Batman v Superman Originally Four Hours Long?

Batman v Superman’s first cut was way longer than even the director’s cut we are getting

Movies getting trimmed down quite a bit from their first cut is nothing new. You throw out scenes that don’t work, or even just to get to what the studio thinks is an acceptable running time. It might be hard to think that at 151 minutes, there’s a ton missing from the theatrical cut of Batman v Superman, but we already know there’s 30 minutes of footage we didn’t see that is being added to the director’s cut of the film on home video, and apparently the first cut of Batman v Superman was even quite a bit longer, clocking in at a whopping four hours. That would’ve made it longer than most epic lengthy Oscar winners such as Godfather Part II and even lengthy fantasy epics such as Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King. Batman v Superman editor David Brenner discussed the challenges of cutting the film down to a mere two and a half ours for theatrical release:

In the script, there were more story lines than you see in the movie today. That was probably our biggest editorial issue in trying to get the cut down to a reasonable length.

"For us, the trickiest section was the beginning of the film, until the point where Bruce Wayne tells Alfred the truth about what is on the ‘White Portugese’ ship… the truth about his plan. This moment set into motion everything until the end of the film, really. Until that point, the movie was always tracking many solo paths, some intersecting, some not. Finally, in this scene, the paths fork into one road.There are more subplots than you see in the movie right now. Also, in terms of building this beginning, we had to move things around. In the script, Lex was introduced much later, but we found that in watching the movie — because he’s such an important player — it was best to set him up sooner.”It was a lot to juggle. So the plot lines of a couple characters had to go.What was once a nearly four hour cut with absolutely everything was ridiculous — ended up being about a three hour cut, once all these added storylines were refined with the fat was cut out.I remember being a little worried. Three and a half hours, okay, that’s fine for a movie of this size, the way Zack likes to work. This was more daunting. But we cut down ‘Man of Steel’ from about 3 and half hours, I knew we’d get this done."

So that means there’s an even longer version of Batman v Superman, with an hour of additional footage on top of the three hour length of the director’s cut, that we may never see. Batman v Superman certainly seemed edited very poorly in the theater, jumping from scene to scene with little connection and coherence. Sure, cutting is normal and and maybe there was a lot of unnecessary stuff, but considering how much unnecessary stuff is in the film and how much is clearly not explained, did we actually need a four hour comic book movie to explain it all? Should Batman v Superman just been a two-part film? Would you watch some 4 hour ultimate cut? I might if the director’s cut still left a lot of questions unanswered, which it clearly might. Batman v Superman is in theaters now, with the home video release including the 3 hour R-rated director’s cut due out July 16th.

h/t CBR