Midsommar Director's Cut Being Released in Theaters This Weekend

With Labor Day coming up next week, summer may be winding down, but if you missed out on Ari [...]

By Nicole Drum

With Labor Day coming up next week, summer may be winding down, but if you missed out on Ari Aster's sun-drenched, heart-of-summer horror film Midsommar, you're in luck. The film is returning to theaters this weekend with extended scenes and additional footage in Midsommar: The Director's Cut. A24 made the announcement via Twitter on Tuesday, complete with a new trailer for the special, unrated cut.

Midsommar follows Dani (Florence Pugh) as well as her boyfriend Christian (Jack Reynor) and his friends and fellow anthropology grad students Josh (William Jackson Harper) and Mark (Will Poulter) as they take a trip to the remote Swedish village of Harga where they will witness a "once-in-a-lifetime" midsummer celebration unique to the village. However, Dani is still reeling from a personal tragedy and her relationship with Christian is not in the best place -- with Christian having planned to break up with her before the tragedy. It all comes to a head during the nine-day festival of love and glee which turns out to have some disturbing, horrific results the visitors certainly wouldn't have expected.

Aster has previously spoken about some of the details of scenes that were ultimately cut for the original theatrical release, including one that set up some of the tension for Dani and Christian's fraught relationship.

"There [was] a very big argument between Dani and Christian in the middle," Aster shared with GameSpot. "That was the only time that we see Dani fight back and argue with Christian, and that was a big debate in the edit room, about whether we keep that or lose that. If you told me that I would have cut that scene before we went into production, I would have told you that you were crazy."

Aster also noted that his original cut of the film was nearly four hours long with more bizarre rituals depicted, but also indicated that the theatrical cut of the film was ultimately one that he was proud of.

"We did find that by cutting that, we were able to maintain the tension between them even more successfully," the filmmaker shared. "I was in love with that scene, because it felt like an argument that I'd had with partners before, and I think it felt like the kind of argument that people would relate to. But it also felt like the movie could survive it being cut, which was a shock to me, and I didn't make peace with that until very recently."

Midsommar: The Director's Cut allows for some of those cut scenes to make their way into the film. Coming in at nearly 3-hours, the unrated director's cut will have almost half an hour more footage than the theatrical release. It was previously screened at the Lincoln Center on August 17th.

Midsommar: The Director's Cut will be in select theaters the weekend of August 30. Midsommar will be released -- without the Director's Cut -- will be released on Digital and On Demand by A24 on September 24th with Blu-ray and DVD via Lionsgate to follow on October 8th.

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