10 Movie Endings You Can No Longer See

Every good story needs a good ending, and if you trip up when bowing out you can be rest assured that people will remember that more than anything else you accomplished. As a result, endings in film are stressed over; often changing between script and production, on set, or after showing a group of people and asking them: “what do you think?”

The majority of the films on this list land in the final camp, with test audiences being responsible for putting their production staff or editing room back to work in order to figure out an alternative solution.

In doing so though, footage that once was played in front of an audience is either destroyed or locked away and never seen again. In the day and age of the Blu-Ray extra, studios will hold onto whatever they can to sell as additional features to hungry fans. That's not so much the case with older films however and, over time, original cuts can be impossible to track down - a pressing matter in a time where digital media preservation is a genuine concern.

Whatever the reason though, the films we’re talking about today have gone through changes that very few people can say they’ve seen both sides of.

Whilst everyone remembers The Blair Witch Project as the film that popularised the “found footage” idea, one thing that remains unappreciated is the ambiguity of its ending. Whilst its sequel largely forewent the shaky camera of the original, director Joe Berlinger intended to keep a similar tone in Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2.

After visiting the site of the original mysteries, a teenage group of ragtag Blair Witch fans find themselves accused of murdering a group of tourists that they had encountered on their way. The planned conclusion saw the main cast plead not guilty but a found video tape shows otherwise, twisting the narrative that the film had shown us, leaving the audience questioning the truth. Furthermore, the film was given a purposeful linear narrative to give the story a "descent into madness" feeling.

After Berlinger showed his film to the studio however, it seems as though they went about changing just as much they could muster. In order to make it more "contemporary" they requested more violence in the final act, and additional shots were filmed that sapped the intended ambiguity of the tourists' deaths. The studio also cut the film’s final scene into pieces and interspersed it throughout the story, changing the film’s linear descent into… well, a mess.

Thankfully, hardcore Blair Witch fans have done the best they can to restore Berlinger’s vision to decent results… but hindsight editing can’t help the film’s critical admonishment.