Francis Ford Coppola and The Godfather Part III obviously. Though I don’t hate the movie, I just want it to be as good as it should be.
That might be everyone’s pick.
Jarmusch’s Dead Man – that movie had so much potential but it ran like a train on broken tracks.
Martin Scorsese: GANGS OF NEW YORK (I like it as stands, but it could be better)
Orson Welles: THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS (so obvious)
Preston Sturges (really deserved a do-over, period)
This one is rather obvious: The Wachowskis for the Matrix sequels. I think the first film still holds up well.
One more: De Sica’s Miracle in Milan; after seeing The Bicycle Thief and Umberto D., this was a major disappointment for me.
Kubrick re-doing “Lolita” minus the censorship hassles.
Spike Lee: 25th Hour. It doesn’t even have to be a do-over, just edit out the 9/11 scenes that were shoehorned in a bid for poignancy as the first film to address the event. “25th Hour” would be great without those bits.
George Roy Hill taking out the Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head sequence from Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.
Kubrick going back to The Shining and using the labyrinth scene from the novel.
Welles with Don Quixote. Rather than the bizarrely chopped together version, it would have been neat to get a finished version.
agree with the Godfather Part III bit.
But maybe it would have been greater if he never made a Godfather after part II
Huh. A do-over, you say? That’s an intriguing concept.
In backwards memory: Chris Nolan, with a producer who says, “Sorry but cut some of this shit.” for Inception.
I love The Fountain as is, but am immensely curious as to what Aronofsky’s larger budgeted intended version was supposed to be, and would be willing to pay for a do-over to see it.
Southland Tales, same thing as Inception, with someone there to say, “Kelly Kelly Kelly, make a decision: serious, or tongue-in-cheek? You cannot have your cake and eat it, too in this case. Sorry.”
Cloverfield, but with more of the mystery of the trailer and less of the … boring… of the actual product. In fact, the monster should have never been real, ever.
I, Robot, but Proyas given only the small budget and independent accommodations he held in Dark City and The Crow, without anybody paying him for product placement.
How about Man of La Mancha by Terry Gilliam. Ooo, too soon?
It’s silly to say, but I would like to grab Spielberg and say, “Quickly, George Lucas is looking away, _remake Kingdom of the Crystal Skull!”_
Hancock. Whatever was originally intended there needs to be. The rest? Somebody’s to blame, and that somebody better be fired.
More later, probably…
—PolarisDiB
I love this idea…
One that comes to mind (I’ll post more as I think of them) is…
Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.: Artificial Intelligence”
I love it for the most part, but I’d like to give him a do-over on the third act. I’ve always personally thought it should’ve ended when David falls from the building. Instead of falling into water and hanging out until the aliens come… I always thought it would be cool (and relevant given the Pinocchio themes) if he landed on a ledge and died… then, we get a close-up of him dead in a pool of blood with a smile on his face.
I don’t know… that could be extremely cheesy when executed, but I’ve always been bothered by the whole alien ending.
Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot.
The Star Wars prequels.
Take out all the unnecessary cameos from the original trilogy. Take out all the humor oriented at younger kids and orient it more at the people who had been waiting decades for them. Hire a better script writer. Take out all awkward racial stereotype aliens. Have Padme die for an actual medical reason instead of ‘disappointment’. Now you’ve got a couple solid scifi flicks.
Inglorious Bastards: Scrap the entire bar scene and have the same events happen with a new scene written from scratch.
I’m sure its makers would relish the chance to do-over
ISHTAR
GIGLI
HOWARD THE DUCK
SERGEANT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND
The Brothers Grimm
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (without dying people..)
@ Timothy:
Well, AI should have ended in the water in front of the statue of the Fairy Godmother. Speilberg sustains such a long fade to black after that scene that it’s almost like he invites people to turn off the movie at that point and be satisfied with its real ending, but for those in the audience who MUST have their sacchirine Hollywood sweat, he then throws on an audience-appeasing but entirely illogical deus ex machina. AI is actually, in my opinion, perfectly fine as is up to that one fade out. One needn’t, necessarily, a re-do or recut DVD release because that fade is long enough for someone to grab the remote and stop it there as they please.
—PolarisDiB
I guess I’ll do the superhero thing
Kick-Ass: A lot of needless changes. A jetpack? Big Daddy is a cop now? It really makes it less of an interesting satire and more of a run of the mill, subpar superhero film.
Spider-Man 3: Just because they had a early deadline and not enough time to either cut some stuff (Franco’s subplot or The Sandman are my vote) or make it two films doesn’t absolve them. What an awful situation.
X:Men Last Stand and Wolverine: Origins: I could go on for weeks on the atrocities of both films so I will cut it short and just wish for new directors. Maybe if Zack Snyder did Wolverine instead of Watchmen, like was originally intended, it would have worked. Ugh.
Watchmen: Maybe if Zach handled the action and visuals and someone else handled the plot. Yeeeeeah. That’d be much better.
Actually, CJ Roy makes me think…
Batman Begins: Now that Nolan knows what the hell he’s trying to do with the Batman character, maybe he should go back and re-engineer the beginning so that it isn’t a complete mess.
—PolarisDiB
@ PolarisDiB
Sorry, but your proposed ending is far more hopeful and sappy that what actually happened on screen.
AI doesn’t have a sugary ending at all. This whole film is about a (mecha) boy seeking the love of his mother. Yet, his love is built on a lie, or rather: programming. It’s a ‘simulation’ of love. When he’s finally reunited with her, he thinks his search is complete. It isn’t. If you look closely, the advanced mechas have merely given a ‘simulation’ of his past life and mother. So, he hasn’t found love. Love no longer exists. It’s been replaced with programming. Just like how ‘orga’ has been replaced with ‘mecha.’ So, David’s simulated love is merely reciprocated with another form of simulated love. It’s a heartbreaking ending. It’s an ending that’s so very ironic and cynical, that perfectly fits in Kubrick’s oeuvre – but with Spielberg’s sentimentality. Yet, this sentimentality is being used in a seemingly self-aware manner. Almost as if Spielberg is riffing on himself in order to deceive the audience, just like how David has been fooled by the mechas. Fantastic ending.
Shocked, if I thought that was what Spielberg actually had in mind with his film, I’d agree with you.
Doesn’t matter. It’s what Kubrick had in mind.
; )
Did Kubrick have anything to do with that ending? I’d read that he’d only had the idea of the aliens digging David out of the ice. Did Kubrick have in mind that “Last Day With Mommy” thing?
Spielberg on AI:
“People pretend to think they know Stanley Kubrick, and think they know me, when most of them don’t know either of us,” Spielberg told film critic Joe Leydon in 2002. “And what’s really funny about that is, all the parts of A.I. that people assume were Stanley’s were mine. And all the parts of A.I. that people accuse me of sweetening and softening and sentimentalizing were all Stanley’s. The teddy bear was Stanley’s. THE WHOLE LAST 20 MINUTES OF THE FILM WAS COMPLETELY STANLEY’S. The whole first 35, 40 minutes of the film – all the stuff in the house – was word for word, from Stanley’s screenplay. This was Stanley’s vision.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.I._Artificial_Intelligence
*All caps and bold being my emphasis
John Huston always wanted to do THE ROOTS OF HEAVEN (1958) over, but studio execs kept asking him to remake films that were already great the first time, e.g. THE MALTESE FALCON and THE AFRICAN QUEEN.
Scorsese should remake every film he made with DiCaprio—WITHOUT DiCaprio.
Hmmmm, a Do-Over… Coppola basically did that with Apocalypse Now, yet Redux didn’t really improve the the 79 cut (my favorite film), but I think Crowe’s Untitled is more complete than Almost Famous, soooo….
And I think Magnificent Ambersons would be less of a Do-Over for Welles and more of a Leave-It-the-Fuck-Alone for the studio.
But as for a whole new Do-Over as opposed to a recut… Hmmmm… Cimino with Heaven’s Gate. Do you think maybe he would cast differently? Keep much everything the same but go with a more user friendly cast. Kristofferson’s window as a leading man had closed, and Huppert, while a fine actress, just wasn’t the right one to bring life to the part. Let’s compare Huppert to Claudia Cardinale in Once Upon A Time in the West, I think Cardinale had the goods to deliver an audience, Huppert did not. And maybe even Walken was not in the right element either.
Agree with the DiCaprio bit, imagine how much stronger his past few films would have been if he used a very talented actor. But DiCaprio’s name helps sell tickets, so that’s that.
The Star Wars prequels are if anything the most deserving of being done over again completely. It’s really a shame what happened there.
Interesting that Kubrick came up that ending of AI that mimics the ending of 2001, with David’s odyssey ending with him imprisoned in a room maintained by aliens. I’d like to find out if what Spielberg says is exactly true, though. I’m not sure I buy it.
Vic, did the studios want Huston to remake his own film of MALTESE FALCON, or are you saying that the first two versions of MALTESE FALCON (the ones before Huston’s, that is) were great?
The Star Wars Episodes 1-3 should just be scrapped entirely, along with episode 6.
I wish the Coppola of GODFATHER II had directed GODFATHER III, when Coppola still had what it took to make a great film.
I’d be up for a reboot of GANGS OF NEW YORK with Matt Damon instead of DiCaprio.
Am I the only one who thinks that Spielberg’s Hook was a fantastic idea conceptually, which was ruined in every way possible through incompetent execution?
No, Brad, you’re not the only one who thinks that.
Damola Animasaun
I’d choose would be Woody Allen’s ‘melinda & melinda’. When I heard about the concept of this film, i was excited at such a clever premise and thought it had the potential to be a truly great Woody Allen film. Unfortunately what i saw was very stilted dialogue that you couldn’t help but tell it was so obviously written. Needless to say, I was very dissapointed.
I was also intrigued by the film’s black character ( Played by the great chiwitel Ejofor)… a rarity for Woody Allen, at least a black character who has some depth.This film had potential to be truly great given the juxtaposition of the tragedy and the comedy. I’d love to see Woody get another crack at this one.