10 Great Movies Almost Ruined By Their Alternate Endings

7. Terminator 2: Judgement Day

The Ending You Know: After The Terminator ended on a storm of inevitability, James Cameron returned with Judgement Day to try and cheer us up. Turns out the future isn't as set in stone as we thought, with the titular day of the machine uprising is totally preventable. The one downside? The Connor's must destroy their Austrian-sounding protector lest he be used as a model for the future machines, lowering him into a put of molten metal as he gives a final thumbs up... oh, now there's something in our eyes. The Ending We Almost Got: Just in case you didn't get that disaster was averted, an alternate ending set in the year 2027 showed it explicitly. Narrated by an unconvincingly aged Sarah Connor watching John and his daughter playing happily in the playground she saw nuked in the earlier film, we hear vague musings of hope in an attempt to mirror the original's more oblique final note. Why It Would Ruin The Film: With the T-1000 battle and heroic sacrifice, Terminator 2 has one of the most perfect endings out there, so why Cameron would want to tack on this emotionally manipulative finale is beyond us. Seeing John Connor, now a US Senator, feels particularly cheap, giving him an all-out happy ending we didn't need. On the plus side it would have stopped us getting the lacklustre sequels that followed.