Francis Ford Coppola Finally Gets to Release His Version of The Godfather Part III
When it comes to his films, director Francis Ford Coppola is perhaps always ready to be pulled back in. On the heels of his acclaimed restorations of Apocalypse Now and The Cotton Club, the Oscar-winning filmmaker has next set his sights on the notorious and disappointing finale to The Godfather trilogy. As announced by Paramount on Thursday, Coppola has finally completed a long-discussed new edit of The Godfather Part III, just in time for the film’s 30th anniversary.
The project, saddled with the lengthy title Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, will debut in theaters (where open and available) in December before hitting digital platforms as well as physical media.
“Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone is an acknowledgment of Mario’s and my preferred title and our original intentions for what became The Godfather: Part III,” Coppola said in a statement. “For this version of the finale, I created a new beginning and ending, and rearranged some scenes, shots, and music cues. With these changes and the restored footage and sound, to me, it is a more appropriate conclusion to The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II and I’m thankful to Jim Gianopulos and Paramount for allowing me to revisit it.”
Released on Christmas Day in 1990, The Godfather Part III arrived not just with the expectations established by the first two films—The Godfather and its sequel, The Godfather Part II, were nominated for a combined 22 Oscars and won nine, including best picture in 1973 and 1975—but in the wake of Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic Goodfellas, which debuted in September of the same year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, with Goodfellas so aggressively upending familiar gangster film tropes, the Coppola film failed to fully satisfy either fans or critics.
“Because we know it so intimately, because its rhythms and values are instantly recognizable to us, a film like The Godfather Part III probably works better than it should,” Roger Ebert wrote in a mostly positive three-and-a-half star review. “If you stand back and look at it rationally, this is a confusing and disjointed film. It is said that Coppola was rewriting it as he went along, and indeed it lacks the confident forward sweep of a film that knows where it’s going.”
Ebert wasn’t wrong. Production on The Godfather Part III was fraught from the start, notably because Coppola wasn’t initially keen to revisit the franchise. In an interview from the Berlin Film Festival in 1990, Coppola recalled being approached by Paramount after hearing they had wanted to do a third film with a new director and either Sylvester Stallone or John Travolta as stars. “It’s like when you have an ex-girlfriend, you hear about her and you say, I don’t care. But you do care,” he said at the time. “I wish they would just leave it alone and let it be finished and not have to get me jealous or possessive of it.”
Once he and author Mario Puzo returned, however, things didn’t get much easier. Robert Duvall was famously low-balled by the studio on salary and refused to return to return as Corleone family consigliere, Tom Hagen. (“I said I would work easily if they paid [Al] Pacino twice what they paid me, that’s fine,” Duvall told 60 Minutes in 2004. “But not three or four times, which is what they did.”) Duvall, a seven-time Oscar nominee who was previously nominated for the first Godfather film, was essentially replaced in the cast by George Hamilton.
Meanwhile, Winona Ryder—who had been cast as Michael Corleone’s teenage daughter over actors like Julia Roberts and Madonna—famously dropped out of the project before shooting even one scene, citing exhaustion. Actresses such as Annabella Sciorra and Laura San Giacomo were considered, it was reported at the time, but Coppola felt they were too old for the role. So instead, he cast his daughter, Sofia Coppola. Her performance in the film was widely panned and mocked for years to come.
“It was hard because I was 18 and the last thing you want to do at that age is listen to what your parents say,” Sofia said in a 2011 interview. “My dad was directing me, so it was awkward because I am not naturally an actress. But I just wanted to try everything, and wasn’t expecting that so many people would look at it. I grew up with The Godfather as a familiar thing, but to me, it wasn’t this iconic masterpiece. It was a learning experience. But since I never wanted to be an actress it wasn’t devastating for me that people generally weren’t too fond of me being in it. After all, it was good because these kinds of experiences make you stronger.”
As Coppola mentioned in the press release, the title was a sore point as well. “It was not meant to be part of a trilogy, but rather a coda to the first two films, and we wished it could be given a different title, one more appropriate,” Coppola wrote in a new introduction to The Godfather novel released last year. “Neither of us [Coppola or Puzo] had the power to insist on our title but in my mind, the film will always be called The Death of Michael Corleone.”
Over the years, Coppola has discussed the third film and how he would go back and change it given the chance. “There’s a cut I want to make that would be 14 minutes shorter,” Coppola told Deadline in an interview last year. “Usually, I go back and make them longer. This would be effective, and it makes the ending break your heart. Jim Gianopulos is the head of Paramount. An extremely nice man. And so what I want to say to them is if you allow me this, you won’t have to pay me.”
The director, now 81, also said he hoped the new cut would better serve his daughter.
“I want to show Sofia a new version, because she is so beautiful in it and so touching,” he told Deadline. “She wasn’t an actress. But she was the real thing, playing that 19-year-old Italian girl in love with her own cousin [played in the film by Andy Garcia]. Godfather III as The Death of Michael Corleone is doubly painful because at the end he doesn’t die, but he does worse than die. He loses everything he loves—and he lives. There are certain things in life that are worse than death.”
In the film, Sofia’s character, Mary Corleone, is shot and killed during an assassination attempt on her father’s life. It’s an especially tragic end, as Michael (Pacino) had previously sworn on his children’s lives to clean up his criminal ways. The Godfather Part III itself ends with a brief epilogue set in at an undetermined time in the future in which Michael dies alone, in a sequence that recalls how his father, Don Vito Corleone, died in the original film.
“I believe if I do this new cut that her performance will be very touching as a little 19-year-old girl. That’s one of the things that can be so improved,” Coppola said last year, before adding, “I believe that in a new version of The Death of Michael Corleone, Sofia’s performance will vindicate her.” Sounds like Coppola is finally ready to settle all family business, once and for all.
