I think you’d have much better luck turning the films into short format serials. Each film could be broken down into four or five 20 to 30 minute episodes.

Something like this would really solve a lot of problems in each film. You can basically cut out whatever you want (silliness, over the top action, boring exposition, etc).

If each episode has its own crawl (maybe the first mini-episode of each ‘season’ would have a standard length crawl and the remaining ones would be much shorter), it would really allow you to finesse the timeline and fill in any necessary information without relying on every single scene from the films.

It would really allow for a much more streamlined and customizable experience, without relying on the need to fill in blanks using outside footage.