10 Fan Edits That Totally Transform Famous Films

2. The Phantom Edit

The fan edit to end all fan edits, which also kickstarted the whole trend of fan edits in the first place. The Phantom Edit was the original attempt at taking a film nobody liked and trying to reshape it into something more palatable. Whether or not you think the first of the Star Wars prequels deserves a reputation quite as bad as it has, it's definitely far from perfect. There's Jar-Jar Binks, there's that incredibly boring opening crawl about taxes, the slightly racist alien races, the midchlorians, the confusing climactic sequence, the bad acting by usually dependable actors, and then there's Jake Lloyd...man, so much went wrong with that film. Proving that you can, in fact, polish a turd in this case is Mike J Nichols, who aimed to make a film which better followed the previous execution and philosophies of film storytelling and editing of George Lucas.

So he wanted to make it less terrible, and more like the original trilogy, basically. Jar-Jar Binks is almost entirely absent from the Phantom Edit, as are all the terrible explanations of the Force and how it manifests in people, the goofy dialogue between the battle droids, the annoying speech patterns of the young Anakin Skywalker, and a total of eighteen minutes cut from the original film.

All the political stuff gets kicked to the curb, there's a lot less exposition, the editing is changed to be more in line with the original films, and deleted scenes pave over the many, many plot holes. It's a marvellous piece of work which takes a total turkey to something you'd actually wanna watch, an opinion shared by the likes of legit filmmakers such as Kevin Smith.

The Phantom Edit became the talk of €“fans and professionals alike €“during the early noughties, with no less than Lucasfilm condoning it. Is there any higher praise?