There Probably Won’t Be A Director’s Cut Of THE AVENGERS In Theaters

A couple of days ago a site called comicbook.com ran a highly speculative piece about a director's cut of The Avengers. The article in question begins:

In an interview with Collider, Joss Whedon revealed that his first cut of The Avengers was three hours long. While initially it was thought that most of these 30 minutes of deleted scenes wouldn’t see the light of day until the DVD was released, we’ve got to wonder if the idea has occurred to Disney and Marvel Studios to release an extended director’s cut of The Avengers in theaters.

It goes on to say that it would be a good idea for Disney to rerelease the film in late summer with the additional scenes included if they hoped to ever best Titanic as the number one movie of all time. Somehow this then became a news story. Ain't It Cool ran it, IGN ran it, all the geek sites ran it - claiming that comicbook.com had some sort of source (a site nobody ever heard of chimed in later that they had a source that corroborated comicbook.com's editorial, but this smells like hot buttered bullshit).

But this isn't a true story. Disney is not rereleasing the movie. I'm not sure they're actively chasing the record. It's just one site's interesting idea of a way that the company could milk extra bucks out of the film.

This is another example of the internet getting something monumentally wrong because everybody's just rushing to get their SEO headlines online. But what would be interesting is if this is one of those occasions where a storm of internet interest in something untrue makes that something true. Some days it seems that Hollywood operates on an almost quantum level, and this much attention on something false might bring it to life.

That said, I suspect that three hour cut isn't really a three hour cut featuring 30 minutes of exciting newness; it's probably just a version of the movie with a bit of extra bloat - shorter than an assemblage, but not a real director's cut.