10 More Movies That Almost Had Much Better Endings

Time travel has been done so often in movies that it can be difficult to find a new and unique way of presenting it within a story. In 2004, The Butterfly Effect had an interesting premise, in that Ashton Kutcher's Evan Treborn was able to project his conscience back in time to inhabit his younger self during blackouts, which he used to change the past in an attempt to make the present better for him and his friends.

It's a dark story, portraying heavy themes of abuse and suicide, and every time Evan went back to the past to change something specific, a different aspect of his life would suffer for it. He could save his friend from suicide, but in doing so he would send her brother down a darker path of abuse and ultimately death.

In the end, Evan accepted that there was nothing he could do in the past that could make life better for everyone, so he sacrificed his own happiness and removed himself from his friends' lives in order to make sure they had better ones. It's an interesting conclusion, but the director's cut features something much darker and far more shocking.

After coming to the harrowing realisation that the world was better off without him, Evan went back to being in the womb where he strangled himself with his own umbilical cord to prevent his curse from ever coming to life at all. It is bleak, certainly, and doesn't make for pleasant viewing, but it would have been a lot more powerful and memorable, even if a little traumatising.