Wonderful Life Edit Has Prime Viewers Perplexed

Holiday purists are incredulous over an Amazon Prime Video version of It's a Wonderful Life, which they say plays like a Christmas movie with its heart surgically removed. The streamer is offering an abridged cut that runs about 22 minutes shorter than the 130-minute original—and it skips the entire "Pottersville" stretch, the alternate-reality sequence where George Bailey learns what the world would look like if he'd never been born, notes the New York Post.

Without that section, audiences see James Stewart's despondent banker on a bridge one moment and then watch him jubilantly racing through town the next, with none of the hard-earned revelation in between. Social media reaction has been sharp, with users calling the edit "sacrilege," "an abomination," and, perhaps worst of all for a classic, "pointless." At Gizmodo, Germain Lussier puts it this way: "The edit makes no sense and completely ruins the film." The missing passage is widely regarded as the film's emotional centerpiece: Bedford Falls morphs into seedy "Pottersville," George's brother dies young, his wife never marries, and tycoon Henry Potter effectively owns the town.

The New York Post explains that the odd edit isn't a new director's cut but a relic of the film's messy copyright history. When It's a Wonderful Life slipped into the public domain in 1974 due to a lapsed renewal, broadcasters freely aired and sometimes trimmed it. In the 1990s, rights holders leaned on still-valid copyrights for the underlying short story The Greatest Gift and Dimitri Tiomkin's score to reassert control. Legal analysts say the Pottersville sequence is the part most closely tied to that short story, and excising it may have been seen as a way to dodge infringement claims while still showing "most" of the film.

One more element of the confusion: Amazon Prime actually has three versions of the film streaming, according to a post at Bored Panda: The black-and-white original (which Lussier argues is the one to watch), a colorized version, and the abridged version. But viewers aren't always aware they've picked an alternative version.