8 Classic Movies That Were Released Unfinished

6. Star Wars

When you think of claims of Star Wars being released "unfinished", you think of George Lucas' desperate attempts to justify his increasingly-ruinous alterations to his classics. Now, in his defence, part of that thinking is justified - in 1977 Star Wars' effects were pioneering, but there's plenty of flubs and a general feeling on compromise in some of the choices, so you can see why the perfectionist would want to return and fix things - although I don't buy for a second that Lucas originally intended for Greedo to shoot at all.

However, I'm not talking about the Special Editions here, because, quite simply, they don't count: Star Wars may not have been perfect, but it was finished by 1997.

Instead, I'm looking fifteen years earlier to the one key element of Star Wars the movie feels incomplete without - the Episode title. Because calling something Number 4 makes it sound like the fourth in a series (obviously), Fox were incredibly hesitant to let the director subtitle his movie Episode IV in the opening crawl (a homage to the movie's Flash Gordon serial origins). In fact, they only allowe the addition for the 1981 re-release after the franchise was already a bona fide hit and Episode V had done it to minimal financial impact.

Which Version Is Better? It's two lines of text in crawl, so doesn't really have much of an impact on the experience of the film, but in terms of the wider franchise it kinda does; called A New Hope, Star Wars fits better as an entry in a wider epic, rather than a single movie that led to a rather different franchise. You still won't catch me calling it Episode IV though.