10 Director's Cuts That Changed Your Mind About Bad Movies
8. Kingdom Of Heaven
In its theatrical form, Ridley Scott's 2005 historical epic is watchable yet disappointingly generic, reportedly the result of a concerned studio focus testing the film into oblivion.
The cinema version is a constant rush to the finish line, with characters too often feeling like cardboard cut-outs, especially Orlando Bloom's Balian.
It's staggering just how drastically the film is improved by the 50 minutes that were added in the Extended Cut later that year.
With a lesser focus purely on action, the 194-minute Scott version digs deeper into its characters and the political machinations of the Crusades, painting a far more complete and easily understood portrait.
Bloom's performance admittedly still isn't great, but the character at least resembles an actual human being rather than an audience surrogate cipher.
It sucks for those who saw the movie once and wrote it off, because Kingdom of Heaven touts one of the most comprehensive and masterful re-edits in cinema history.