A three-hour extended cut of Superman: The Movie is being released for the first time, but can alternate versions of classics ever be more than poor relations?

Warner Brothers recently announced a release that combines both a “special edition” cut of Richard Donner’s 1978 blockbuster Superman: The Movie and an extended TV version that runs over three hours and was previously on television in 1982.

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As the hefty box-office gross of even the abysmal Batman v Superman illustrated, there’s a lot of money to be made from even bad depictions of the Man of Steel (such as, you know, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel). With that in mind, it’s not surprising this three-hour-plus cut of Superman is not the only alternate Superman movie cut out there. In 2006, as the world waited to be underwhelmed by Bryan Singer’s mostly forgotten reboot Superman Returns (which catapulted its star Brandon Routh to anonymity), Warner Brothers took advantage of the eternal market for Superman product with a restored version of Superman II, overseen by Donner.

Alternate cuts often dazzle cinephiles with their potential before disappointing them with their bloated reality. To cite a high-profile example, when Francis Ford Coppola finally got to release his director’s cut of Apocalypse Now, the overwhelming consensus was that the shorter, less crazily self-indulgent version of Coppola’s film was superior.

Alternate cuts often dazzle cinephiles with their potential before disappointing them with their bloated reality

Alternate cuts can drastically change how some cinematic masterpieces are seen. Before Annie Hall established the template for a lot of both contemporary romantic comedy and independent film (not to mention the next phase of Woody Allen’s career), it was a “free-associative project” with a working title of Anhedonia, which bore little resemblance to the proto romcom it became. It originally ran almost an hour longer than the 93-minute version we all know and love.

Caddyshack is to bros what Annie Hall is to pretentious east coast intellectuals, but it was a very different proposition as well. According to comedy legend, the first cut of Caddyshack ran at four and a half hours. One of Bill Murray’s famous monologues lasted an entire half hour, until hard-nosed editors went in and transformed this shapeless mass of improvisation into a 93-minute movie. Caddyshack has been monetized and exploited relentlessly through the decades, but I doubt we’ll ever see the epic original cut, or a straight half hour of Murray riffing in one of his best and purest roles, though that would be the ultimate deleted scene.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Have you got a spare four hours?’ ... Bill Murray in Caddyshack. Photograph: Allstar/ORION/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

That’s the thing about alternate cuts of famous or infamous movies: they hold out the exhilarating potential of being better than versions of movies we all seemingly know and love, but more often than not they’re poor relations that at best are self-indulgent and at worst terrible.

Richard Kelly’s gonzo 2006 satire Southland Tales, whose most famous set piece features a feral-looking Justin Timberlake staring lecherously into the camera while lip-synching to the Killers, was released to a chorus of boos when it premiered in a 160-minute unfinished version at 2006 Cannes. It bombed in a 145-minute theatrical cut, but the nice thing about cult films is that self-indulgences that were jeered in the past are often cheered in the present. The cult of Southland Tales is a cult of delirious excess, so the idea of even more crazy is irresistible to Richard Kelly diehards.

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We’re intrigued by alternate cuts of movies like Southland Tales, Annie Hall and Caddyshack. We may get to experience them at some point, but there are holy grails of the cinematic unseen that haven’t been shown in any version, director’s cut, theatrical, TV, edited or otherwise.

Orson Welles, for example, shot one of the most famous and notorious unreleased films of all time when he directed contemporary John Huston and a cast full of New Hollywood figures like Peter Bogdanovich over a period of years in the arty, very 1970s inside-show-biz melodrama The Other Side of the Wind. For decades, it seemed like the movie was cursed to forever go unfinished and unseen but that has changed over the past few years. In 2015, more than $400,000 was raised via crowdfunding to finish the film, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we’ll ever see an official release.

Even more promisingly for the morbidly curious, Jerry Lewis’s recent death at 91 renewed hope that we’ll someday get to see the ultimate unseen cut/unseen film: Lewis’s notorious 1973 Holocaust-themed drama The Day the Clown Cried. In 2016, 30 minutes of the film leaked on to YouTube, although it was taken down for copyright violation.

That’s a shame because that footage, incomplete and unfinished as it might have been, could very well be the only cut of The Day the Clown Cried anyone outside of Lewis’s inner circle will ever have the supremely questionable “honor” of seeing. Even that sliver of clown was a victim of international copyright law dictating that the unseen remain unseen, at least until there’s some money to be made from a release, as is obviously the case with the three-hour-plus Superman, which has slightly more mainstream appeal than a Jerry Lewis movie even Jerry Lewis (who had a very high opinion of himself) thinks is terrible and should never be seen.