Stargate

The early pre-release screenings of the movie were disastrous. The percentage of the audience who liked the movie fell into the mid-30s, and executive producer Mario Kassar felt that the main problem was that the plot made zero sense. Producer Dean Devlin noted that Jaye Davidson's struggle with drugs and alcohol addiction negatively affected his performance as Ra, to the point where the audience didn't believe he was a genuine threat. The solution: change the Ra character into an alien inhabiting a human body, alter his dialogue, and subtitle it into information that presented a clearer storyline. When these changes were made, the subsequent test screenings produced an overwhelming majority of positive reviews, and this carried the movie into becoming one of the surprise hits of fall 1994.

The crew is using a satellite receiver when on the other world. A receiver needs a satellite in orbit to relay a signal. They could not have sent up a satellite. And they could not have been communicating with earth.

Special edition released on Laserdisc and US video substitutes alternate footage for some scenes and includes 9 minutes of additional material.

Edited into Horizon: Extreme Dinosaurs (2000)