10 Unreleased Cuts Of Movies That Are Probably Terrible
9. The Thin Red Line: The 5-Hour Malick Cut
Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line is one of the greatest war films ever made - a towering, epic tone poem like no other, albeit one unavoidably overshadowed by the more mainstream-skewing Saving Private Ryan which released the very same year.
Much has been written about the movie's hellish post-production process, with Malick shooting so much material that he was able to effectively re-shape the story in post-production.
This resulted in him cutting Adrien Brody's role down from protagonist to supporting character, while the likes of Bill Pullman, Lukas Haas, and Mickey Rourke had their parts excised entirely.
Malick spent over a year editing the film down to the 170-minute theatrical cut, though it took him seven of those months alone to complete his first assembly cut, which clocked in at an eye-watering five hours.
The Malick Cut has since taken on a mythic status of its own, with the director's die-hard fans hoping that it could eventually see the light of day, especially with streaming being such a perfect platform for niche cuts that wouldn't necessarily be worth the trouble of a physical media release.
Yet morbid curiosity aside, a five-hour Malick film sounds like a nightmare, honestly. He's a wildly over-indulgent filmmaker even at his best, and giving him free rein to deliver a version of The Thin Red Line running almost double its theatrical length could be a recipe for a pure mess.
Considering its brutal length and the fact it appears to have been an assembly of basically all the shot footage, though, it's unlikely it'll ever be released.