10 Movie Endings You Can No Longer See
6. Brazil
According to Universal, who were set to handle the US release of Terry Gilliam's Brazil, the reactions from international and European audiences to the dystopian black comedy were unsatisfactory.
Brazil's lead character Sam, who has spent the film struggling against a bureaucracy that has pinned a string of terrorist attacks on him, ends the story thinking that he's evaded his captors and avoided torture. However, it's all revealed to be an illusion in his head as he stares, smiling madly into the middle distance and humming to himself in a glass cell.
Studio head Sid Sheinberg demanded that the film be given a happier ending, cutting around the story and reusing footage where possible so that love interest Jill survives and Jack makes it out of the city to start a new life. Even the film's villain Tuttle is implied to have been offed by... supernatural paperwork?
But the egg landed firmly on the face of Universal when, having screened his version to critics in secret, Gilliam’s Brazil won a plethora of awards. It forced the studio’s hand and they released it in its original edited format.
Ergo, the version of this film that you would struggle to see today is in fact the Sid Sheinberg cut. It did appear on Criterion DVD, and LaserDisc of all things, but with technology moving forward and not always so well preserved it may be a matter of time before this version and its sappier ending goes from “hard to find” to totally lost.