alt Hacker NewsI wonder if they'll show the director's cut?
I was in high school when the movie came out, and we were on a 6 week road trip all over the USA that summer, so I couldn't see the movie. Those days they also published books for a lot of the popular movies (sold at gas stations), so I bought and read the book. I only got to see the movie a month or 2 after release when we were back home in Baton Rouge. The book was the director's cut, and to this day I seem to remember that the version of the movie I saw also had that ending (my brain playing tricks on me). There's also the scene where they cut open his skull to put his cpu in learning mode in the gas station. I don't know why they cut that, it works so well with John asking "are we learning yet" in a next scene.
My understanding is that it's not so much that the novelisation is of the director's cut, but that the people writing them are typically working from (at best) the shooting script (and at worst, an earlier version of the script). The book needs to come out at around the same time as the movie, and there simply isn't enough time to re-edit it and print it after the final editing decisions are made. You'll frequently find sections in the book version that only end up on-screen as a director's cut or in deleted scenes, and sometimes just never at all.