10 Movie Endings You Can No Longer See
3. Somewhere In Time
1980 romance fantasy flick Somewhere in Time is, by general consensus, a fine if not fairly middle of the road film. It explores time travel as obtained by hypnosis so that our lead character Richard Collier (Christopher Reeve) can meet his otherwise unobtainable girl of his dreams that he sees in an old photograph.
Something else that appears to be unattainable is the original cut of the film. Somewhere in Time ends with the death of its protagonist and, through the point of view of the lens, we see Collier’s spirit finally reunited with the woman he loves. It's a fine ending but, according to Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells, it was much better the way he remembers it.
Executing a technique that was rare at the time, Somewhere in Time originally ended with an extraordinary and extra-long tracking shot that led us through the halls of the hospital and into the arms of Collier’s love very slowly and very deliberately. In the 1980s, with very little trickery available, the shot would’ve been incredibly hard to capture.
According to the film’s cinematographer Isidore Mankofsky, Universal Studios thought it was "too long and trimmed it down to a few edits", fading parts of the shot together to get to the point quicker. And then? It appears they threw the reel in the bin, since as far as Mankofsy knows, the original version "no longer exists".