Very few filmmakers have the power to be granted final cut on a picture: you pretty much have to be at the top of the tree, or working on miniscule budgets, in order to be allowed to cut together the movie you want, notes be damned. As such, it's no surprise that Director's Cuts of movies have become popular over the past few decades, particularly after Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner: The Director's Cut" demonstrated the masterpiece lurking beneath the somewhat tarnished original. Of course, the form's been bastardized somewhat, either by films like "Donnie Darko" where the filmmaker's preferred cut is substantially worse than the original, or by the stream of 'Unseen & Unrated' versions of comedies that add an extra 30 seconds of dick jokes to a picture. But that's neither here nor there.
Now, rumors of one particular director's cut made the blogosphere light up recently, with Nuke The Fridge reporting that an Extended Director's Cut of Christopher Nolan's megahit "The Dark Knight Rises" was heading to DVD & Blu-ray, featuring an extra 30 minutes of footage (for a film that already ran 165 minutes or so) including Bane's origin story, and that the new version was set for release next June, just ahead of the release of the Nolan-produced Superman flick "Man Of Steel." But insiders close to the director confirmed to us yesterday that no such plans exist, and reports of an extended cut of the film are completely false.
Really, anyone listening to Nolan, who's never included many deleted scenes on his home video releases, would have known that the chances were very slim — Nolan told MTV shortly after the release of "The Dark Knight Rises" that ""I tend to try and weed things out on paper because it's crazy expensive to shoot things that aren't going to be in the film. It also takes up a lot of time and energy. Pretty much with all my films, there are very few deleted scenes, which always disappoints the DVD crowd."
And while reports of a four-hour cut circulated months ago, that's pretty much standard for the first assembly cut of any movie — as Nolan says, "what we do editorially is just compress and stuff everything into the sandwich. Frankly, a lot of that is about music, about [composer] Hans Zimmer. We're going to cut this film faster than anybody can care about anything, so [Zimmer has] to find a way to score it so people feel what they're meant to feel as they go along. By the end, the last two reels are practically a musical. That's the way it works on all of the films I've done."
Disappointing news for fans, perhaps, but we like "The Dark Knight Rises" just the way it was, so we're not too mournful about this. No official details about "The Dark Knight Rises"' home video release have been announced, but it's should be in stores in time for the Christmas rush.