10 Risky Film Moments Directors Thought They'd Lose You

Nobody who has seen David Fincher's Se7en will ever forget its nauseating final showdown, where serial killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) delivers a box to Detective Mills (Brad Pitt) containing his pregnant wife's (Gwyneth Paltrow) severed head, before Mills guns Doe down in anger.

The bleak ending caused a major headache for Fincher, who along with Pitt had to fight tooth and nail against New Line Cinema to keep it in the movie.

During post-production, the studio felt that either the wife's head should be replaced with a dog's or Mills' murder of Doe should be cut, and ultimately Fincher compromised only by adding a vaguely hopeful closing sliver of narration from Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman).

If that wasn't indication enough that Se7en was in for a tricky time with the mainstream, the director recounted a test screening which confirmed the sentiment:

"I'm standing in the back of the theater, I think I was with Bob Shaye [director of New Line Cinema] and these three women come by and one of them says to the other two, 'The people who made that movie should be killed.'"

Fincher added that the test screening had been sold solely on the presence of Pitt and Freeman without any additional context, yet even within the confines of the thriller genre, Se7en's ending was a massively grim risk.

In the end Fincher and Pitt proved New Line wrong, with Se7en going on to gross over $325 million worldwide, while today remaining a much-loved classic of its genre.