10 Sci-Fi Movie Endings You Can No Longer See

It's not much of a secret that 2011's The Thing prequel was significantly reworked during post-production, with the studio ultimately mandating that the extensive practical effects be effectively painted over with CGI.

Much of the third act was also reshot, with director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. revealing that the film originally ended with protagonist Kate Lloyd (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) entering the alien spacecraft and discovering the bodies of its original alien pilots, which had been killed by The Thing.

This ending would've implied that the aliens attempted to crash the ship in order to kill the Thing, which they had collected from another planet before it managed to escape containment aboard their spacecraft. The Thing then assimilated one of the aliens in an attempt to fly the ship away from Earth.

But ultimately, following test screenings it was decided that this ending had too much going on, and so it was reshot to remove the aliens entirely, replacing the animatronic pilot with a glowing hologram, while focusing on Kate hunting down the Sander-Thing (Ulrich Thomsen). Heijningen said:

"I liked that idea because it would be the Norwegian camp in space. Kate sees the pod room and one pod being broken, giving her the clues what happened. What didn't work was that she wanted to find Sander and stop the ship from taking off and still solve the mystery in the ship. These two energies were in conflict."

Sadly the only part of the original ending that remains is some B-roll footage on set, showing off the frankly incredible animatronic alien pilot design. What a waste.