10 Famous Movie Endings That Had Radical Last Minute Changes

4. World War Z, Only Without The World War

We don't know if troubled productions are more common nowadays or if we're just more aware of them, thanks to a combination of the insane hype machine that starts off as soon as a movie gets announced and the endless rumours and on-set reports that get written up on the countless online film sites (present company excluded, we're mint). Regardless of why they seem to becoming more prevalent, we know for a fact that World War Z is one of the more complicated situations in recent blockbuster filmmaking, with reshoots and rewrites occurring almost the entire way through its production. Perhaps most infamously, the entire third act of the movie was filmed, scrapped, and completely redone, with help from Prometheus and Star Trek Into Darkness screenwriter Damon Lindelof. Originally director Marc Forster had planned for World War Z to live up to its name with a huge, climactic battle between a load of soldiers and an army of the undead in Russia, to be filmed in Budapest. That was scuppered somewhat when the local government seized a huge shipment of prop guns they mistook for an actual illegal arms shipment, not helped by the crew failing to get the proper papers and flying them there on a private plane. This delay in shooting meant that Forster didn't end up with enough footage to actually piece together this big blockbuster ending. Between that and the studio getting a little uncomfortable about the political undertones of Americans firing guns all over Red Square, this necessitated a totally new - and significantly cheaper, so as not to go over budget - ending to be filmed. Lindelof came up with the fantastically tense chase across the WHO facility to grab what could be the cure for the zombie plague from a lab that's crawling with the undead. And no zombie Putin. Sadly.