• Fanedit Title: The Many Saints of Newark - The Baliscon Cut

• Original Movie Title: The Many Saints of Newark 

• Original Release Date:  October 1, 2021

• Original Runtime: 2 Hours and 3 Minutes

• Fanedit Release Date: January 14, 2025

• Fanedit Running Time: 1 Hour and 58 Minutes

• Time Cut: 7 Minutes

• Time Added: 5 Minutes

• Synopsis: As rival gangsters begin to rise up and challenge the all-powerful DiMeo crime family's hold over the increasingly race-torn Newark, a young Tony Soprano is influenced by his uncle to become a all-powerful mob boss.

• Intention and Change List:  Like the majority of the people on Earth, I quite enjoy The Sopranos. Like many of those fans, I did not love the prequel film, The Many Saints of Newark. I wanted to clean the film up a bit. I think the people involved in the film had the best intentions, but I'd rewatch the whole series again before deciding to watch the movie. The film feels unfocused, lacking the poignancy of most Sopranos episodes.

Ultimately, I would rather seen a mini series that better fleshes out the ideas that David Chase and Alan Taylor sought to explore in this film. Harold's character could have had more room to breathe, and the other, more familiar side characters could be developed beyond their recognizable catch phrases or mannerisms.

Still, I felt at though there was enough salvageable material in the film to experiment with. My main gripe is that after fourteen years since The Sopranos finale, I don't think anyone signed to watch a story about Harold McBrayer. I didn't cut him from the film entirely because his actions still inherently tie into Dickie's story, but out of the seven minutes I cut from the film, much of that was made up of Harold's solo scenes. At the end of the day, this film should belong to Dickie and especially Tony. Michael Gandolfini deciding to step into his late father's shoes to portray Tony Soprano was my primary draw to watch the film, and him being sidelined was incredibly disappointing.

I added five minutes of deleted scenes back into the edit, each of which features Tony interacting more with his family and Dickie. Hopefully this helps to redirect more focus onto his character. Additionally, some of the footage I cut includes Dickie being referred to as the Saint of Newark, one of Junior's throwback lines, and Giuseppina revealing to Dickie who she had an affair with. Him learning that she was with Harold plays little part in the rest of the film, so I figured that he could lash out and murder her without even needing to know who else she had been intimate with.

Visually, I tried to adjust the picture quality. It's kind of amazing that the original show elevated the quality offered by television, and yet this new movie suffers from looking like a made-for-streaming film. I increased the contrast and saturation, along with adding film grain, hoping that the final edit is more visually entertaining than the greyed out, low contrast