Death by a Thousand Director's CutsHow DVD marketing is rewriting the history of film.

I've reached the conclusion that the version released in the theater is the only proper version of the movie (as a result of Blade Runner, actually). If the director wanted that footage in the movie, he should have insisted on it. Otherwise, it wasn't really that necessary in the first place. Assuming, of course, that the director was right about it. In any case, a movie isn't just the product of a director. It's a collaborative product, and all manner of commercial concerns are part of its creation.

-- eofiss
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The horror and gross-out comedy genres have been plagued with this kind of marketing double-talk for years. After some very successful DVD releases of older films with their MPAA un-approved gore spliced back in, distributors started slapping the 'uncut' & 'unrated' labels on nearly everything, often with taglines such as "too intense for theaters."

This implies that the squares in charge of rating films gave the new footage some stamp of disapproval or at least a solemn shake of the head, but in reality, all one has to do to make a DVD release 'unrated' is to change in any way it from its rated theatrical version. Add in a few deleted scenes the director cut for pacing reasons (maybe a couple extra frames of exploding head for good measure) and you can now brand your film an outlaw for the Best Buy racks. Thus watering down the labels until they achieve total meaninglessness.

Along the same lines, but not quite as annoying: how can a film's DVD release be called a "special edition" if it is also the only edition released?

-- zwortnik
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