Red Dragon – Manhunter Edition
by CBB
Can a movie with an incredible cast like this be a failure? Indeed it can, if is not about what it is supposed to be about. This fanedit gets rid of a bunch of Hannibal Lecter scenes to turn the focus back on Francis Dolarhyde and Will Graham. Through seamless branching it also comes with 2 very different endings.
member ratings: 
(16 votes, average: 9.31 out of 10, rated)
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original film name: Red Dragon
new film name : Red Dragon – Manhunter Edition
film studio name : MGM
edit crew name : CBB
Date Original Film Was Released : 2002
Date Edit Was Released : April, 2009
Original Runtime : 124 min
New Runtime :104 min / 99 min
Amount of time Cut/Added : 20 / 25 minutes cut
Fanedit details:
Bratt Ratner was for sure not the no.1 choice for this project, but he tried his very best and got an awesome cast and great characters to work with: Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter, Edward Norton as Will Graham, Ralph Fiennes as Francis “the Tooth Fairy” Dolarhyde, Emily Watson as Reba McClane and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Freddy Lounds.
The rights for all Hannibal Lecter movies belong since “Hannibal” to Dino De Laurentiis and he decided to milk that cow for whatever it takes (and even gave us the atrocious “Hannibal Rising”, for which he forced Thomas Harris to write the novel and screenplay). De Laurentiis thought that what the audience wanted most of all is to see more Hannibal Lecter, so Ted Tally added additional scenes to the script including him.
But Hannibal Lecter as supporting character has the “Doc Holiday” effect (“Doc Holiday” is a supporting character in the Wyatt Earp story and tends to steal the entire show, because he is so charismatic). Remember: 18 minutes screentime in “Silence Of The Lambs” were enough to earn him the well deserved academy award for best actor in a LEADING role.
So what the additional Hannibal scenes really do is to take away from the main story about the investiagtion of the “tooth fairy” murders. This entire part becomes incredibly flat and all the audience does is to wait for more Hannibal scenes, which actually makes the movie lame to watch.
What I did was to get rid of all the unneeded Hannibal scenes to take the focus away from him, starting with the 10 minutes intro, where he was caught and continuing with scenes, where he was teasing Chilton.
The result is a totally different movie, although my changes were actually minor. I think this version of Red Dragon is way more in the spirit of the original book and makes all characters (including Hannibal) appear with a lot more impact. Especially the great performance of Ralph Fiennes profits from the changes.
Another thing that always bothered me in both movies (Red Dragon and Manhunter) is the original book ending, which I never liked. But I was not sure that the fanedit audience would prefer a new ending without a true showdown (and with the investigation actually not leading to the true defeat of the tooth fairy), so I created 2 versions, one with the original ending and one with a very different ending, which I like a lot better.
Version 1 is called FOREHEAD and version 2 is called FACE. Let’s see if you can figure out why that is. 
To make it possible to have 2 different endings and still a good image quality on a SL DVD, I used seamless branching to present the movie versions. The breaking point is easily spottable and the break can be a tad long, depending on the DVD player, still it works rather well.
The changes:
- recolored the entire movie to a less reddish and more cold tone.
- cut Hannibal beginning
- moved Dolarhyde residence scene to an earlier point (to introduce the tooth fairy earlier to the audience)
- cut starting credits
- cut first Hannibal visit finale
- cut Hannibal cell removing books
- cut Hannibal gets soup scene
- cut Hannibal cheering to Chilton
face finale:
- cut entire Dolarhyde showdown scene
- cut Hannibal mentioning Dolarhyde showdown scene
- cut Chilton announcing Clarice to Hannibal
Trailer:
DVD Details:
- 104/99 minutes Single Layer NTSC 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with AC3-5.1 audio
- LANGUAGES : ENGLISH (5.1), GERMAN (2.0)
- SUBTITLES : ENGLISH (selectable)
- MENUS : animated with sound
- SCENE SELECTION : yes
- EXTRAS: 6 Deleted Scenes, Trailer, CBB Overview for all 34 fanedits, Cover & Disc Art : yes, on DVD-Rom part
Fanedit history and making:
When my “First Contact” edit did not work out the way I intended it, I switched to this one. The idea for this fanedit is rather old, but I never got around to actually do it.
This fanedit also marks my complete swtich to Sony Vegas as video editor, because I am sick and tired of the Ulead Media Studio Pro 8.0 bugs. The fanedit was created with Ulead, all deleted scenes, menus and the trailer were created with Vegas. Byebye Ulead. I will never return.
Editing the movie was quite easy, except for the earlier introduction of Francis Dolarhyde and the additional ending. Encoding gave me a hard time because Ulead did not always add interlacing to the progressive source, which I could not get rid off completely (and I tried many times with many different settings, filters and programs) until I switched to the original mpg source (which Ulead can handle very well).
Hardware and software information:
Hardware:
- Windows XP computer
- with an AMD phenom II 940 quadcore cpu
- and 4 GB of RAM on an ASUS board
Software:
- Ulead Media Studio Pro 8.0 (fanedit editing)
- Vegas Video 7.0 (extras editing, 5.1 audio creation)
- Cinema Craft Encoder (encoding to mpg)
- Virtual Dub (frameserving, resizing, recloring)
- Adobe Audition 1.5 (music normalization, additonal music track creation)
- Pro Show Producer (start and end credits creation)
- Jasc Paint Shop Pro (transparent stills creation for menus, correcting stills for end credits, cover and disc art)
- PhotoZoom Pro2 (pro enlarging of images for cover art and menus)
- DVD Lab Pro 1.52 (DVD authoring)
- Cyberlink Power DVD (previewing)
- Irfan View (image resizing)
- PGCDemux (to get the audio and video sources from the original DVD structure)
- AnyDVD (DVD ripper)
- DGPulldown (to change 25fps to 29.97fps)
- TMPGxpress (encoding the extras video)
- ffmepggui (converting the extras, German and menu audio files to ac-3 2.0)
- Auto GK (to get an avi to create the subtitles)
- Subrip (to rip the subtitles from the DVD)
- Subtitle Workshop (to load and alter the original subtitles)
Time needed for the edition:
editing: 3 days, extras: 1 day, trailer: 1 day, DVD menus: 2 days, quality checking and further corrections: 20 days.
persons involved: boon
awards:
winner of the true fanedit contest for april 2009:
Buy the original DVD and support FANEDIT.ORG by shopping through one of the Amazon widgets:
Images:
cover art by boon23 (download here):
Disclaimer: You must own the original movie before downloading any FanEdited movie. We here at FanEdit.org respect the company’s copyrights, and don’t want to infringe on any company’s rights. Thank you, FE!
Maybe downloadable from Fanedit.info through Rapidshare and bittorrent (enter and download at your own risk and responsibility)
Thanks for the effort. Will d/l this evening. Big fan of this movie series (Manhunter is a favorite). As a side note, I consider myself artistic and creative, and want to learn how to fanedit. Are there any written guides, and what programs are recommended?
There are some edits on here where the picture or things int he picture are edited/altered. How is that done (non-professionally)?
I always wanted to learn to do a fanedit of Manhunter, but Leonenut beat me to it (and he did a great job IMO).
Review by saltyron — April 14, 2009 @ 11:11 pm
Ha Ha, already wrote this once but forgot to submit the comment DUH! Ok This is one of the best edits I have seen this year, as usual your seemless video makes it hard to remember where the scenes have been deleted, I see what you mean now about the Doc Holliday syndrome, yes Hannibal does not take over this version, which makes it a much stronger story, with the villian looking more sinister.And Edward
Norton seamingly playing a better part, almost as though you had hired him to redo the scenes HA, but seriously this is another amazing watching experiece from Boon and I would highly recommend it.
Story great, video quality superb, audio also great. What can I rate it but 10/10. Well done Boon great edit.
Review by searcher — April 15, 2009 @ 4:50 pm
Although this one hasn’t gotten too much attention yet, I very much hope this will change soon. This is some of Boon’s best and most delicate work and perfectly demonstrates his “less is more” mantra.
The edit itself is not intricate, but the cuts were all very well chosen. Simple, but they alter the experience of the movie greatly. This is easily evidenced by the included deleted scenes reel. He saw the better movie within and drew it out with a few deft strokes. How’s that for pretentious? But this is what I was hoping I’d see from Boon again, an edit where the final project was truly a classic piece and a worthy showcase for his skills.
Very well done. Highly recommended. Great job. 9 of 10 easy.
And saltyron, there are guides of all kinds in the forum.
Review by jokersmailbag — April 29, 2009 @ 8:50 am
Decent fanedit, bad movie ;-/ Even with all the stuff removed, Lecter still hijacks the whole thing – to many mediocra actors and not enough Francis Dolarhyde. He’s the main character and what makes “Red Dragon” such a great novel, yet he hardly ever gets a closeup. Pity, the actor isn’t that bad.
As your edit is now, it’s almost a “Manhunter” Reloaded. Have you considered opening the movie with the long shot as we move towards F.D.’s old house and see him bodybuilding? The music is gorgeously creepy and sets a wholly different mood for the opening.
I’d also try to cut Will’s opening bla-bla in the Leeds’(?) home to a minimum, as it only distracts from getting to know the character.
Review by maxie09 — May 15, 2009 @ 4:05 am
thanks for all the great comments so far.
maxie09: yes, I have indeed considered starting the movie with the Dolarhyde house scene, but it does not work that way. Francis simply does not have enough scenes and it would take too long, until he has his next one. I already split the Dolarhyde house scene to stretch that and give him more scenes.
As for Will’s crime talk… it’s unfortunately necessary, so the audience can adapt to what and how he thinking. The approach of this movie to Will Graham is to make him more of the analytic guy and take away from his incredible ability to FEEL what goes on in a serial killer, which was one of the thriving forces in the book and the original Manhunter movie.
Review by boon23 — May 15, 2009 @ 5:29 am
Just finished watching it. It’s certainly a great improvement – removing some Lecter scenes really helped, though I think the “Dinner & a Movie” scene could be cut entirely (and the reference to it before it happens).
As for the two endings:
The “Face” ending just kind of … stops without a good conclusion, in my opinion. The “Forehead” ending is fine, but …
WHY THE HELL did you remove the “Clarice” reference from the “Face” version, but not the “Forehead” version? Please, please, PLEASE do a Version 2 where you remove this, or I may be forced to do my own “Red Dragon” edit
Review by ChainsawAsh — May 19, 2009 @ 5:59 am
To my very surprise this is really a good movie now. What an incredible difference to the lame original. 10 stars. Kudos.
Review by xGrind — September 2, 2009 @ 9:52 am
Not on the same level as SOTL, but in this version way before Hannibal and Hannibal Rising. You saved this one, CBB. Thank you.
Review by r8s8fr8 — November 27, 2009 @ 8:38 pm