The film was originally scheduled for a Christmas 1966 release, but was later delayed to spring 1967, then later October 1967.[111] The film's world premiere was on 2 April 1968,[112][113] at the Uptown Theater in Washington, D.C.,[114] with a 160-minute cut.[115] It opened the next day at the Loew's Capitol in New York and the following day at the Warner Hollywood Theatre in Los Angeles.[115] The original version was also shown in Boston.
Kubrick and editor Ray Lovejoy edited the film between 5 and 9 April 1968. Kubrick's rationale for trimming the film was to tighten the narrative. Reviews suggested the film suffered from its departure from traditional cinematic storytelling.[116] Kubrick said, "I didn't believe that the trims made a critical difference. ... The people who like it like it no matter what its length, and the same holds true for the people who hate it."[66] The cut footage is reported as being 19[117][118] or 17[119] minutes long. It includes scenes revealing details about life on Discovery: additional space walks, Bowman retrieving a spare part from an octagonal corridor, elements from the Poole murder sequence—including space-walk preparation and HAL turning off radio contact with Poole—and a close-up of Bowman picking up a slipper during his walk in the alien room.[66] Jerome Agel describes the cut scenes as comprising "Dawn of Man, Orion, Poole exercising in the centrifuge, and Poole's pod exiting from Discovery."[120] The new cut was approximately 139 minutes long.[2]
According to his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, Kubrick was adamant that the trims were never to be seen and had the negatives, which he had kept in his garage, burned shortly before his death. This was confirmed by former Kubrick assistant Leon Vitali: "I'll tell you right now, okay, on Clockwork Orange, The Shining, Barry Lyndon, some little parts of 2001, we had thousands of cans of negative outtakes and print, which we had stored in an area at his house where we worked out of, which he personally supervised the loading of it to a truck and then I went down to a big industrial waste lot and burned it. That's what he wanted."[121] However, in December 2010, Douglas Trumbull, the film's visual effects supervisor, announced that Warner Bros. had found 17 minutes of lost footage from the post-premiere cuts, "perfectly preserved", in a Kansas salt mine vault used by Warners for storage.[122][120][119] No plans have been announced for the rediscovered footage.[123]
The revised version was ready for the expansion of the roadshow release to four other US cities (Chicago, Denver, Detroit and Houston), on 10 April 1968, and internationally in five cities the following day,[120][124] where the shortened version was shown in 70mm format in the 2.21:1 aspect ratio and used a six-track stereo magnetic soundtrack.[120]
By the end of May, the film had opened in 22 cities in the United States and Canada and in another 36 in June.[125] The general release of the film in its 35 mm anamorphic format took place in autumn 1968 and used either a four-track magnetic stereo soundtrack or an optical monaural one.[126]
The original 70-millimetre release, like many Super Panavision 70 films of the era such as Grand Prix, was advertised as being in "Cinerama" in cinemas equipped with special projection optics and a deeply curved screen. In standard cinemas, the film was identified as a 70-millimetre production. The original release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70-millimetre Cinerama with six-track sound played continually for more than a year in several venues, and for 103 weeks in Los Angeles.[126]
As was typical of most films of the era released both as a "roadshow" (in Cinerama format in the case of 2001) and general release (in 70-millimetre in the case of 2001), the entrance music, intermission music (and intermission altogether), and postcredit exit music were cut from most prints of the latter version, although these have been restored to most DVD releases.[127][128]
