"MORE KINGDOM TO COME
Kingdom Of Heaven to be blessed with regal 4 disc Director's Cut Special Edition....
Even though Kingdom Of Heaven ran to a weighty 2 hours and 24 minutes, Empire staggered out of Ridley Scott's latest hack-and-slash epic practically crying: "A director's cut! A director's cut! My kingdom for a director's cut!"
With key characters cut back to walk-on status, important themes left unexplored, and chunks of the story given short thrift, our reviewer was left asking if there were a longer, better film in Scott's material.
The answer it seems, is yes, as a Director's Cut will appear on a 4 disc Special Edition set for a likely in-time-for-Christmas release later this year, with a 2 disc theatrical cut dur around September. According to Remote Control's sources at Fox and Scott Free (Ridley's production house), the yardstick for these two Kingdom DVD releases will be the Lord Of The Rings movies. So, for the initial double-disc version, we can expect a bunch of featurettes and behind-the-scenes footage, with the heavenly features - several commentaries and the hallowed director's cut - held back for the 4 disc follow-up.
The extended cut is likely to expand the running time by "around an hour", Ridley Scott told Remote Control recently. Apparently Sir Rid initially turned in a whopping first cut of around the 5 hour mark, but the logistics of scoring more music, inserting more effects and dubbing more dialogue would have inflated the budget by a prohibitive $10 million or so.
Among the material Scott told us to expect are extended scenes set back in France featuring Michael Sheen's dodgy priest. Also, we can expect a sword fight between Orlando Bloom's Balian and Marton Csokas' Guy de Lusignan that Jeremy Irons described to us as "amazing". The word on set was that Fox is hoping for a global box office returns of about $500 million. And it's a sign of the home entertainment-obsessed times that the studio is looking to recoup the same - if not more - from DVD sales."
Well I am excited and cannot wait until Christmas! I do wish that they'd release the 5 hour edition as well! Plus if that were not enough there will be a Director's Cut of Gladiator out this year with an extra 17 minutes of footage added in as well as an unconfirmed addition to the DVD from Russell Crowe and a 200minute (Charles de Lazurika) documentary. All we need now is a proper Director's Cut of 'Blade Runner' on special edition DVD and we'll be set up for the rest of our lives! The only problem is (as was reported in an issue of Total Film) that a Spanish company that owns the rights to Blade Runner now (or enough to do what they are doing) are refusing to let a proper director's cut and special edition DVD to be released.