10 Sci-Fi Movies That Almost Had Way Better Endings

John Carpenter’s The Thing is, like its polar opposite 1982 alien-arrives-on-Earth competitor E.T, an almost perfect film. This much we can all agree on, since after an inauspicious debut at the box office the film has gone on to inspire everything from Event Horizon to the Dead Space series. Every element of the production from Rob Bottin’s seminal VFX work (which saw the overworked artist hospitalized for exhaustion) to Carpenter’s own synthy score have been reappraised as iconic eighties works.

But God is its ending bleak as all Hell.

The movie closes on a note of hopeless ambiguity, wherein the most positive interpretation possible presumes that the nominal protagonist will soon die alone in the Artic wilderness and at least take any trace of the alien interloper with him. Sure, we may end up arguing for more bleak endings in this article, but it’s fair to say that’s a dramatically cruel closer to a Cold War allegory—particularly when said war was still raging through the decade of the movie’s release.

The film almost had a marginally more hopeful closing scene in which not only is Childs rescued, but he even takes a blood test to prove he isn’t, in fact, infected. However Carpenter feared this would be “cheesy”, leaving us with the brutal coda we are all familiar with.

Wonder why it never connected with punters at the multiplex?