Michael Mann has overseen a 40th anniversary restoration of his 1986 thriller, Manhunter. The Final Cut is coming to cinemas this September. Poorly promoted and unfairly overlooked on its release in 1986, Michael Mann’s horror-laced thriller Manhunter went on to find deserved cult status. A sign of just how respected Mann’s film is these days: ... Manhunter: The Final Cut | Restored 4K edition coming to UK cinemas in September
Michael Mann has overseen a 40th anniversary restoration of his 1986 thriller, Manhunter. The Final Cut is coming to cinemas this September.
Poorly promoted and unfairly overlooked on its release in 1986, Michael Mann’s horror-laced thriller Manhunter went on to find deserved cult status.
A sign of just how respected Mann’s film is these days: it’s getting a new cinema release as Manhunter: The Final Cut. Restored and in 4K, the project has been overseen by Mann himself, and is said to greatly improve the film’s sound and image, “offering audiences the ultimate immersive version,” according to its press release.
It also sounds as though Mann has either added in a few previously deleted scenes or made a few trims here and there. Alternate cuts (including a “Restored Director’s Cut”) already exist, which lengthen some sequences and shorten others. We’ll have to wait and see which version The Final Cut most closely resembles.
Starring William Petersen as FBI criminal profiler Will Graham, Manhunter was adapted from Thomas Harris’s novel, Red Dragon (legend has it that the title was changed due to fears that audiences might think they were see paying to see a martial arts movie). Like the later, far more successful The Silence Of The Lambs, it sees its protagonist on the hunt for a serial killer and consulting a convicted murderer named Hannibal the Cannibal.
Manhunter is a much more cold, insidious film than The Silence Of The Lambs, though, with performances that really get under the skin. Brian Cox plays a more casual, calculating Hannibal Lecktor (as it’s spelled here) than Anthony Hopkins’ more famous incarnation. The late Tom Noonan, playing a killer dubbed the Tooth Fairy, is nothing less than extraordinary.
Manhunter: The Final Cut will be coming out on disc courtesy of StudioCanal, but it’s also getting a welcome cinema release. In the US, it’ll screen from the 24th July, while the UK will get it a little later, from the 25th September.
“If the picture was left the way it was, it would be interesting, but you’d feel some distance,” Mann said in a statement (via Bloody Disgusting); “you’d be observing it somewhat. I’m more interested in its original intent impacting you the same way it may have in 1986…that is, to bring you into it again in the original way.”
For those of us who haven’t been lucky enough to see Manhunter in a cinema yet, this is likely to be the best way to experience Mann’s masterpiece.
