Godfather 3, Winona Ryder as Mary?

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What effect do you think her presence would have had on the film?

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Likely a net positive. Winona is a good actress and very attractive.

Michael's role was altered as well and Pacino was pretty terrible. The whole thing was a mess in many ways.

Andy Garcia was great, though.

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Andy Garcia was great, though.

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A little overboard on a few lines/exchanges, but overall I agree he was great and a positive for the film.

Definitely would have been an upgrade but the movie is just not in the same league as the first two.
G3 is like turkey bacon, not horrible, but if you're expecting bacon, you'll be disappointed.

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Michael's role was altered as well and Pacino was pretty terrible. The whole thing was a mess in many ways.

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No tom is what really killed the movie for me.

They shouldn't have cheapened out and not paid Robert Duvall.

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What effect do you think her presence would have had on the film?

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It might well have been positive, but here the thing: Godfather Part III was fricked for reasons more fundamental than Sophia Coppola's casting.

Coppola and Puzo requested six months to write the script; Paramount gave them six weeks, wanting to rush it for a holiday 1990 release. The movie's an iffy prospect creatively by definition, and then right off the bat the most important part, the script, is compromised thanks to greedy idiots.

Then you've got the absence of Tom Hagen, which is a huge blow to the movie. What happened was that pretty much the whole budget was blown to meet Pacino's salary, so there was nothing left for Duvall. Despite the rumors, it wasn't that Duvall made obscene demands -- when queried by James Lipton, he claimed he would have accepted half of what Pacino was getting, but that they offered him far less, which was insulting.

And on a more superficial level, the title Coppola and Puzo wanted to use, "The Death of Michael Corleone," made way more sense than what the studio made them call it for marketing purposes. A big part of the reason the movie rubs people the wrong way is because it claims to be the closing chapter in a trilogy, which the creators expressly wanted to avoid.

Which is why I think it's a miracle The Godfather Part III wasn't complete and total garbage. Coppola, despite the bad reputation this film gets, did a masterful job of adapting to Paramount's rigorous demands. He created a good (but by no means great) film that ended up getting awards love. The casting of his daughter Sofia was not what he wanted but he had no other choice because there were no other options after Winona Ryder backed out literally the day before shooting began.

Even with Sofia's performance, Godfather III was actually a very good movie. It's just that Godfather I and II were impossible standards to live up to. It also didn't help matters that Goodfellas came out three months earlier. A lot of movies would look bad if you compare it those three movies.