'Red, White & Royal Blue' Director Says 3-Hour Cut Doesn't Exist

Sorry, Red, White & Royal Blue fans, it turns out there’s not a three-hour cut of the movie after all.

Director Matthew López accidentally caused a stir earlier this week when he mentioned to US Magazine that the first cut he watched of the popular adaptation had a much longer run time than the final, which clocked in at just under two hours.

But what people failed to realize—even though this same misunderstanding has happened with other popular films in the past—is that a lengthy runtime is common in a very first cut of a film, and doesn’t actually mean there is an extra hour of usable movie.

“What I said to somebody…was the assembly of this film was about 2 hours and 45 minutes,” López explained to Teen Vogue. “But an assembly of a film, anyone who’s ever worked on a movie will tell you, an assembly is not a cut. An assembly is quite literally everything that’s in the script that was shot, strung together in order.”

It’s common for a couple of scenes to get cut going from the assembly to the rough cut—that’s where the deleted scenes on the special features of movies come from. But a lot of the work is just trimming existing scenes and individual shots, so the pacing isn’t awkward and uncomfortably slow.

“There is no way on God’s green earth that anybody ever wants to see or ever should see the assembly of a film — to the point that not even my producers or the studio are allowed to see an assembly,” López added. “I hate to break everyone’s heart, but the first cut of the film that I turned into the studio was about 2 hours and 7 minutes long.”

He does acknowledge that there are a few deleted scenes, although it’s unclear if they will ever be released by Amazon. So fans of Red, White & Royal Blueare just going to have to make do with the film itself for now.