10 Alternate Endings To 2021 Movies You Almost Saw

Luca is a refreshingly low-key, small-scale effort from Pixar, and its climax is fittingly designed within the same vein, unfolding amid the final leg of the Portorosso Cup - a race involving swimming, pasta eating, and cycling.

The ending boils down to the town of Portorosso learning to embrace sea monster Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and his similarly afflicted family, and that's that.

But the original climax was decidedly more bombastic and typical of what audiences have been reared to expect from big-budget studio animation, with Luca's best pal Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) turning into a kraken who Luca then attempts to protect. Director Enrico Casarosa said of the change:

"We had a big ending with a kraken, Alberto turning into a kraken magically and Luca was going to protect him and defend him. And we realised that we want to tell a smaller kid-like movie world here, so the monster movie ending – which was very much about the two factions, very much about two worlds against each other – that might work with the Romeo and Juliet version of the story, but it didn't really work for the one that we more and more fell in love with."

It's tough to argue with the logic here - this was a more reined-in story that didn't need to go big in the final stretch, as interesting as it would've been to see Alberto as a huge kraken.