Wait, What? ‘Galaxy Quest’ Was Initially R-Rated

Speaking with Lindsey Collins—producer of the massive Disney blockbuster that hit theaters this weekend, John Carter—recently, Collider’s Steve Weintraub was informed of some long-lost buried treasure of sorts.

Apparently Galaxy Quest, the fantastic 1999 sci-fi comedy starring Tim Allen, Alan Rickman, Sigourney Weaver, Sam Rockwell, Tony Shalhoub, and Daryl Mitchell (as well as a slew of other familiar faces) as the stars of an old sci-fi TV series (a la Star Trek) who inadvertently find themselves beamed out to space to help very real aliens put an end to the ongoing threats of an evil being named Sarris and his crew, was initially an R-rated comedy before being cut down to the PG version fans know and love.

Collins explained how she came to find out this information while dining with Weaver:

â€œWe had lunch with Sigourney, who was telling us that there actually used to be an R-rated version of that movie which was awesome. It was the directorâ€™s cut and it was R-rated and everybody was swearing and there were sex scenes, and the whole thing. They didnâ€™t know what to do with it, so they had to re-edit the whole thing and made it what it is today. We were like, â€˜How do we get our hands on the R-rated version of Galaxy Quest?â€™ She said â€˜I donâ€™t know!â€™ and we were like, â€˜Come on, Sigourney!â€™â€

I’m a total advocate for the R-rated motion picture. Far too often these days do studios force filmmakers to make a movie PG-13 to appeal to a larger audience, thus hoping to increase the amount of money that ends up in their pockets. It’s led to awful installments in great R-rated franchises such as Live Free or Die Hard and Terminator Salvation, with the possibility of The Expendables 2 soon joining that conversation.

All of that said, Galaxy Quest isn’t part of that conversation because it’s not a movie you’d ever expect to be rated R. It’s perfectly fine as it is, and will always be so…but that also makes this new knowledge of a more mature cut of the movie so very intriguing. An R-rated version of a PG movie? Unheard of!

It’s become a constant these days for PG-13 comedies and horror flicks to release “unrated” cuts when the movie hits Blu-ray and DVD. Usually these are just money-grabs and useless, but sometimes the adult-aimed version can be fun. Before it became the norm we saw movies like Daredevil or Michael Bay’s Armageddon and Pearl Harbor do it as well. But rarely does the presence of one so random as this surface.

Which brings us to the big question asked above: where in the sweetest of Hells is this R-rated version of Galaxy Quest, and how to we get our eyes on it?!

DreamWorks released the film, so it would be up to them to release some kind of special edition with it on there. A new Deluxe Edition and the Blu-ray version of the movie were released in 2009, so they do still know the movie exists. Let’s just hope they didn’t destroy all copies of it.

Would you want to see an R-rated version of Galaxy Quest?