It's worth asking before anyone loses their mind about this, who made this change and why? Licensors like Criterion can't and don't "re-edit" (if you can call removing 4 seconds re-editing). Others can and do pretty frequently.
It's decisions about market fit by executives, not a moral crusade (as we have seen, Hollywood execs aren't really the type for that). Sometimes the whole film is affected, as in Blade Runner, Brazil, Once Upon a Time in America, or Kingdom of Heaven. Those movies were "butchered" (to use the language of the histrionic Forbes article). Yet in Leon (The Professional) the director supposedly intended the titular character to sleep with his underage protege. I'm glad someone overrode the sacred "artist's intent" there, and I wish someone had done the same for George Lucas's ill-advised Star Wars editions.
Here someone probably looks at a report and says, OK here are the movies in our pile with more than 20 slurs in them. Let's try to get that number below 10 so we don't have to add a "the language in this film represents the time in which it was made..." warning, that turns a lot of people off.
These decisions get made to maximize shareholder value, and the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars), it's just one of a dozen variant cuts — you think they show the same exact movie everywhere in the world? Ever been to China? Believe it or not art is flexible and resilient. A film can survive a temporary blip while some VPs try to minimize complaints from sensitive viewers. If you disagree with those viewers that is another issue in my opinion.
> It's decisions about market fit by executives, not a moral crusade (as we have seen, Hollywood execs aren't really the type for that).
As a Criterion Channel subscriber, I take them at their word when they say in their mission statement [1]--
> No matter the medium... Criterion has maintained its pioneering commitment to presenting each film as its maker would want it seen...
Which leads me to ask, did the maker of The French Connection want those slurs removed from his film? (William Friedkin is, after all, still with us.) He certainly seems to have left those slurs in when he and his distributor released the film to audiences in the 70's.
Which makes me curious--just how tough were those previous audiences to be able to withstand the onslaught of slurs that today wilts the average modern viewer? Those moderns could probably use a bit of that stern stuff when looking at the past...
> It's worth asking before anyone loses their mind about this, who made this change and why? [...] These decisions get made to maximize shareholder value
Sounds like a pretty goddamn good reason to lose my mind.
> the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars)
This is Disney we're talking about. When they want to disappear a movie, they disappear a movie. You can pirate the old version, or buy extant DVDs, but I don't expect them to release a "French Connection Full Slur Version" Bluray or make it an option on streaming ("click here for the slurs version, you RACIST")
It's decisions about market fit by executives, not a moral crusade (as we have seen, Hollywood execs aren't really the type for that). Sometimes the whole film is affected, as in Blade Runner, Brazil, Once Upon a Time in America, or Kingdom of Heaven. Those movies were "butchered" (to use the language of the histrionic Forbes article). Yet in Leon (The Professional) the director supposedly intended the titular character to sleep with his underage protege. I'm glad someone overrode the sacred "artist's intent" there, and I wish someone had done the same for George Lucas's ill-advised Star Wars editions.
Here someone probably looks at a report and says, OK here are the movies in our pile with more than 20 slurs in them. Let's try to get that number below 10 so we don't have to add a "the language in this film represents the time in which it was made..." warning, that turns a lot of people off.
These decisions get made to maximize shareholder value, and the original film is not lost (except in the case of Star Wars), it's just one of a dozen variant cuts — you think they show the same exact movie everywhere in the world? Ever been to China? Believe it or not art is flexible and resilient. A film can survive a temporary blip while some VPs try to minimize complaints from sensitive viewers. If you disagree with those viewers that is another issue in my opinion.