Posted in: 4K/Blu-Ray, Movies | Tagged: A Better Tomorrow, a better tomorrow 2, chow yun fat, heroic bloodshed, john woo, leslie cheung, Shout! Factory, ti lung, tsui hark

A Better Tomorrow 2: John Woo's Longer Original Cut has been Found!

John Woo's original 140-minute workprint cut of A Better Tomorrow 2 has been found and will be released on Blu-Ray by Shout! Factory.

The long-lost original workprint first cut of John Woo's definitive 1980s heroic bloodshed movie A Better Tomorrow 2 has been discovered and it's coming out on Blu-Ray for the first time. This is huge news! Woo's original cut of the movie was 30 minutes longer than the 107-minute theatrical release that became the quintessential Hong Kong gangster movie of the 1980s and established Chow Yun Fat as an international superstar two years before the West discovered him in Woo's next film The Killer. The rediscovery of the longer cut of A Better Tomorrow 2 is the action movie equivalent of discovering the lost footage of Orson Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons, which is reportedly lost forever.

The Definitive 1980s Hong Kong Action Movie that Broke John Woo's Heart

John Woo agreed to make A Better Tomorrow 2 partly to help out actor-director Dean Shek, casting him as a tragic ex-gangster trying to go straight and mentor to Ti Lung and Chow Yun Fat's characters. Chow Yun Fat's character Mark died at the end of the first movie, but Woo simply cast him as Kit, Mark's twin brother. Leslie Cheung returns as Ti Lung's cop brother he's trying to reconcile with and sings the song that became a major ballad in 1980s Cantopop. The batshit plot  (whose wildest moments feature Chow Yun Fat) is even more sprawling than the first movie's, partly taking place in New York City before returning to Hong Kong for the wildest shootout in 1980s action cinema. That climactic shootout set the template for every movie shooting in global cinema ever since. Other Hong Kong gangster movies shamelessly ripped it off for the rest of the decade but never as well as when John Woo did it, and he would top himself in his next movies, The Killer, A Bullet in the Head, and Hardboiled. It was also the shootout setpiece that truly established his style of action – the use of slow motion he learned from Sam Peckinpah, the roving camera and punching editing he took from Martin Scorsese and a balletic sense of choreography all his own. It further cemented Chow Yun Fat's iconic look with the sunglasses and trenchcoat as he fired two guns at once. Chow Yun Fat even undercuts the gangster cool with improvised moments of panicked physical comedy.

Tsui Hark produced A Better Tomorrow 2 via his production company Film Workshop, and he fought with John Woo throughout the production over every aspect of the script and editing. Woo's original cut was 140 minutes long but was forced by the studio to cut it down to under two hours mere weeks before its release. Woo disowned the theatrical cut and Chow Yun Fat hated it. Woo and Tsui Hark fell out over similar fights on The Killer and the two filmmakers didn't reconcile until the mid-2010s. Despite their feelings the movie was the megahit that put Hong Kong gangster movies on the map. Every major shootout in a movie ever since has its DNA in that shootout. The John Wick movies would not exist without A Better Tomorrow 2 and The Killer. Woo remains proud of the final shootout since he finally found his feet as an action director there.

Shout! Factor to the Rescue

Shout! Factory recently bought the entire Media Asia library, which has virtually every major Hong Kong movie from the 1980s to the early 2000s, including genre- and decade-defining works by Tsui Hark, John Woo, Ringo Lam and Ching Tsiu-Tung. Their plan is to remaster the movies in 4K for release on VOD, streaming and Blu-Ray. As of this writing, Tsui Hark's Peking Opera Blues, John Woo's A Better Tomorrow, A Better Tomorrow 2, The Killer, and Hardboiled, and Ringo Lam's City On Fire, whose plot was lifted by Quentin Tarantino for Reservoir Dogs, as well as several of Jet Li's major martial arts films, are now streaming on Shout! TV, with more titles to come. Somehow Shout! found the original workprint of A Better Tomorrow 2 and will be releasing it as an exclusive in their upcoming 4K Blu-Ray box set of the A Better Tomorrow trilogy along with a longer Taiwanese theatrical version of The Killer that's 15 minutes longer, but it's the unearthing of A Better Tomorrow 2 that's the main event, never before seen by the public. Somehow, Bleeding Cool are the only ones to report this story.

This surprise release of the longer cut of A Better Tomorrow 2 feels like the time the original workprint of Blade Runner was accidentally unearthed and screened to the public. That renewed interest enabled Sir Ridley Scott to recut Blade Runner into his intended version. Would John Woo be interested in revising and polishing A Better Tomorrow 2? The original negatives may be gone, but it's entirely possible to digitally restore any final cut he makes into a releasable 4K version. He has enough fans who have wanted to see it since 1987.

A Better Tomorrow – the trilogy box set is available for pre-order.

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