10 Alternate Endings To 2020 Movies You Almost Saw
1. Cassie Lives - Promising Young Woman
Promising Young Woman was one of 2020's most provocative films, and for damn good reason. It follows Cassie Thomas (Carey Mulligan), a woman who plans to avenge her best friend Nina, who committed suicide after being raped by a man named Alexander Monroe (Chris Lowell).
When Alexander is getting married, Cassie heads to his bachelor party while posing as a stripper, and after taking him upstairs and handcuffing him to the bed, prepares to mete out violent revenge.
However, Alexander manages to get the better of Cassie in the scuffle and ends up suffocating her with a pillow, with a friend (Max Greenfield) helping him burn Cassie's corpse the next morning.
Though it first appears that Alexander gets away with it, the film's final moments reveal that Cassie set a contingency plan in place in case something went wrong, leading to Alexander being arrested at his own wedding.
But writer-director Emerald Fennell agonised over the ending in the scripting stage, writing numerous endings which ultimately weren't used.
In one case the film ended with Alexander burning Cassie's body, but some financier hand-wringing prompted her to add the slightly less-bleak coda.
Another proposed ending saw Cassie simply murder all the men at the bachelor party as a "big, f**k you, cathartic ending," but Fennell felt it wasn't honest to the reality of a woman fighting a cabin full of drunk men.
But a draft of the script which found its way online reveals a more crowd-pleasing finale in which Cassie carves Nina's name into Alexander's chest, cuts off his penis, and then leaves with her life very much in tact. But again, Fennell felt that this wasn't an honest representation of the situation:
"It just seemed too easy to say that she would carve Nina’s name into his body and cut his dick off, and then walk out of the cabin in slow motion smoking a cigarette. I wish she could because I wish all of us could. But it's just not true."
As much as the film's ending has heavily divided audiences, the outcome for Cassie does sadly seem to be the more "realistic" of all the suggested endings.