The Godfather Part III

Coppola and Mario Puzo wanted to call this The Death of Michael Corleone; Paramount refused. Two absences shaped it. Robert Duvall asked for pay matching Pacino and did not return, so Tom Hagen was declared dead before the story opens and George Hamilton plays a new lawyer instead. Winona Ryder, cast as Mary, left a few weeks in and the part passed to Sofia Coppola. Both changes altered which relationships the picture rests on. The screenplay went through twelve rewrites and the ending was not settled until two months before the December 1990 opening. The financial strand rests on real events: Pope John Paul I’s death in 1978 and the Banco Ambrosiano collapse across 1981 and 1982. Viewers who do not know those follow the family fine but can lose the banking thread. The climax unfolds at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo during Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Seven Academy Award nominations came in, none converted. Which cut you watch matters. Coppola’s 2020 recut moves the Vatican Bank meeting from around the fortieth minute to the opening, drops the Lake Tahoe flashback, and no longer shows Michael’s death, closing on a Sicilian saying. A good fit if you want Michael’s remorse and the Vatican strand, cast changes and all. Not for a viewer coming to see the Corleone family at its height.