Oh, Snowpiercer controversies, how we missed your presence. Bong Joon-ho‘s reportedly excellent sci-fi actioner is doing just fine overseas — the thing’s already opened in South Korea, and will hit France this month; Taiwan and Japan will see it in the near-future, too — — but it’s no secret that The Weinstein Company have made its eventual U.S. release no easy task for the writer-director, who recently revealed that Harvey Weinstein is demanding for 20 minutes to be taken from its not-exactly-Andrei Rublev 125-minute runtime. Worse yet? It’s likely the loss of character-based material that will help shape, instead, a “straightforward action film” with more immediate commercial appeal. “Feh,” as some might say.
In the time since, a few had suspected the studio head of playing some odd publicity game: if you can get a noticeable number of people incensed over alterations to a film, you know that it’s anticipated — naturally, justifying a release of the full cut. It didn’t make a great deal of sense to me, either, and that’s because it was probably wishful thinking. Sitting in on an after-film press conference at the Busan International Film Festival, Variety quoted Bong‘s response to a Weinstein-related question, his answer coming down to “it is clear that this is the only director’s cut you will be able to see.” But the situation might be worse than that still-blunt statement: as a follow-up to the vague notion that Snowpiercer‘s U.S. cut should turn out “a little bit different,” Variety have been told that “furious” is a more appropriate descriptor of his mindset at this point in time — and it’s unlikely to change, given the indomitable power TWC wields in this scenario.
These issues are playing out despite Snowpiercer netting approximately 9.3 million admissions in a country that consists of roughly 50 million people, and regardless of Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt, Alison Pill, Ed Harris, and Jamie Bell taking part in a film that, no less, is about 95% in English. It doesn’t make sense, but this might, still, just be the way “it” is. Time to pony up for that import Blu-ray.
Do you think Bong is right to be angry over these likely, potentially damaging alterations?