A Director’s Cut isn’t necessarily a guarantee of improvement, with the multiple editions of Oliver Stone’s infamous Alexander proving that sometimes it’s impossible to polish a cinematic turd, no matter how hard you try.
However, there have been many instances when filmmakers heading back to tinker with their features has yielded an exponentially better experience for audiences, justifying the decision to return to the well, and leaving fans to question why the inferior theatrical version was the one approved for release by the studio.
Some Director’s Cuts make minor additions and create incremental improvements as a result, but Redditors have been praising the longer, more coherent, and ultimately superior films that were completely reinvented after the fact.
Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven is taking up a lot of the conversation, which is fair enough when the 144-minute big screen release was greeted with lukewarm reviews and tepid box office, while the Academy Award winner’s preferred 194-minute vision for the historical epic is lauded by many as one of this best-ever works.
Ben Affleck’s maligned Daredevil chopped off 30 minutes that deserved to stay in, and Zack Snyder’s name inevitably comes up given that he’s delivered a Director’s Cut and Ultimate Cut of Watchmen, an Ultimate Edition of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and of course a four-hour Justice League, all of which can be deemed as better to their vanilla counterparts.
There’s never any guarantees that a Director’s Cut can turn the bad into the mediocre, the mediocre into good, or the good into great, but the evidence is definitely there that it can happen on occasion.