10 Movies That Were Re-Edited After Release (And Why)

8. Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate
United Artists

Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate was an absolute disaster. It endured a tumultuous production phase that sent the film way over budget and was a critical and commercial disappointment upon its release, destroying director Michael Cimino's career and sinking distributor United Artists.

Cimino's first cut ran for well over five hours, a version the studio completely refused to release (understandably). The director then went and chopped about two hours from the film, and this is the cut that premiered in New York on 19 November 1980, to an overwhelmingly negative reception.

After a short one-week run with poor financial returns, the film was yanked from cinemas, re-cut again (this time, down to two-and-a-half-hours), and re-released. Ultimately, this didn't help: Heaven's Gate closed after its second week in theatres, and in total, only grossed $3.5 million against a reported $44 million budget.

More like... Hell's Gate, right? Eh?

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!