Longlegs Director Confirms There Won't Be an Extended Cut

Osgood Perkins details that the theatrical cut is his preferred version of the story.

By Patrick Cavanaugh

When a movie earns a home video release, they've been known to come with extended cuts that align more closely with a director's original vision, but Longlegs fans shouldn't anticipate such a release, as writer/director Osgood Perkins thinks the theatrical cut is the ideal version of the story. Given that the movie featured a number of mysterious clues and narrative threads, some viewers might hope to learn more about the movie's mythology, and while Perkins didn't refute the idea of additional scenes being included on a home video release, we shouldn't expect a version in which the movie is extended. Longlegs is still in theaters.

While participating in a Reddit AMA, one fan asked if there would be a director's cut, to which Perkins replied, "You've seen the director's cut. no one messed with what I wanted to do. Director's [cuts] are, I think, a bit of nonsense. Check out the Coen [brothers'] 'director's cut' of Blood Simple... it's shorter than the theatrical cut."

What makes this reveal potentially more surprising is that, in regards to horror movies, home video releases typically offer more brutal looks at the violent sequences in a film that need to be trimmed down for the MPA, but with Longlegs only having a handful of violent moments, it seems all of the more gruesome elements were left in the final cut.

With one of the more compelling elements of Longlegs being Nicolas Cage's performance as the titular figure, fans would hope to get more glimpses at the character, but the film's editors shared earlier this month that there wasn't much that they cut out of the movie.

"There is a lot of material from the jail scene or the interrogation room scene," Graham Fortin confirmed to ComicBook. "I remember, can we say 'Crimson and Clover?' Cage sang that whole entire song, like, 'Crimson and Clover. Over and over...' And that was in for a while, and then we lost that. There's some material from the house I remember that was lost."

Greg Ng continued, "I do feel like they're fairly efficient with all that. While the scenes were maybe trimmed, there weren't tons of scenes that were lying on the cutting room floor. There was certainly extra material, and it's Nick Cage, so everything was gold. It wasn't a matter of we didn't want to use it, it was just that there's so much of it, and you can only give the audience ... You've got to give everybody what they need instead of, you can't just give them a Nick Cage milkshake and throw it in everyone's face. So maybe people would like that, but that's not what this movie is."

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Stay tuned for updates on the home video release of Longlegs.

Are you disappointed there won't be a director's cut? Contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter or on Instagram to talk all things Star Wars and horror! 

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