10 Classic Movies The Directors Won't Stop Changing

James Cameron is a serious perfectionist, so it's no surprise that he likes to tinker with his movies long after they appear in theatres. Remember how the Titanic re-issue involved digitally changing the sky so that the constellations were those that would have been visible in April 1912? But it's Aliens that he's gone back to more than any of his other work.

For the movie's original 1986 theatrical release, executives at Fox pushed Cameron to cut over a quarter of an hour of "too much nothing", essentially backstory and slow-build suspense.

Cameron put much of this back in for Aliens's TV debut in 1989, adding scenes that many now see as essential (such as Ripley learning of her daughter's death during her long years in hypersleep), as well as plenty more space marine content.

Some of the visual effects on the scenes cut from the theatrical cut were never finished, so didn't get put back in this TV version. Cameron, however, got the effects team to restore a couple of sequences, mostly related to the deserted colony on LV-426, and these first appeared on the "Special Edition" released on laserdisc and VHS in the early 1990s.

The 2010 Blu-Ray release (for the Alien Anthology boxset) included versions of both the "Theatrical Cut" and "Special Edition", but Cameron had tinkered with them yet again.

For this (as yet) final version of the film, there was not just the expected 4K, high-definition transfer, but the director also used the opportunity to recut some small mistakes (such as Ripley picking up the rifle and flamethrower in the wrong order when tooling up). It doesn't make a huge difference to the viewing experience, but just demonstrates Cameron's difficulty with ever letting something go.