10 Movie Adaptations That Changed The Ending For The Better

6. Planet of the Apes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPfcim_p38w It's one of the best-known twist endings of all time, but the reveal at the end of Planet of the Apes - that Chuck Heston is on Earth all along - was not in the original French novel. In the novel, the protagonists escape to Earth, but it's 700 years in the future, and Apes are now the rulers. The astronauts promptly decide to exit, going back to space, where they write their terrifying ordeal down and send it out into space. What's hilarious is that a couple find it, but they're an advanced Simian couple who sardonically refuse to believe that a human wrote it because it's too well-written. Fun though this was, The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling made a truly brilliant contribution to the film's script with that twist ending that helped cement it as a classic of science-fiction cinema. It's pretty hard to deny that Serling's ending has a whole load more impact than the novel's, which on the screen would have seemed really damn goofy.