There’s already multiple edits available that cut Bo Gullet and there’s likely many more coming. I love that crazy scene and I’m glad it’s being kept in.
I’ve come to expect only the highest quality of work from you, and I don’t think this fan edit will disappoint.
This film is kind of forgotten these days, even more so now that James Franco’s finally been exposed as a creep. However, I think there’s a pretty decent film here. Reynolds was clearly trying to recapture the magic of his all-time classic Count of Monte Cristo adaptation, but this just fell short, possibly because of the behind the scenes nonsense that Franco was pulling (according to co-star Sophia Miles, he was refusing to even speak to Reynolds during the filming).
That said, I think Franco does tortured heart-throb pretty well and Miles does a great job of playing a woman stuck in an impossible possition. Also, Rufus Sewel and Henry Cavill give a lot more to their thankless roles as the scorned husband and nephew than expected. The biggest problem, in my estimation at least, is that it’s just too damned long. It should not take 2 hours and 5 minutes to tell a story this straight forward, particularly one as well-troden as this.
So, I’ve aimed to shed the film of some excess weight and hopefully deliver something more satisfying as a result. The biggest cut is the rather pointless prologue. We don’t need to see the deaths of Tristan & Isolde’s father and mother, or how Marke got his hand chopped off. It adds nothing particuarly important to their characters that we don’t already learn later in the movie. We also don’t need to see Tristan and his freinds discover the Roman tunnels as, again, it is revealed later. I’ve also cut Tristan being a dick to Isolde because she’s trying to find happiness in the marriage he told her was so important. It just makes him look like a petulant child.
The new running time is 1 hour 44 minutes. As this is for my ESL students, it has hardcoded English subtitles, although I could make a version without subtitles if I recieve enough polite requests. An ESL reader adaptation will also be included that incorporates elements of the movie with the parts of the original legend like Tristan fighting the dragon (no love potions though, that wasn’t part of the original story but was added later by religious zealots).
The movie will be in the same folder as all my other edits. If you don’t already have the link, please contact me though PRIVATE MESSAGE. As always, suggestions are welcome.
After showing my First Knight edit to one of my classes, I was pleasantly surprised to find that nearly all the students assumed Connery was playing Guinevere’s father, Leondegrance, in his quick cameo at the end. So I’ve added another short scene between them which can also be viewed as a chat between father and daughter about her upcoming marriage.
I’ve given this edit a few test screens and made a few revisions. I’ve further trimmed a few more unnecessary bits and added back a little more action. The new runtime is 1 hour 9 minutes. The new version has hardcoded English subtitles, but a subtitle free version is also available upon request.
Contact me through Private Message if you don’t already have the link.
If you wouldn’t mind a suggestion, I don’t think it would be too unreasonable to aim for 3 hours this time around 😉
Yeah, I’m going to be flexible with the time if I must, but the goal is still around 2:30 and no more than 2:40.
We’ll see!
Good luck! If anyone could manage it, it’d be you.
I’ve added a quick 6 minute short with Eva Green’s Morgana poisoning Uther from Starz’s Camelot. The show wasn’t great, but Green is always fun to watch.
Sounds interesting. Would definitely like to see some clips!
Alright, here’s the halfass clipshow!
https://vimeo.com/1089604497/96ef54b8e8
Just thought it’d be interesting to see some of these ideas up on their feet
This all looks great to me.
I’m still kinda shocked you were able to widdle down the first season in a satisfying 2.5 hour movie, but you did.
If you wouldn’t mind a suggestion, I don’t think it would be too unreasonable to aim for 3 hours this time around 😉
Thanks for sharing your article.
Thanks. Have you watched the edit?
I’ve made some significant changes to this series of edits to better sync up with the Knights of Camelot ESL reader my students are using. The general story remains unchanged, but the order has been rearranged slightly and new cuts of the sections involving the Legend of the Sword edit and the Morgana section have been completely redone.
1981’s Dragonslayer is a somewhat forgotten fantasy film, mostly because the most interesting thing about it is the dragon, whose design has been so influential that pretty much every dragon since then has been at least partially based on it, from Reign of Fire to The Hobbit to Game of Thrones.
The biggest problem with the film, for me, is that it takes too damn long to get to the dragon itself and none of the human characters are particularly compelling. This edit aims to speed things up a bit, trim some of the more annoying bit with your protagonists to hopefully make us care about them more.
Most of the cuts are at the beginnng. A lot of them are micro-cuts here and there to improve the sluggish pace, but others are just plain unnecessary. Much like Marcia Lucas realised in the early cuts of Star Wars, we don’t need nearly as many scenes with Galen at the start before he takes up his quest. I’ve also trimmed a few instances of Valerian being a dummy. She’s an interesting character so I’d rather audiences be rooting for her rather than rolling their eyes at her.
The theatrical cut was 1hr 49min, mine is 1hr 37min (although I may try shaving off a few more minutes after test-screening it a few times with my classes). This is for my ESL students so it has hardcoded English subtitles. An ESL reader adaptation of the film is also included.
The movie is in the same folder as all my other edits. If you don’t already have the link, please send me a Private Message. As always, suggestions are welcome.
I love this film dearly, but I know that, for younger viewers, there are some elements that needed some minor tweaks to help them get into it easier. The first is that the opening credits have been moved to the end of the movie, the second is the ‘Can You Read My Mind’ bit has been trimmed thanks to the work of DIGITALMASTERZ, and the last is the inclusion of the extra action beats when Superman arrives at Luthor’s lair. Aside from that, this masterpeice is untouched.
The new running time is 2hr 13min.
This edit is for my ESL students so it has hardcoded English subtitles. I’ve also included my ESL reader adaptation of the film.
The link is the same as all my other edits, but, if you don’t already have it, please send me a Private Message asking for it. As always, suggestions are welcome.
Nearly half a century since George Lucas and his team created it, the original Star Wars film remains the best of the franchise in my mind. Every line of dialogue, musical que, and quirk of this movie is burned into my very DNA at this point.
That said, I’ve watched this movie enough times with younger viewers that I know the pacing of the first half hour, while cutting edge in 1977, is a bit too slow for modern audiences. So, with the help of other editors and VFX artists who’ve helped enrich the stew that is now ‘A New Hope’ over the years, we’ve put together a ‘Quick-Start Edition’ that gets things moving a lot faster.
Special thanks to Broom Kid AKA StraightCutsNoChaser for helping me when I was stuck. His work has been invaluable. So, if you enjoy it, just know that a lot of the credit for that should go to him. And if you hate it, it was all his fault and I was helpless to stop him 😉
The first cut is the most painful, but I’ve seen so many kids tune out during the opening crawl that I knew it had to go. If that’s a deal breaker for you, let me remind you that this version of Star Wars isn’t necessarily for you, it’s for younger kids who don’t want to start their exciting space adventure with a long wall of text for them to read before the fun begins.
Next, JoyOfEditing came up with some clever fixes to speed up how quickly R2 & 3PO get to Luke at Owen & Beru’s farm. Finally, the original Kenobi vs Vader fight has been swapped out for a mix of FixItInPost’s souped-up cut with 21C Peasant Fan’s version that better blends with the original footage.
It goes without saying that there’s no CGI Jabba and Han shoots first (obviously).
This uses elements of Buzz Lightyear’s cut of A New Hope, which is itself a recut of a previous edit by ForceGhostRecon, which was cut from Lucas’s own re-edit of his original film. So it’s a real Theseus’s ship situation at this point 😉
This is for my ESL students, so it has hardcoded English subtitles. It can also be paired nicely with Wakeupkeo’s edit of the Galaxy of Adventures A New Hope anime and its ESL reader.
If you’d like a version without the hardcoded subtitles, I’ve made available JoyOfEditing, StraightCutsNoChaser, and 21C Peasant Fan’s work for you to incorporate into your own version in the same folder as my Quick-Start Edition.
It’s at the same link as all my other edits. If you don’t already have that link, please send me a Private Message. As always, suggestions are welcome.
UPDATED JULY 4th 2025
This is a compilation of the various adaptations of Arthurian legend, edited to work together as one story.
I consider Boorman’s Excalibur to be the high watermark for Arthurian Myth adaptations. No one has done it better. However, with such a huge story covering so much material, I think it could use a little breathing room to focus on specific elements more. So I’ve turned Excalibur into a miniseries that chronicles Arthur’s birth to his death. It can be viewed on its own with just the Excalibur parts or you can include other Arthurian adaptations if you’d like.
1 EXCALIBUR - MERLIN & UTHER PENDRAGON (23min)
This is the opening act of Boorman’s Excalibur with some minor cuts. I think this is just about the perfect introduction to who both Merlin and Uther are while also setting up Morgana as the villain of the tale.
1b CAMELOT - UTHER & MORGANA (6min)
Starz’s Camelot was short-lived and a bit bland, but Eva Green is always excellent so I’ve included her first scenes of confronting Uther and her poisoning of him.
2a LEGEND of the SWORD - ARTHUR (25min)
Guy Ritchie’s decidedly non-traditional take on Arthur’s upbringing is not very kindly regarded, but I think it does the best job of depicting how powerful Excalibur is and the battles he fought to earn his place as king.
2b DISNEY’S THE SWORD IN THE STONE (44min)
You can also go the more Harry Potter-esque route with Walt Disney’s final film, the family-friendly adaptation of the first book of W.H. White’s Once and Future King.
3 EXCALIBUR - The SWORD & the STONE (11min)
We return to Excalibur again to see a more traditional version of Arthur’s first moments as king and the beginnings of his tutalege under Merlin.
4 LEGEND of the SWORD - VORTIGERN (37min)
Back to Ritchie’s version, we see Arthur’s mastery of Excalibur under the training of The Lady of the Lake AKA ‘The Mage’ and his climactic fight with Vortigern.
5 EXCALIBUR - ARTHUR & GUINEVERE (14min)
Arthur’s courtship of Guinevere and his creation of the Knights of the Round Table. I think Boorman nails this bit as well as he can given how fast he has to rush through it all. I’ve cut Arthur’s first scene with Lancelot as I’d rather he be more squeaky-clean until everything with his wife and best friend blows up in his face.
6 FIRST KNIGHT - LANCELOT & GUINEVERE (49min)
I think Richard Gere & Julia Ormond gave us the best modern retelling of the doomed Lancelot/Guinevere romance, even if the film utterly fumbles the love triangle by casting Arthur as a much, much older man and making his marriage a political alliance rather than a true romance. This has been updated to recast Connery as Leondegrance instead of Arthur.
7 EXCALIBUR - MORGANA (7min)
Coming back to Boorman, we are introduced to Helen Miren’s masterful turn as Morgana, her seduction of Merlin, and the birth of her unholy child Mordred.
7a THE GREEN KNIGHT (1hr 5min)
You could also slot David Lowery’s beautiful adaptation of Gawain and the Green Knight here. I think the theatrical cut is really interesting, but this is a more streamlined version that sticks closer to the essentials of the legend.
7b TRISTAN + ISOLDE (1hr 44min)
If you’d like a pitstop in Cornwall and Ireland and some very unsubtle foreshadowing of what’s coming in Camelot, Kevin Reynolds’ adaptation of the classic tragic love story can be slotted here.
7c QUEST FOR THE MAGIC SWORD (1hr 5min)
‘Quest for Camelot’ was an adaptation of Vera Chapman’s novel ‘The King’s Damosel’. It was unfortunately torpedoed by the clueless executives running Warner Animation, who tried to warp the story into something more Disney-esque. I’ve trimmed out as much of that as possible.
8 EXCALIBUR - The FALL of CAMELOT (24min)
Morgana’s manipulation of Guinevere & Lancelot. I’ve cut the Lancelot/Gawain fight as it’s unnecessary and we don’t really need to see Percival get knighted.
9 EXCALIBUR - THE QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL (22min)
This is Boorman’s version of the Fisher King/Grail myth, uncut. I think he nails it.
9b MONTY PYTHON & THE QUEST FOR THE HOLY GRAIL (Theatrical cut available to buy or rent everywhere)
If you want to lighten things up, this is a perfectly valid alternative.
10 EXCALIBUR - MORDRED (21min)
The epic conclusion in which father and son face one another for the final time. No cuts here. Again, Boorman absolutely nails it.
This is for my ESL students, so hardcoded English subtitles are included on all of them. In addtion, there is an ESL reader adaptation that incorporates elements used by Boorman, T.H. White, Ritchie, and many more.
This is available in the same folder as all my other edits. If you don’t already have the link and want one, please send me a PRIVATE MESSAGE. As always, suggestions are welcome.
1995’s First Knight has the distinction, from my perspective at least, of being the most successful modern depiction of the Lancelot/Guinevere romance, but it utterly fumbles the ball in regards to the love triangle by making Arthur so much older that it’s not even a question about which man Guinevere will choose, particularly if the other guy is a 65 year old Sean Connery in full “gimme my paycheck” mode. It also chickens out and kills off Arthur in a pretty lame way so that Lancelot and Guinevere can be together, guilt free.
This edit aims to not only speed-up the films sluggish pacing, but keep Arthur as an off-screen presence that the audience can imagine however they wish. This unfortunately leaves the Lancelot/Arthur friendship absent, but the movie only half-heartedly establishes any relationship between the two. Again, it’s best to leave their friendship off-screen so that the audience can imply whatever they choose.
The theatrical cut was 2 hours 6 minutes. My edit is about 45 minutes. Some of the transitions are less elegant than I’d like, but nothing too distracting, I hope.
This is for my ESL students so it will have hardcoded English subtitles. I’ve also included my ESL reader for Arthurian Legends, which incorporates elements of First Knight, in addition to Boorman’s Excalibur, Ritchie’s Legend of the Sword, and others.
This edit is in my movie edits folder now. If you don’t already have the link, please send me a PM. As always, suggestions are welcome.
Based upon feedback from my classes, I’ve trimmed a further ten minutes of unnecessary fat from this edit. The new runtime is 1 hour 12 minutes. It is for ESL students so it has hardcoded English subitles. However, I could certainly make a new version without subtitles if I get enough polite requests.
The link is the same. If you’d like one, please contact me through PM.
Hi, I know it is a long time after you created this but I was wondering if you could reupload the download link to the Twin Suns cut you made.
Edit: Accidentally sent comment 3 times cause of a loading glitch
I have it, with English subtitles I made. If anyone would like a link, please contact me through PM.
I’ve seen a preview cut and I can confirm that this meets the extremely high standards of quality and craftsmanship that all of BroomKid / StraightCutsNoChaser’s previous edits shared. You guys are in for a real treat.
Might I suggest the movie title “Rebellion” for season two?
The first movie in your trilogy would be “Andor” and the last would be “Rogue One”.
I made an edit of ‘Secret Cargo’ with Mon Mothma’s speech from Andor if anyone wants a copy. Just send me a PM. It includes an SRT file with English subtitles.
Who’s Leonheart?
A fan editor from Reddit. I got the spelling wrong though.
It’s leeonheart22
I agree that Cassian being ordered to kill Erso is a must now as well. Rogue One can’t really be just Jyn’s story anymore. It’s essentially Andor’s series finale.
I think this version of Rogue One is exactly what I’d want, but I think reinserting Andor’s introduction would be better at this point. I understand the idea of starting the story off through Jyn’s eyes, but Cassian’s first scenes were sorely missed.
Some of these edits have been lurking in my edits folders for a while, but I just haven’t gotten around to releasing them publicly yet. All of them are for my ESL students so each of them have hardcoded English subtitles. Sorry if that’s a dealbreaker for any of you, but it makes editing them so much easier.
All of the edits also include ESL reader adaptations of the films themselves.
The first is an edit of Superman II that incorporates elements of Donner with some Lester, but uses the excellent work done for ‘The Kryptonian Cuts’ to modernize the Metropolis battle and Fran Garcia’s ‘Richard Donner Vision’ fixes for the unexplained new powers. I end the film with Lois still knowing who Superman is. No memory kiss or time reversal.
The last two are pretty simple tweaks of Wakeupkeo’s edits for Man of Steel and Wonder Woman. While I think Keo’s edits of BvS and JL are the high water mark for DCEU edits, I wanted more material from the theatrical cuts when I show them MoS and WW. My Man of Steel edit is essentially Keo’s edit, but with the full Krypton sequence restored while my Wonder Woman edit is the theatrical cut, but with Keo’s fix for the awful Daddy Zeus/Ares scene inserted.
If you already have the link to my edits, you’re good to go. Please contact me through PM for one.