In a rare turn of events, the studio asked Gareth Edwards to restore five minute of the film to make it longer,
according to io9:
“I was determined to do a film that was under two hours,” Edwards told io9. “And so we showed this one hour 59 [minute] cut to the studio. And essentially their note was like, ‘Great, could you put the five minutes that you cut out back in?’ And so we put those five minutes back in, and it was essentially the movie.”
I'm curious if we'll ever find out what five minutes were added back in and whether how obvious it is. I recently watched the extended cut of
Dominion and I was impressed by how well the extra
twelve minutes were seamlessly restored (but since I'm in the minority about enjoying that film, I suppose that opinion should be taken with a grain of salt).
Edwards also mentioned that despite this request, there are still three deleted scenes from the film, two of which is he's fine with, but he was torn about the third:
“I really wanted [it] to stay in the movie,” Edwards said. “I really liked it. And that was a kill-your-baby sort of moment. I won’t ruin it for people, but there’s a section out the front of the gas station that used to be a little bit more like being hunted. The tension of something coming. And it was a note from [writer] David Koepp, which was essentially, the third act, if you give it a name, it would be ‘Run like hell.’ And so basically once they started running, it was like, don’t make them stop. And it felt like it stopped again. And so we removed that idea, those beats, and it got a lot better. But I do really like what happened in the bit where they did stop. And that will be on the extras.”
