“Arguably, one reason why the film industry has encouraged and promoted the concept of director’s cuts…is that it enables a film’s owner to sell the same product to the same customer twice — or even, in a few special cases, three or four times. Presumably, if you recut somebody’s film, the damage isn’t serious because it can always be ‘restored’ on DVD. The basic mythology appears to be that every film has two versions, a correct one and an incorrect one. But in fact this isn’t quite true.

“A better paraphrase of the mythology would be, more paradoxically, that every film has at least two versions — a correct one and a more correct one, to be succeeded in turn by further upgrades.” — from a 6.23 Slate piece by Jonathan Rosenbaum‘s called “Death by a Thousand Director’s Cuts — How DVD marketing is rewriting the history of film.”