10 Alternate Endings To 2021 Movies You Almost Saw

The Many Saints of Newark delivered an unnecessary yet entertaining prologue to hit TV show The Sopranos, presenting the formative circumstances which led Tony Soprano (Michael Gandolfini) into a life of crime.

The film ends with the assassination of Tony's mentor Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), the implication being that this was a pivotal event in his life and one which steered him towards an adulthood defined by law-breaking and ultra-violence.

As Tony stares into Dickie's casket, the iconic Sopranos theme plays and we cut to the credits.

Yet Sopranos creator David Chase originally wrote a more cutesy ending for the film which he ultimately decided against, feeling that it wasn't in step with the tone of the movie up to that point:

"In the alternate ending, the theme music from the show plays as young Tony struts down the street, in a very 'I'm going to be the boss gangster of the world' kind of way. I just didn't like it. And I didn't buy it. And even though I wrote it, it was my idea. I had to relieve everyone else of the stupidity of it... I thought, 'Tony's not getting into some f**king cool gang. He's going to become a killer. A criminal. An unhappy man."

It was definitely the right call - no self-respecting Sopranos fan would've preferred an ending which tried to make Tony's mapped-out future seem slick and cool. The vaguely haunting finale we ended up with, while still invoking the show's indelible theme, was much better.