Addressing fan questions in a Reddit AMA yesterday, Midsommar and Hereditary director Ari Aster said his next film will either be "a zonky nightmare comedy or a big, sickly domestic melodrama". But while we wait for that, there's actually much more Midsommar to come. In case you didn't think its current 147-minute running time gave it quite enough breathing room, Aster has "at least" another half an hour he's planning to add back in.
Some of the material missing from the theatrical cut, Aster reveals, was due to battles with the MPAA over the dreaded NC-17 rating. "Lots of back-and-forth with them," he says. "We had an NC-17 for weeks." So fans of Jack Reynor may be seeing (ahem) a lot more of him in future Midsommar iterations.
Aside from orgiastic shenanigans, we also know from previous interviews that Aster ended up chopping at least a couple of scenes that he was loathe to lose.
“There was a very big argument between Dani and Christian in the middle,” Aster told Gamespot before the film's release. “That was the only time that we see Dani fight back and argue with Christian, and that was a big debate in the edit room, about whether we keep that or lose that. If you told me that I would have cut that scene before we went into production, I would have told you that you were crazy.” He also told USA Today that several scenes were lost that gave a slower burn to Dani's mental deterioration: "there were a lot of scenes that helped illustrate she was losing her grip on her sanity."
As for when we'll see this three-hour cut, there are no specifics yet, but it seems likely that Aster is talking about a Blu-ray release later in the year.