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

Shorter by: 10 minutes

The movie that bombed so hard that it prompted Al Pacino to leave acting for four years, this eighteenth-century "birth of America" epic cost almost $30 million to make and netted barely over $300,000 at the domestic box office in 1985.

Revolution's distributors at Warner Bros. had hubristically imagined the movie to be a potential Oscar front-runner (instead it picked up four Razzie nods and a Stinkers Bad Movie Award for Worst Picture). This led to a rushed post-production to get the movie out in time for awards consideration. The result was a cut which was a fragmentary mess that was hard to follow.

Director Hugh Hudson, best known for Chariots Of Fire, always insisted that the version of Revolution released in theatres was not his vision for the movie and in 2009 he got a chance to return to it with Revolution: Revisited.

This cut of the film removes scenes and occasionally whole characters, makes the ending much more ambiguous by taking out Pacino's fur trapper miraculously and implausibly finding Natassja Kinski alive and well, and adds a newly written and recorded voiceover from Pacino to try and fill in the gaps in his character and make sense of what the hell is going on. In all, all of this cutting left Revisited at least ten minutes shorter than its theatrical predecessor.

The new shorter cut did prompt some critical reappraisal of the film, but ultimately didn't feel sufficient to paper over all of Revolution's flaws.