10 Things You Didn't Know About 2001: A Space Odyssey
7. Cut Footage Was Recently Discovered
Many people won’t know that the original cut of 2001 was actually around 20 minutes longer than the finished cut. Apparently, Kubrick showed the film to a studio audience, and due to their baffled reactions, he went back in the editing room, where he took out 17 minutes of footage.
Some of the scenes that have reportedly been cut include: a sequence involving Bowman searching for a replacement antenna in storage; a scene where HAL severs communication on Poole’s pod before he kills him, and many, many more.
Kubrick’s own copy of this footage will likely never be found, as he always burnt the negatives of each film he made.
However, this footage was later re-discovered in a salt mine vault in Kansas, and is currently in a vault in Warner Bros. studios. Don’t get your hopes up though - it’s very rare that the footage will ever see the light of day, and even if it did, the footage (which was taken out due to pacing issues) might not really work with the finished movie anyway.