10 Movies Weirdly Changed (Nobody Knows Why)
When films gets changed for no clear reason.
Though it's often said that a film no longer belongs to the filmmaker once it's released into the world for all to see, that's not quite true. Despite the long-held belief that movies are a rigid, immutable product once they're out there, time and time again we've seen them be changed post-release.
The most infamous example, of course, is George Lucas' controversial pervasive changes made to the original Star Wars trilogy, yet even if you don't agree with Lucas' artistic decisions, it's at least easy to appreciate his way of thinking, that he believes he's improving the movies for modern audiences.
It's tougher to makes sense of these changes, though.
Inspired by this recent Reddit thread about a certain home video change we'll be discussing momentarily, these 10 movies all received odd alterations once they hit home video - revisions which haven't ever been fully explained and have left fans puzzled ever since.
From random dialogue changes to strange edits to sound and music, most of these alterations didn't exactly go down well with fans, who called them out and begged the distributor to restore the original versions - which, in some cases, they thankfully did...
10. Will Smith's Changed Dialogue - Men In Black
Men in Black is a film so firmly set in most of our minds that even the slightest change is pretty noticeable. Case in point, one head-scratching revision for its streaming release was recently brought to light by a keen-eared Redditor.
Early in the film, when the soon-to-be Agent J (Will Smith) is chasing down an alien perp, he originally shouts "Freeze means stop!," but in some streaming versions of the movie, he instead says, "It’s your ass when I catch you!"
More to the point, he says this phrase twice in a row, and even weirder, the subtitles still have the original 'freeze' line.
It's tough to make sense of why decisions like this are made - one commenter suggested it could've been in response to the 1992 incident where a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student was shot and killed in the U.S. because he didn't understand the word "freeze."
But given that Men in Black came out in 1997 and its streaming release many, many years later, it's not quite a persuasive explanation.