Better picture quality instead of just VHS footage spliced in for this version? Shout Factory did an amazing job with Halloween 6 the producers cut. They used footage of pretty much comparable quality and you would have never guessed it as it looks amazing on blu ray. I call lazyness on this one. This movie deserves better.
shareGood points. If, as you say, SF did a good job with the VHS of Halloween 6 director's cut, what would have prevented such professional treatment in the case of the Exorcist III director's cut...?
shareApparently they did a comprehensive search, including an entire pallet of film stock in a Kansas mine, but couldn't find the original film elements for the original cut, like they did with Nightbreed.
They did find 20+ VHS tapes of dailies, from which this cut was made. Unfortunate that the original elements couldn't be found after such a search, but this is likely the best we will ever get. The content seems to be very close to Blatty's original cut. It may have been a case of Morgan Creek being careless with their film stock, or deeming it redundant and purposely disposing of it once the re-shoots were completed.
Thank you for all the info... a fascinating set of circumstances. Looks like another typical case of Morgan Creek carelessness...
shareMore than welcome :) Indeed it is, hopefully even more details will come out about how all this came about, it's something I thought would never happen, irregardless of video quality. And yes, Morgan Creek seems like a very shoddy production company, a quick look at their Wiki shows from the early to mid 90's onwards they made turkey after turkey and seemed incapable of making money- "Battlefield Earth", enough said! So it's not surprising that they wouldn't have much respect for their own film assets and keep them safe.
It got me thinking that with everything being made on digital now, it means that this is probably one of the last instances where we have a set of circumstances like this, and genuine anticipation for fabled "lost cuts" and missing footage. So many new movies now get "extended cuts" for their home video release (mostly consisting of filler) it has begun to lose much of its meaning.
Sweet Cthulhu... Battlefield Earth was MC??? Yes, that speaks very poorly for their cinematic sensitivity. At least your view of the future of digital causes some hope that these conditions will not repeat themselves for very much longer...
shareYeah, now that we can store thousands of hours of digital content on handheld devices there will never be a need to hunt down film elements like what we've seen with Exorcist 3, everything is at our fingertips now. That has probably added to the allure and legend of the Legion cut over the years- we're always intrigued by what we can't have or what is out of our reach!
This is a really interesting/funny read, all of MC's productions, their budget and worldwide gross. Some real cinematic atrocities in here. Battlefield Earth, though savaged by audiences and critics alike still wasn't near their biggest flop- their Get Carter remake lost nearly $45 million and Chill Factor lost $60 million! And Dominion didn't do too well either,they lost over $30 million between those 2 prequels. Exorcist 3's modest gross seems like a mini-triumph in comparison to what came later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Creek_Productions
Again, thanks for the info and MC stats. There's no way to alter history and we're stuck with what we have... Although it's good that Scream Factory did the director's cut.
shareHalloween 6 was NOT put together from VHS footage. There is only so much that can be done to clean up old VHS footage, and Halloween 6 is not even remotely close to being of VHS quality. All that exists of The Exorcist III is what was found on old VHS dailies. Nightbreed would have been just like this...cleaned up VHS footage...had the actual film reels of the deleted footage not been discovered at the last minute.
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I am not a fan. I just happen to enjoy movies. Fans are embarrassing.
Agreed, Halloween 6 had several production companies behind it who evidently took better care of their film elements, making it easy for Shout Factory to find and put together a seamless cut.
I'm sure Shout would have loved to have found the materials to make a pristine cut of "Legion", but it just wasn't there. I doubt it was due to laziness or lack of effort on their part. Even the original audio elements of the Theatrical Cut were missing.
To think Warners were sitting on all this stuff for so many years, with their resources they could have easily put together a special edition on par with this release many years ago, but instead kept on re-hashing the same "Exorcist Anthology" box-sets with no new materials or added value of any kind. How much mileage did they get out of that "flipper" DVD of the original from the format's early days, where the movie was on one side and the extra's on the other!
I suppose if Morgan Creek didn't sell their library we would never have gotten a special edition of Exorcist 3, so I'm grateful for what we've ended up with. BTW Shout are also releasing Cronenberg's Dead Ringers soon, another early horror film from Morgan Creek. Not familiar with the background of this movie but will be curious to see if it had any troubles similar to Nightbreed or Exorcist 3.