10 Alternate Endings To 2021 Movies You Almost Saw
2. Jeff & Goodyear Find Humans - Finch
If you were paying attention to the production of the Tom Hanks-starring post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama Finch, you might've been expecting to see a larger ensemble cast, namely Samira Wiley, Skeet Ulrich, and Laura Harrier, who were counted among the film's cast right up until its release.
That's because the three were supposed to appear as benevolent humans who meet robot Jeff (Caleb Landry Jones) and dog Goodyear (Seamus) following the death of their human companion Finch (Hanks) at the end of the story.
But director Miguel Sapochnik made the painful decision to cut this epilogue in order to focus the emotional core of the story on Finch's demise from an unspecified illness (implied to be radiation sickness), before Jeff and Goodyear discover evidence of human survivors and set off in pursuit of them.
Sapochnik said:
"There is a whole section that ended up on the cutting room floor that was about Jeff finally coming into contact with human beings and how they were not what he expected and certainly not what his father, Finch, had prepared him for. But when we got to post, we were in the edit, there was a point where I realised that I knew we had reached the end of the movie but we still had more story to tell.
I tried as much as I could to see if we could accommodate it, but it was a bigger story than we had time to tell in the time we had left to tell it. At some point we just had to make a choice. To me, I believe the notion of kill your darlings. I loved it. I really liked what we did. It had great actors in it. It had Samira Wiley, it had my wife Alexis Raben, we had Skeet Ulrich, we had a load of people in it. And it was really good. It wasn't the right ending for this chapter of this story. We had to let it go."
It's a shame for the actors that their parts never made it to the screen, and that Apple so far hasn't made the scenes available to view, but as Sapochnik says, sometimes you just have to kill your darlings.
The final ending certainly doesn't feel incomplete or as if anything vital was cleaved away, so he may have made the right call - but we can't know for sure without seeing the footage.