Amazon Prime is facing backlash for “butchering” the 1946 Christmas classic “It’s A Wonderful Life” by editing out a pivotal scene.
Directed by Frank Capra, the film stars Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, a selfless man in the fictional town of Bedford Falls. On Christmas Eve, George contemplates suicide due to looming financial ruin at the hands of the town’s main antagonist, greedy business tycoon Henry Potter.
George’s guardian angel, Clarence, then intervenes by showing him an alternate reality where he never existed, highlighting the positive impact of his life. The film, inspired by Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” is widely regarded as one of the best Christmas movies of all time.
In recent weeks, viewers have taken notice of an edited version of the film available on Amazon Prime Video, prompting fierce backlash over editing. This version omits a significant portion of the narrative, specifically the “Pottersville” sequence.
In the original film, this segment depicts the dystopian alternate world without George, where Bedford Falls becomes Pottersville, a grim place marked by poverty, vice, and despair. The angel Clarence guides George through this vision, showing how his absence affects his family, friends, and community.
This includes his brother drowning as a child, his uncle’s institutionalization, and the town falling under the control of Potter. The roughly 20-minute, is central to the plot, as it leads to George’s realization of his life’s value and his decision to embrace it.
The abridged edition removes this entire alternate reality segment, shortening the film from its original runtime of approximately 130 minutes to around 110 minutes. Without it, the story jumps from George’s moment of crisis to his sudden change of heart, significantly altering the film’s emotional depth.
Social media users and longtime fans of the film have voiced their disgust and bewilderment with the decision. “I kid you not, Amazon Prime is running a version of this movie with this entire sequence removed—completely edited out—to make it less ‘dark.’ Sacrilege. Damn streamers,” said one popular film account on X.
Others have described the cut as an “abomination” or “sacrilege.”
Editing out the Pottersville sequence as not a creative decision by Amazon, as the primary reason for abridged versions traces back to the film’s complicated copyright history.
The movie itself fell into the public domain in 1975 due to a failure to renew its copyright, but the Pottersville alternate-reality storyline is directly adapted from the short story “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern, whose copyright was properly maintained and remains protected (now by Paramount through various acquisitions).
Distributors creating “legal” public-domain versions avoided potential infringement claims by excising elements too closely tied to the copyrighted source material, resulting in these truncated edits that preserve most of the film but gut its pivotal climax. Some releases also replaced or altered the original score for similar copyright reasons, though the Pottersville cut is the most noticeable and controversial change.
Full, uncut versions licensed from Paramount include the complete sequence.
