10 Famous Movie Endings That Had Radical Last Minute Changes

3. Everybody Dies In Dawn Of The Dead

There seems to be something about zombie movies and people not making up their minds. They get reanimated almost as often as their ghoulish antagonists, a tradition that stretches all the way back to George Romero's incredibly influential Dawn Of The Dead, the follow up to the director's iconic prototype for the modern zombie movie, Night Of The Living Dead. That first film broke new ground in a lot of ways, managing to neatly sidestep the cheesiness of other fifties B-movies by ending things in a significantly grim way as Ben - the film's black hero - being gunned down by other survivors of the zombie attack, having been the only one to scrape by in a country house previously full of people. Whether or not this was a conscious piece of political commentary, it was undoubtedly ballsy to finish a film on as grim an image as the hero being lifted up on sickles and thrown on a pile of flaming bodies. Romero went for a similar tone for the end of his next film, Dawn Of The Dead, which expanded the scope from a small building to an entire shopping mall a group of rag-tag survivors decide to barricade themselves in against the cannibalistic hordes outside. Despite the goofy music and scene where somebody gets killed whilst using a heart rate machine, most of the film was pretty downbeat, as each member of the group slowly succumbed either to zombie bites or the insanity that slowly spreads through somebody who spends more than half an hour in a shopping centre. So the film was, obviously, supposed to end with the last remaining survivors killing themselves - Kevin Foree's Peter shooting himself in the face, followed by Gayleen Ross's Francine sticking her bonce into some spinning helicopter rotors. Part of the way into filming Romero seemed to realise this was a step too far for a film which had previously been dealing with Hare Krishna zombies stumbling into water fountains, and so at the last minute Peter decides to karate chop all the monsters instead of killing himself, bundling Francine into the chopper and flying off into an uncertain - but slightly less hopeless - future.