Once distributors discovered that consumers would buy alternate versions of films, it became more common for films to have alternative versions released. And the original public meaning of a director's preferred vision has become ignored, leading to so-called "director's cuts" of films where the director prefers the theatrically released version (or when the director had actual final cut privilege in the first place). Such versions are often marketing ploys, assembled by simply restoring deleted scenes, sometimes adding as much as a half-hour to the length of the film without regard to pacing and storytelling. As a result, the "director's cut" is often considered a misnomer. Some directors deliberately try to avoid labelling alternate versions as such (e.g.
Peter Jackson and
James Cameron; each using the phrases "Special Edition" or "Extended Edition" for alternate versions of their films). Sometimes the term is used a marketing ploy. For example, Ridley Scott states on the director's commentary track of
Alien that the original theatrical release was his "director's cut", and that the new version was released as a marketing ploy. Director
Peter Bogdanovich, no stranger to director's cuts himself, cites
Red River as an example where Another way that released director's cuts can be compromised is when directors were never allowed to even shoot their vision, and thus when the film is re-cut, they must make do with the footage that exists. Examples of this include
Terry Zwigoff's
Bad Santa,
Brian Helgeland's
Payback, and most notably the
Richard Donner re-cut of
Superman II. Donner completed about 75 per cent of the shooting of the sequel during the shooting of the first one but was fired from the project.
His director's cut of the film includes, among other things, screen test footage of stars
Christopher Reeve and
Margot Kidder, footage used in the first film, and entire scenes that were shot by replacement director
Richard Lester which Donner dislikes but were required for story purposes. On the other side, some critics (such as
Roger Ebert) have approved of the use of the label in unsuccessful films that had been tampered with by studio executives, such as
Sergio Leone's original cut of
Once Upon a Time in America, and the moderately successful theatrical version of
Daredevil, which were altered by studio interference for their theatrical release. Other well-received director's cuts include
Ridley Scott's
Kingdom of Heaven (with
Empire magazine stating: "The added 45 minutes in the Director’s Cut are like pieces missing from a beautiful but incomplete puzzle"), or
Sam Peckinpah's
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, where the restored 115-minute cut is closer to the director's intent than the theatrical 105-minute cut (the actual director's cut was 122 minutes; it was never completed to Peckinpah's satisfaction, but was used as a guide for the restoration that was done after his death). In some instances, such as
Peter Weir's
Picnic at Hanging Rock,
Robert Wise's
Star Trek: The Motion Picture,
John Cassavetes's
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,
Blake Edwards's
Darling Lili and
Francis Ford Coppola's
The Godfather Coda, changes made to a director's cut resulted in a very similar runtime or a shorter, more compact cut. This generally happens when a distributor insists that a film be completed to meet a release date, but sometimes it is the result of removing scenes that the distributor insisted on inserting, as opposed to restoring scenes they insisted on cutting. == Extended cuts and special editions ==