a roughly 20-to-35-minute French plantation sequence; the 2019 Final Cut removes the second Playmates sequence but keeps the plantation scene and Kilgore's surfboard. Sean prefers Redux's French colonists, which he says echoes Coppola's stated idea (from Eleanor Coppola's Hearts of Darkness) that the boat trip moves backward through time.

Blade Runner 1982

No. 2. The Final Cut drops Harrison Ford's voiceover and the studio-mandated happy ending, and more clearly implies Deckard is a replicant. Both hosts prefer it, though Chris wonders how many people have only ever seen the version without the narration that used to hold the plot together.

Heaven's Gate 1980

No. 3. Back again, but for the filmmaking this time rather than the production history; Sean calls the Harvard dance and roller-skating sequences some of the best filmmaking of the era, even as the back half drags.

The Abyss 1989

No. 4. James Cameron's extended cut spends much more time on the Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio/Ed Harris marriage and changes the ending significantly. Sean isn't sure which cut is streaming on HBO Max, since Cameron's various director's cuts aren't clearly labeled.

Kingdom of Heaven 2005

No. 5. Ridley Scott's Crusades epic went from a maligned two-hour-20-minute theatrical cut to a roadshow director's cut of roughly three and a half hours. Chris unabashedly calls it 'McCabe and Mrs. Miller meets Lawrence of Arabia' and one of the hidden gems of the last 20 years.

Alien 1979

Chris puts this and Blade Runner in a category of their own, above the rest of Scott's filmography.

Black Hawk Down 2001

Chris calls it technically astonishing, though he wonders if changing politics have made it harder to watch.

Robin Hood 2010

One of the two Scott releases Chris says genuinely hurt him.

Exodus: Gods and Kings 2014

The other big disappointment on Chris's list.

G.I. Jane 1997

A movie Chris expected to dislike and didn't.

Matchstick Men 2003

Same category as G.I. Jane: a pleasant surprise.

Gladiator 2000

The counter-example that made Kingdom of Heaven's box-office failure feel unfair to Chris: Gladiator had a clean, sellable premise, while Kingdom of Heaven's themes are harder to put on a poster.

Wonder Woman 2017

Cited as a case of modern critics being more forgiving of a merely good blockbuster than critics were in the 1980s.

Lawrence of Arabia 1962

Sean's dad took him to a theatrical re-release when Sean was 11; Sean asked to leave partway through.

The Last Duel 2021

One of two Ridley Scott films due out in 2021, notable mainly because Scott was 83 at the time and still making two movies a year.

House of Gucci 2021

The other 2021 Scott release.

The Magnificent Ambersons 1942

Sean's answer: Orson Welles's Citizen Kane follow-up was recut by the studio and the original negative was destroyed, so the director's version is gone for good.

Citizen Kane 1941

Touch of Evil 1958

The closer precedent: Walter Murch went back to Welles's original memo decades later and restored the film to something closer to his intent.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story 2016

Chris's pick. He wonders what Gareth Edwards's original assembly looked like before Tony Gilroy's reshoots and recut, which most people credit with saving the film.

Alien³ 1992

David Fincher's film has an existing assembly cut that approximates, but doesn't fully realize, his intended version.

Amadeus 1984

Its director's cut adds about 30 minutes to an already long film.

Pokémon Detective Pikachu 2019

Sean's joking suggestion for a movie that might actually need a rescue cut.

Dark Phoenix 2019

Same joke, though Chris doubts there's even usable footage to work with.