10 Original Endings That Would Have Ruined Great Movies

The ending of a movie is arguably the most important part. Having sat down in a darkened room for up to three hours with a bunch of strangers, audiences want to leave the theatre in a mood that best sums up their experience. That's where the ending comes in: it has to leave you thinking about the movie for as long as possible, especially if the studio has any hope that you'll pick up the DVD at a later date.

And movie endings come in all shapes and sizes: happy, sad, bizarre, twisty. Some are even downright perfect. But sometimes the ending of a movie - perfect as it may seem - wasn't what the filmmakers originally intended. And that's usually because during some test screening, audiences wrote banal comments on their test cards, stating things like: "It was too depressing and I'm offended by the content", or "I'm an insufferable waste of life with no knowledge of the process but I think the ending was plain wrong".

A lot of good endings have been lost that way: studios have been scared into swapping them for lighter, happier affairs. But now and again, those infernal test audiences get it 100% right. That's the case for the 10 movie endings included here, anyway - rightfully abandoned and re-thought just in the nick of time.