10 Film Director's Cuts That Actually Made The Movie Shorter

Shorter by: 8 minutes

The huge success of Gladiator at the dawn of the new Millennium prompted a whole army of new historical epics, none of which managed to replicate the box office and Oscar glory of Ridley Scott's Roman hit. Perhaps the most ambitious and consequently most disastrous of these failures was Oliver Stone's Alexander, featuring a blond-wigged Colin Farrell looking thoroughly uncomfortable in the role of the Macedonian conqueror.

While, as we've already mentioned, Scott managed to rescue his own failed epic Kingdom Of Heaven with a substantially longer director's cut, Stone initially went in the opposite direction with Alexander.

For the film's DVD release in 2005, Stone added an additional nine minutes of never before seen footage, but also cut out a whole seventeen minutes. Much of this removed the romantic and sexual nature of the relationship between Alexander and his companion Hephaistion (Jared Leto) on the belief that the inclusion of homosexual content was responsible for the movie's failure stateside (it actually did OK at the box office in Europe).

This version was not any more successful than the movie had been on first release and would not be Stone's final attempt at turning the film into something watchable, leaving Alexander in the strange situation of being a movie with competing director's cuts that are both shorter and longer than the original version. In fact, Stone has reworked the movie so many times that Alexander comes with both a mis-titled "Final Cut" and a subsequent "Ultimate Cut".