
Fans of Frank Capra’s Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, were aghast after Amazon Prime quietly gutted key scenes from the iconic film. The New York Post reported that the 1946 movie is missing one of its most famous moments on the streaming platform: the pivotal sequence in which protagonist George Bailey, played by James Stewart, sees what life would have been like without him and regains his desire to live. The botched version—now 22 minutes shorter than the original 130-minute film—jarringly jumps from Bailey contemplating ending his own life to rejoicing at being alive. According to the Post, the missing scene is the result of the film’s notoriously messy copyright history. While It’s a Wonderful Life entered the public domain in 1974, its musical score and the original short story upon which it’s based, The Greatest Gift, remain copyrighted, prompting altered, truncated versions of the film as a workaround. “Sacrilege. Damn streamers,” one X user wrote about the edited version.


















