Paul W.S. Anderson might be renowned for his painfully mediocre adaptations of popular video games, but his second major Hollywood project after 1995’s Mortal Kombat saw him dive headfirst into full-blown horror. Event Horizon has since ascended to cult classic status, but it was a major disappointment at the time, earning just $26 million at the box office on a $60 million budget.
Of course, this wasn’t helped by the studio butchering the filmmaker’s original vision, and the movie was heavily altered in post-production, which is the reason why the theatrical release ran at a brief and incredibly disjointed 96 minutes. Anderson has admitted in the past that his very first cut of the movie was over 30 minutes longer, but much of the footage has been lost to the sands of time.
The Resident Evil architect recently revealed that he’s still holding out hope for a Director’s Cut to see the light of day eventually, though, which is entirely dependent on the missing scenes being discovered somewhere in the Paramount vault. Jason Isaacs, however, who starred as the ship’s doctor, sounds a lot less confident about the mythical version of Event Horizon even existing, never mind getting a release.
“Maybe Paul did a cut, or not. Any more of it, I think, would not have made the film better. I don’t know that he was asked to trim it down by the studio. I don’t remember those discussions at the time. I’m pretty sure it didn’t happen, but I might be wrong.”
The additional footage is reportedly of a very violent, gruesome and gory persuasion, involving surreal torture and subliminal flashes of some pretty disturbing imagery, which you imagine would push the already R-rated Event Horizon perilously close to NC-17 territory. So far, though, the studio have shown no interest in having Anderson return to the well, and they’re seemingly more focused on the upcoming small screen reboot that’s being produced and directed by Godzilla vs. Kong‘s Adam Wingard for Amazon.