10 Times Movies Panicked And CHANGED THE ENDING Just Before Release
The new Ant-Man retooled its ending barely a month before release. Wild.
It can't be overstated just how much of a miracle even the worst movie is.
Making films is hard, and with hundreds or even thousands of people pooling their talents on projects costing potentially hundreds of millions of dollars, it's little surprise that studios will make major changes late in the game to protect their investment.
Even so, it's shocking just how late these adjustments can happen, with producers and executives making drastic changes to mega-budget movies even mere weeks before release.
In some cases this might simply be cutting a final scene that test audiences hated, but in more extreme instances it requires summoning key cast members back for a round of quick-and-dirty reshoots to "save" the movie.
With hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, it makes sense to make changes if test audiences tell you things aren't working, but to make them so close to release certainly suggests a production that probably could've been better-managed.
For many of these movies things thankfully worked out for the best, though some clearly suffered from rushing to meet a concrete, immovable release date...
10. The Empire Strikes Back
Let's kick things off with an especially outrageous example, given that Empire Strikes Back was actually already in a small number of cinemas when George Lucas made some literally last-minute changes to the blockbuster sequel.
Empire opened on limited release on May 21, 1980, and shortly after this, Lucas made the executive call to go back into production to complete additional shots for the ending before it went into wide release less than a month later.
You'll recall that the film ends with Luke (Mark Hamill) and Leia (Carrie Fisher) watching as Lando (Billy Dee Williams) and Chewbacca (Peter Mayhew) depart on the Millennium Falcon to find Han (Harrison Ford).
But the original version of the scene, which was frantically edited to meet that May 21 date, failed to make it clear which ships the various heroes were in.
And so, Lucas called up Industrial Light and Magic to hastily create a number of new effects shots showing the exteriors of the Millennium Falcon and the Rebel fleet, ensuring audiences knew precisely who was where.
Thankfully, this being decades before everybody had the Internet in their pocket, Lucas was able to do this without stirring up discontent amid the fanbase.