When French literary critic Roland Barthes wrote “The Death of the Author” in 1967 to put forward an argument against relying on the intent of the author to understand their work and instead that every individual reader’s interpretation is as valid as the author’s he probably wasn’t thinking about the person who tried to raise funds to reshoot the final scene of The Departed to remove the rat. Increasingly fan edits and so-called “director’s cuts” not made by the director are taking up space in fandom and if fans aren’t happy with the finished product from a studio you may see a new edit being made by them.
Perhaps the most famous example of this is “The Star Wars Despecialized Edition by Harmy”. In the 1990s The Star Wars trilogy was re-issued on VHS and then DVD, George Lucas took this opportunity to go back and change things in the trilogy. Often this was to do with things Lucas felt he couldn’t do in the 70s due to technological limitations, many of the changes reflected aesthetics, or things like removing the actor who played Jabba the Hutt in A New Hope with a CGI version looking more like the “slug” creature from Return of the Jedi. This annoyed some people but when further releases of Star Wars were exclusively this special edition of Lucas’ edits and the original unedited films were no longer available to buy some people became very annoyed. Harmy, a pseudonym adopted by a Czech teacher, released a de-specialised edition they made themselves, describing Lucas’ edited version as an act of “cultural vandalism”.
Now Harmy was doing a work of “restoration”, bringing something back that was not available that people wanted, but there are fan edits where people make editing choices themselves. Fanedit.org is a website containing information on many fan edits, it does not host them but points you in the right direction to find them. The website breaks down the different types of edits, with labels like FanFix – making minor changes and improvements, or FanMix which may provide an entirely different story. A lot of the films sound like a labour of love, stories of fans disappointed with a franchise they adore that they feel dropped the ball, or being able to edit a really good film into being amongst the less entertaining theatrical release. Some edits are incredibly minor, removing what might be a genuine mistake. Some are approaching a little more of the toxic fandom (note – I have not watched any of these fan edits so I am relying on the description), such as a franchise film where the edit seems mainly concerned with cutting out a female character. When these edits seem to simply be enthusiastic fans and/or filmmakers trying to express their interpretation it seems like an interesting pursuit but sometimes there seems to be an urge of “I will make this better!” a wounded cry that the film isn’t exactly to their taste, and not just a matter of opinion, but a demonstrable fact.
What drives fans to make these fan edits? Well, 95% of the fan edits I could find were of franchise films, Star Wars, Marvel, and Lord of the Rings, where there are huge fandoms who care massively about the material. Seemingly there are far fewer or more “serious” films, which I think has less to do with that these films are inherently better and so have less to edit (as they are not inherently better) but fans feel more able to tinker with the franchise movies. After all, there is no definitive Spider-Man story or interpretation, numerous movies in the last twenty years and then decades and decades of comics. After the original Star Wars trilogy there were dozens of books, comics etc that suddenly were no longer canon as new films were released. This was a franchise that seemed to be actively telling people to change things, to make their own improvements and with an average person having the technology to do so…they did.
