The Stepford Wives (found preview cut of black comedy sci-fi film; 2003)

Poster for the film.

Status: Found

Date found: 01 Aug 2023

Found by: ToastWoomy (Part 1), Rowster64 (Part 2) and YoshiKiller2S (release)

The Stepford Wives is a 2004 American black comedy science fiction film starring Nicole Kidman and was directed by Frank Oz. The movie was the second feature-length adaptation of the 1972 Ira Levin novel of the same name. The film received mostly negative reviews from critics and was a box office bomb, grossing $103 million worldwide on a $90–100 million budget, however, in recent years the film has received a small cult following.

Preview Cut

Like most films, The Stepford Wives had various preview screenings to test how audiences would respond/react to the movie before release. Many of these test screenings would feature earlier/unfinished cuts that would later be edited down or expanded depending on the screening results. The Stepford Wives had roughly 20 minutes cut from its preview screening with many of these scenes being plot-heavy.

Availability

Sometime in September 2003, one of the test screenings for The Stepford Wives was illegally filmed by the piracy group "TUN" (pronounced "Tee You N"). The bootleg was later split into 2 parts and uploaded to file-sharing applications on the day of the film's official release. However, the recording was quickly replaced by a higher-quality bootleg of the final release two days later.

After this, the bootleg recording fell into obscurity, with the earliest mentions of it existing being from late 2005.^[1] From then on it only circulated through private workprint collectors.

In July 2022, both parts of The Stepford Wives bootleg were found by users ToastWoomy and Rowster64 respectively, however, they were mainly kept private. It wasn't until August 1st, 2023 when Lost Media Wiki user YoshiKiller2S was permitted to release the full bootleg from one of the parties involved.^[2]