10 Films That Suffered In The Editing Room
7. Die Hard 4.0
Speaking of directors being treated with little respect, here's another example of a studio who felt that their own vision was more important than that of the person they'd hired to craft the feature in the first place.
To decide midway through production that your film needed to have a completely different rating to what was originally planned, surely must've felt like a bad idea. Dune Entertainment obviously thought not and opted to change the expected rated R version of Die Hard 4.0 into a PG-13, but only after three months of production had passed.
Director, Les Wiseman, and star Bruce Willis, both seemed upset by the studios lack of clarity and you can see why, as the movie they thought they were creating would be significantly diluted before it ever reached an audience theatrically.
Much of the gore and violence was toned down in post-production and the film felt like a shell of the earlier entries in the series because of it. Fans at least got a DVD unrated cut in the end, but this decision still ranks as a downright dumb one in hindsight.