This is a recreation of the rarely seen "Theatrical Cut" or "2nd Director's Cut" of 'Heaven's Gate' using the beautiful HD Blu-Ray transfer of the "Preview/Premiere/1st Director's Cut". The much shorter cut is not a studio-imposed hatchet-job but the result of 6 months of Director Michael Cimino's further work in the cutting room, trying to perfect the film. It's 67 minutes shorter, features a voiceover, radically rearranged scenes, altered dialogue, music and SoundFX and 18 minutes of new footage.

For whatever reason he did not chose to restore this cut of the film for Blu-Ray and opted to present his first much longer cut that he himself had withdrawn. So here is my attempt to recreate that "2nd Director's Cut" in the best quality possible.

Steven Soderbergh made a fanedit of Michael Cimino's much maligned 1980 epic 'Heaven's Gate' back in 2006 (For his own amusement). This year he decided to release it onto the internet via his blog, but the visual quality was very poor, as it was cut from the un-restored DVD (Also compressed for streaming).

I really wanted to enjoy Soderbergh's dramatic slashing-in-half of this overlong but beautiful film but the poor quality stopped me. So now I've recreated 'The Butcher's Cut' frame-by-frame based on the restored 2012 'Heaven's Gate' Blu-Ray. It's Steven Soderbergh's fanedit with me just presenting it in the best possible light.

'Heaven's Gate' has many strengths, including some the most beautiful cinematography you're likely to see, a wonderfully poetic script and one of the greatest scores ever recorded. But pacing, strict editing, character motivation and narrative clarity weren't among them. I think Soderbergh has addressed many of these flaws and also reduced the inflated running time down to almost exactly a half.