UPDATE: Sony has now confirmed this and revealed that there’ll be a total of 7 additional minutes of footage, 4 minutes of which will be a never before seen action sequence.
When Marvel Studios announced that Avengers: Endgame was going to get a rapidly assembled new cut including deleted scenes, most assumed that the goal was to help it push past Avatar to become the highest-grossing film of all time. But now it seems that they’re set to try the same trick with Spider-Man: Far From Home.
Redditor Matedogcata claims to be the manager of a theater and that they’ve received an email that says the following:
“On August 30th, for Labor Day Weekend, Sony Pictures Entertainment will be reissuing a Director’s Cut of Spider-Man: Far From Home into theaters across the country. This Director’s Cut will feature unseen footage added back into the film for an all new Spider-Man experience. There will be a major marketing campaign behind this new cut, so we are asking for everyone’s support in playing the picture in both regular and PLF screens.”
It’s a bold move, especially as the new cut of Avengers: Endgame and its terrible extra scene featuring unfinished Hulk VFX went down like a bucket of cold sick. This email makes it sound like they’re trying the exact same trick with Far From Home now, so I’d be skeptical of the claim that this will be an “all new Spider-Man experience.”
My bet is that we’ll see a couple of scenes that were justly cut for time, potentially featuring unused special effects that will be the immediate subject of online mockery. The general thinking is that the included footage will be the restaurant scene that was shown in the trailers. Director Jon Watts has said that this would be reworked into a short film for the Blu-Ray, but perhaps Sony and Marvel execs have changed their mind and decided it’s good enough to hit the big screen.
Why are they doing this, though? Well, there are a few theories going around. One is that it’s an effort to push the movie over the $400 million domestic mark, but that doesn’t seem like a significant milestone to me. This re-release may potentially make it Sony Pictures’ highest-grossing domestic film ever though, which could theoretically give them some leverage in future negotiations for the Marvel Studios partnership. Or maybe they just want more money for simple greed-based reasons. Who knows?
Whatever the case, let’s just hope they do a better job with Spider-Man: Far From Home than the depressingly horrible Endgame re-release.
