10 Movies That Almost Had Much Better Endings
When the alternate ending was actually better.
As a rule, alternate endings don't make it into the film because they were a bit naff; a back-up idea that clearly didn't past muster with the creative types. Heck, just a couple of weeks ago we looked at 10 Great Movies Almost Ruined By Their Alternate Endings, which highlights just how bad some iron-clad classics could have turned out.
But that isn't always the case. Whether it's a director not understanding the source material, of a major lapse in judgement, some movies can leave their best ending on the cutting room floor (or, more contemporarily, the recycle bin), leaving us with a rather compromised movie.
One of the biggest problems tends to be test screenings. In the months leading up to release, small groups of the general public with little experience in film are shown rough cuts of movies and asked for their input. A shocking amount of stock is put in this process, with the director's creative drive sometimes completely overridden by negative results; many downbeat endings have become happy when the test screenings found it "too depressing".
Today we're going to take a look at ten alternate endings that would actually have been better than the ones we got, in some way actually improving their movies.