8 Recent Movies Most Obviously Ruined By Bad Editing

Based on Summer 2016, Hollywood’s in the middle of a post-production crisis.

The past few months have been dominated by a seemingly never-ending string of movies that had whatever was interesting about them quashed in the edit. I'm actually losing track of the amount of times it's painfully obvious a studio's got panicky over the stupid amounts of money they've invested and desperately tried to sanitise the movie their carefully picked auteur had handed in with brutal cuts made with the broadest (and most international) possible audience in mind.

The result is that this has been the year of patchy pacing. Thanks to so much fiddling, many movies have wound up not really having a coherent A-B-C story, to the point that when one comes along that can simply follow a three-act structure it feels like a masterpiece.

It's at the point where simply pointing out problems or speculating on behind-the-scenes scoops for an individual movie is trivialising the wider issue, so to show how widespread this sort of meddling is becoming, here are the eight biggest offenders from the past few months.

Warcraft had people’s attention more than any other long-gestating video game movie thanks to Duncan Jones; the last time a tricky fantasy had been adapted by an unbeatable up-and-comer we’d got The Lord Of The Rings. However, unlike Peter Jackson’s opus, Warcraft stumbled in making its world of different coloured orcs, bickering humans and CGI-extended sets accessible. There’s no establishing of the universe, and what is given out within the dialogue is so mumbled it’s basically alien.

Part of this may be Jones getting blinded by being a big fan of the game (or Universal not caring about the audience outside Blizzard's millions of subscribers), but a big part is a lack of general narrative coherence, something that comes from a troubled edit.

Jones reportedly had to shave a good forty minutes from the film, ruining the plot's flow and the character’s likability, something he’s been pretty blunt about in a recent interview.

Worst Moment: The magically disappearing human army.

At the end of the film we get a big battle that comes out of nowhere, although that suddenness is nothing on its resolution; somewhere in the melee, Jones managed to have the entire human army just disappear through the teleporter without showing it. Couple this with the barely explained sacrifice of Dominic Cooper’s King and it’s a wonder even China can want a sequel.