The Star Wars Trilogy

The original Star Wars films deserve to be on the top of any list of rereleases if only for the fact that George Lucas never seems to stop rereleasing them. Each time, he tweaks them a bit more in the search for some sort of narrative perfection that likely doesn’t exist. In 1981 — one year after the release of the sequel The Empire Strikes Back — Lucas brought Star Wars back to theaters. Among other things, he reworked the now famous opening crawl to read, “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope” (even early on he was thinking of all the films fitting together as one large story). In 1997, to celebrate the original film’s 20th anniversary, all three films were digitally remastered and rereleased to great fanfare. Again, Lucas made some minor but significant changes, such as making Han Solo less of a rogue by changing a scene in which he had previously shot a bounty hunter in cold blood. In 2004, all three films were again released (this time on DVD) with changes that brought them in line with the story set out in the series’ prequels. Not surprisingly, Lucas has talked about sending the original trilogy back to theaters once again — this time in 3-D.
Blade Runner

There are directors like George Lucas who like to continue to toy with films that were pretty good to begin with. And then there are directors like Ridley Scott, who has spent decades trying to fix a movie butchered by the moneymen. In 1982, Blade Runner was nearly ruined when execs gave the film a noiresque voice-over (to provide explanation for audiences they assumed would be too confused to enjoy the film otherwise) and a happy ending that seemed to come out of nowhere. In 1992, Scott released a director’s cut, which nixed the voice-over and replaced the sunny ending with one that entirely changed the main character’s story arc (if you haven’t seen the film, all we’re going to say is the word unicorn). He followed that in 2007 with Blade Runner: The Final Cut, which is supposedly the absolute last version. We’re just going to have to take Scott’s word on that.













