What editions are available?
- Theatrical Cut (120 min.)
- Extended Cut (130 min.)
The Academy Award winning Best Picture Argo was released in an extended cut on Blu-ray dubbed Declassified Extended Edition in 2013. The extended cut adds almost 10 minutes to the film and is currently only available on Blu-ray. Entertainment Weekly interviewed director-star Ben Affleck when the extended cut of Argo was released:
Entertainment Weekly: This new extended cut of the film has nine extra minutes. Now, are those scenes your darlings that broke your heart to slash for the theatrical release? Or are these scenes more supplementary, adding context to what already exists?
Ben Affleck: No, it’s really interesting. I’ve never been in a movie where this happened or encountered it as a director. The nine minutes kind of came out all in one piece. I was screening the movie and people were really complaining that they were bored in various places but they couldn’t say what the problem was or what they didn’t like. They’d just say “Well, it’s slow. It takes a while to get going, blah, blah, blah.” And I loved the movie and I didn’t know what to do. I could tell that people were a bit less interested in Tony’s home life and so the editor and I, sort of as an experiment, said “Let’s just take out all the scenes with his wife and his kid, and just at the end, he just shows up at home on the porch. Let’s just see what happens.” And we did it and we screened it, and all of a sudden it just came together perfectly. And it broke my heart because the themes about family, responsibility, and marriage and all the other stuff were so dear to me; they were so central to why I wanted to make the movie. And Taylor [Schilling] is so great [as the wife] and she’s now on Orange is the New Black and everybody knows how great she is. But at the time, it felt like such a sh–ty thing to do — just to cut her all the way out of the movie, out of no fault of her own. And it’s such a sh–ty call because it’s like the breakup: “It’s not you, it’s me.” But it really was me! And now, I really was happy because I said [to Taylor], “Listen, I promise you, I’m going to put the whole thing back on the extended version so you’ll be able to see it. You’re really good in it.” And I’ll be interested to see if the people who do watch it share the belief that I had ultimately, that while really good, it was stuff that had to come out for the sake of the larger narrative. But it’s not just the kind of like, “Oh yeah, the bathroom scene we took out and, you know, 30 seconds from that scene.” You know, how people kind of slop stuff back in there just to be able to put a sticker on it that says “More Footage!”
Source: Ben Affleck on the new ‘Argo’ Blu-ray and the role more daunting than Batman, Entertainment Weekly
The director’s preferred edition: Theatrical Cut
Comparison of the editions with courtesy of Movie-Censorship.com
List of different editions with courtesy of DVDCompare.net: DVD | Blu-ray | UHD Blu-ray
