Will LOTR:ROTK Extended Edition Hit Cinemas?

yootje writes "Two articles today on TheOneRing.net about rumours that the extended edition from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King will come in theaters before the release on DVD. The first article can be found here, the second one here. Both come from people who work in a cinema themselves, one in the UK and one in Denmark."

Comments

And now... all three in a row!

[danimrich]

I wonder whether some theatre will screen all three extended editions as a triple-feature... that's probably gonna take more than half a day!

Not me

[nwbvt]

The extended versions of the first two were crap. To dispense with all the knee-jerk responses I will be getting: no, I'm not just saying that because I just watched the two movies for the sword fights, and no I can stand movies that are longer than 3 hours (assuming they don't suck), and no I don't hate everything other than the commercialized theatrical versions of movies.

I actually have nothing against director's cuts, often they make a film much better (think "BladeRunner" or "Apocalypse Now"), but these don't appear to be cut at all. Basically they just stuck in all the extra scenes they could find, regardless of whether or not they made the film better. Often this ended up in redundant sequences (the first movie effectively has two opening sequences which is one too many), bad timing (in the original, after Theoden asks "Where is my son", there is a cut to a flower growing on his grave, which I consider very moving. But in the extended edition, they stick a funeral sequence in between the two scenes which, while not a bad scene in itself, screws up the original cut), more deviations from the books (the flashback to Faramir and Boromir just serve to make Faramir look more pathetic), and tedious drawn out scenes (look again at the Faramir/Boromir flashback). Keep in mind, what works great in a book doesn't always work in the theater.

If the cut scenes served the movie well, they would have most likely been kept in the theatrical version. If for some reason the studio forced Jackson to pull a scene or two, he could have included it in a directors cut. But all these extended versions have is everything that did (and probably should have) ended on the cutting room's floor. They are just an excuse for Jackson to sell DVDs at twice the normal cost.

Watch, some mod who foolishly spent extra money on the extended versions will -1 Troll me.