Cuts

Not at all. Movies on terrestrial TV are cut to ribbons.

No they're not. Not always anyway. They get artificially extended due to advert breaks. Unless they're on the BBC of course, or somebody's cobbled together a TV print which may include extra material, but that's rare anyway for most films.

Sometimes it could be argued that for film showing purposes the model practised by Sky Cinema is ideal, since they air them all ad free, but of course you have adverts and trailers around the films and it costs the customer more money for that, whereas everything else is traditional "puncture the film with ads". No such thing as a free lunch after all.

“Paying” via ads as far as I’m concerned isn’t an issue for me. What is an issue is when I don’t get the full movie in return.

And that's why we have Blu-Ray and DVD for home viewings. But even then sometimes you're not guaranteed to get a full movie either, or at least not what you saw in the cinema, but even then those changes tend to be minor. Big list here:
https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Films-re-released-with-alterations/id/50111

Sometimes these end up on the telly too.

Star Wars is the obvious exception here, as its well documented George Lucas can't leave the damn thing alone and its anybody's guess what's official canon and what isn't...

Blade runner and Superman II are also good examples.

A few random memories here around cuts to films, going back a few years!


The 1989 ‘ Batman’ has been mentioned, that got it’s ‘network premiere’ on Christmas Day 1991 on BBC 1. Given that it went out at 6pm I’m presuming it was quite heavily edited?

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/bc731c8e3a024122b22aca2c44782f3b

In the film reviews section of the ‘Radio Times’ they used to (in the late 80s / early 90s) add a note to the end (with the content warnings) saying ‘TVV’ - the panel at the side of the page would explain that this was a ‘TV version’ and said something along the lines ‘these are often heavily edited and are usually bought in from America”, so those who’d checked knew what to expect.

On of those ‘TV Versions’ that I remember causing a fuss (possibly complaints on ‘Points of View’) was ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ - which actually mentions it’s a ‘TV version’ in its listing. Searching Genome it seems that version must have had a number of outings, because it was a few years before it got a fully post watershed showing.

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/730bbb402a3543ab86bf9ca1e5a642f0

I remember a feature on a BBC feedback / behind the scenes programme (not ‘Points of View’, think it used to be on a Sunday afternoon) about how they’d edited ‘A Fish Called Wanda’ to remove Kevin Kline using the same expletive twice in a short space of time. It showed the editor explaining how they used a shot from elsewhere in the film to cover the edits. Presumably that was for its premiere in 1991

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/schedules/bbcone/london/1991-12-26#at-21.35

I remember an edition of ‘Right 2 Reply’ in the mid / late 90s where a viewer was featured complaining about ITV showing a heavily edited / dubbed version of one of the ‘Robocop’ films, complete with examples of the ‘unlikely’ dialogue. ITV commented that they’d shown the uncut version once and the cut version once, so maybe they’d show the uncut one next time.

I think where cuts have been made to home releases of films the TV channels (including Sky) have tended to stick to those versions, although I seem to remember - I think it was - C4 showing the uncut version of ‘The Abyss’ by mistake.

Sky tended not to edit films, but I can clearly remember being at a friend’s house one afternoon watching ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ on Sky Movies and it being introduced as showing a version ‘suitable for family viewing’ or ‘suitable for daytime showing’. Presumably they were referring to it being the ‘PG’ video edited version (the BBFC made Fox cut a scene to get a home release as ‘PG), but as we didn’t have Sky at the time I’m not sure if this happened very often?

In the 90s C4, along with BBC 2 and Sky (with the odd exception as above) would be the places where you’d expect to see films uncut. The network premiere of ‘Pulp Fiction’ on BBC 2 had a preview programme with Mark Cousins introducing it, mentioning the one small cut the BBFC had asked for, so presumably they had to show it uncut after that!

I believe The Abyss was re-edited a couple of years after it was released (or at least acquired a "special version"), and so when it turns up anywhere it's pot luck as to which version you get. IMDb suggests the uncut version (as apparently the RSPCA intervened due to the scene with the rat) was released on video initially, but all later releases don't include it.

Of course it was documented in the news recently that a Canadian TV network edited Donald Trump's cameo out of Home Alone 2, which was a storm in a teacup really considering the network said the edits were done in 2014 before he became President, so it took five years for somebody to notice...

The notorious one for a "TV version" on ITV was Lethal Weapon 2 which they showed at 9pm in 1993, massively edited. There was a great discussion on the Radio Times letters page about this, with ITV's film buyer supplying a brilliantly abrupt statement saying, basically, "We take little interest in what film buffs think, we're only interested in our general audience and if people want to see a film in full they should go to the cinema". Which is fair enough, I suppose, but that statement caused even more complaints.

There was a period just after they moved the news to 11pm in 1999 when ITV got a bit of flak for editing films. One of the big selling points for moving the news was that they could show films at 9pm without stopping for the news, but of course not all films are of the same length so for the first few months they had the news starting at 10.50 or 11.10 sometimes, so nobody knew when it was on. So after a few months there was a period when they showed a repeated film at 9pm every Friday for about three months, and to make them all tidy they edited them all down to fill a two hour slot, in some cases editing out quite a bit. They didn't do that after that, though.

Of course, there is an air of reverence over film you don't get with TV, given that on Christmas Day the Beeb edited The Two Ronnies Sketchbook to twenty minutes, and nobody was bothered about that. But there was a bit of a kerfuffle when the Beeb edited The Young Ones down from 35 to 30 minutes in 1999 so they could better fit in the schedule when they were repeated. Paul Jackson himself supervised those edits, though.

At least in those cases you can still get the orginal versions in addition to the altered ones. Unlike Star Wars where Lucas wants to bury the originals, and we have to put up with Greedo shooting first, Darth Vader shouting "Nooooooooo" and Hayden Christiansen's Anakin instead of Sebastian Shaw's.

Also don't forget the infamous 20th anniversiary edition of ET that replaced the guns with walkie talkies. But Stephen Speilberg has thankfully since disowned.

When Vincent injects heroin into his arm, it was in close up, and you can see the needle go into the vein. This was actually uncut in the cinema, for the video release the BBFC made them reframe the scene so you can't see the specific place where to inject as it was 'a concern on video where underage viewers could replay the scene for instructional detail'

So I'm guessing the BBC did actually comply with the BBFC request.

Not that it matters these days as the blu-ray and even later DVD versions are also uncut.

Interestingly the French censors actually cut out the driving scenes after Vincent has injected feeling people may be encouraged to do drugs and drive.