For those of us who like to wait and actually see a film before we pass judgement, the jury is still out on the new Ghostbusters film opening Friday. But if you come away from it liking it as much as some of the advance reviews seem to and want more, there’s good news. There will be an extended cut of the film coming out on home video somewhere down the road.
Speaking with Collider, director Paul Feig explained how he arrived at the film’s theatrical running time and how he decided what to include and what to trim.
The editor’s first cut was 4 hours and 15 minutes, and I trimmed that down to a slim 3 and a half hours (laughs). We generate a lot of stuff and I always wanna have all the underpinnings of a big, emotional story, and because of that it just added a lot of extra scenes that as you’re going through, you know you have to make a lot of choices because I knew I had to bring this down under two hours. You just start weeding and saying, ‘What do people want to delve deeper into and what do we wanna just kind of skirt through and get to the fun parts?’
It sounds like he is adding some character moments back into the film, unlike the recently released Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice extended cut, which restored vital story elements that were missing from the film’s initial release.
Feig went on to explain exactly how much of that cut footage is making it back into the Ghostbusters extended cut. He also stated that even more cut material will be made part of the home video release.
We actually just finished [the extended cut] so it’s about another 15 minutes longer, but I will also include a lot of the deleted scenes and extra material that we have on the DVD.
There’s no date announced for the release of the extended Ghostbusters cut. But given that the film itself is just hitting theaters this week, you will probably be able to see it in stores and online sometime in the fall just in time for Christmas shopping.
