So it turns out...

Francis Ford Coppola has been tinkering with "The Godfather, Part III" from the very beginning!

If you didn't see the movie in theaters in 1990/1991, you haven't seen the original theatrical version. That original theatrical version ran 161 minutes, a mere five minutes longer than the supposedly “tighter, better-flowing” "The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone."

When the movie was released on VHS, it was billed as "the Final Director's Cut" and ran 170 minutes with nine extra minutes of material added back in. This is the version of Godfather III you've been watching ever since, so it’s hard to tell what the added material may have been.

So first, Coppola was putting material into the movie and now, he’s taking material out and calling it a “director’s cut.”

1991 original VHS release:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/20a9c0968d76e49561869d1447ff1cca/d42284c2591213c1-39/s400x600/0d2dfae9287d7c0686153f6c166ad8fcd473ee27.jpg

199? laserdisc release (you can barely see in this image that it boasts the “Final Director’s Cut” notation):
https://64.media.tumblr.com/c50862d44e8e7f647c73ff14ad639651/d42284c2591213c1-21/s2048x3072/c647dcf9449a09d10506bb3d7cb99a2916e7a53e.jpg

1997 widescreen VHS release for the first Godfather’s 25th anniversary:
https://64.media.tumblr.com/2f3a2d4d4ed84e7e271ffe2c627654be/d42284c2591213c1-21/s400x600/79b8de37ca4497e1022b7989362ac486097443f2.jpg

It wasn’t until the movie came to DVD that Godfather III wasn’t billed as “the final director’s cut.” But Coppola never talks about any of this, does he?