alex.sp89 wrote:Or maybe they have deleted some violence from R, Unrated cut and were forced to insert something.
They are not violent scenes, one shows Berkowitz emptying his desk when he quits (after having seen Castle in jail), the one sees him visiting Sam Leary at the hospital and then being kidnapped by the mob when he gets back to his car.
What I suspect happened is that the Japanese distributor received video copies of dailies or earlier cuts of the movie and somehow ended up inserting some of them for this TV version for some reason...
Jox, Goldblatt has the workprint only on BETA. But who owns the original negatives, reels of footage and all that stuff after New World Pictures defunct ? They should be stored somewhere ?
The negative of the final released cut must be somewhere, but the reels of dailies and deleted scenes and prologue are likely lost or destroyed. (And since the movie was shot and partly edited in Australia makes it worse).
The storage of film elements is a big issue because it takes so much warehouse space and costs money to keep, especially for small or medium-sized companies so prints and elements are regularly destroyed.
And in the case of companies that disappear such as New World it's even worse because materials get all over the place, are not archived properly, and the new owners don't necessarily know the films well enough so they'd know what they might have.
If any of the titles were big successes or recipient of awards and acclaim, they'd care more about keeping stuff, but imagine in the 90s, they wouldn't think much of an exploitation title like THE PUNISHER...