On April 3, 1968, it was released at Loew’s Capitol in New York Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece 2001: A Space Odysseyand it’s not that the first is very good. The New York Times describes it as something “halfway between the hypnotic and the immensely boring”while film critic Pauline Kael dubbed it as “enormously unimaginative.” To which Kubrick immediately understands the hint and cuts “a full 19 minutes” from the filmwhich 3 days later comes out in the Final Cut version, becoming a resounding success (started with 4 Oscar nominations, won for special effects).
Many years later, in December 2010, we returned to talk about those 19 (or maybe 17) minutes cut by the great master. The director of special effects Douglas Trumball had revealed that those images were shot and never seen again in a cinema (apart from three days in April 1968, in fact), they were lying in a salt mine used as a warehouse by Warner Bros. Was it possible to finally put them back into circulation? Answering a specific question from Wired, Warner Bros made a very eloquent statement: no, it was the answer. Because? Because “those images have always been in our warehouse. When Kubrick cut those 17 minutes after the New York premiere, he quickly made it clear that the shortened version of the film was its final version. In short, the film in circulation is the one he would have liked to have been seen and kept and we have no plans to change Kubrick’s vision. “