10 Director's Cuts That Changed Your Mind About Bad Movies

The frustratingly money-driven nature of Hollywood is such that the movie we see on a giant cinema screen may often differ substantially from the filmmaker's original vision.

This occasionally results in studios eventually relenting and releasing a Director's Cut, often many years after the fact, finally doing justice to directors often unfairly pilloried for the neutered original release.

Somewhat understandably, many of these films are still remembered for their tawdry, choppy, studio-mandated theatrical edits, though if you were even remotely intrigued by what you saw in cinemas, you should most certainly check out these effortlessly superior revisions...

Fox's 2003 Daredevil is bad enough that it swore Ben Affleck off the superhero genre for about a decade, being panned as a generic, soulless comic book film despite proving modestly successful at the box office.

The theatrical cut is, indeed, alternately boring and offputtingly silly, focused too intently on the cheeseball romance between Matt Murdock (Affleck) and Elektra (Jennifer Garner) above all else.

If the theatrical release feels like a product, Mark Steven Johnson's 2004 Director's Cut feels like an actual movie with a definitive vision free of studio meddling.

An entire half-hour longer, it includes R-rated violence and language, and a surprisingly compelling subplot in which Murdock and Foggy Nelson (Jon Favreau) defend a man framed for murder (played by Coolio, oddly enough). The stodgy romance is also trimmed down significantly.

It's still a rough-around-the-edges movie for sure, and Affleck's performance is still a bit questionable, but it feels less like a commitee-designed cash-grab and more like a film produced by an actual artist.

It's not a patch on the Netflix Daredevil, sure, but Johnson's original vision is hardly worthy of all the derision.