So, ultimately, the Special Editions ended up doing the opposite of what Lucas intended them to. He set out to finish a project that he felt like he’d abandoned and instead turned his trilogy into a shapeshifting monstrosity perpetually in flux. There were always subtle revisions in previous re-releases (like assigning the episode number and subtitle to what became A New Hope in 1981), but following the Special Editions, Star Wars became less of a movie series and more of a shambolic mish-mash of confounding revisions. The ’90s kids who grew up loving the theatrical Special Editions can’t even watch those versions (the ones with some CGI additions but zero Hayden Christensen ghosts) anymore, except for on old VHS tapes.
The financial success of the Special Editions had an impact beyond Lucasfilm, too, leading studios to greenlight alternate cut vanity projects that, arguably, would never have been given a wide release prior to Lucas’ gamble.
In 1998, Universal released a new cut of Touch of Evil, allegedly in keeping with Orson Welles’ original vision. In 2001, Lucas’ friend and mentor Francis Ford Coppola released Apocalypse Now Redux, which crammed the movie full of deleted scenes that mostly involved ghost sex. Like Lucas, Coppola wasn’t done with the movie, releasing Apocalypse Now: Final Cut in 2019. And in 2000, there was The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen, which was spearheaded not by director William Friedkin but by screenwriter William Peter Blatty. The new cut tacked on a happy ending and added the infamous “spider-walk” scene, which was originally removed for technical reasons but was improved by, you guessed it, digital technology.