10 Sci-Fi Movies That Pissed Audiences Off In The Final Scene
5. I Am Legend
Up until its final three minutes, I Am Legend is a terrifically smart and entertaining post-apocalyptic sci-fi that ultimately throws all that away with an infuriatingly trite, studio-mandated ending.
In the final sequence, Dr. Robert Neville (Will Smith) has synthesised a cure to the virus plaguing humanity, at which point the mutated Darkseekers attempt to breach the lab.
Neville quickly extracts a sample of the cure and gives it to an immune woman, Anna (Alice Braga), before sacrificing himself to ensure her escape. Neville pulls the pin on a grenade and runs directly into the Darkseeker horde, killing everyone in the room.
An embarrassingly tacked-on epilogue then shows Anna and her son Ethan (Charlie Tahan) arriving at a survivor's camp and handing over the cure, where Anna's voiceover narration declares that the story of humanity's survival will be Neville's legend.
It's about the lamest, least imaginative way to resolve the whole humanity-on-the-brink-of-extinction scenario, especially as the original ending was so much better.
The alternate ending, mercifully released on home video, is more faithful to Richard Matheson's original novel and shows Neville realising that the Darkseekers aren't quite the thoughtless monsters he believed. To them, he is a monstrous figure - a legend, even.
But because spineless studio executives think that such a smart ending would confuse popcorn-gobbling audiences, we got a big explosion and hasty resolution to the plague instead. It remains one of the most blatant "test audience endings" in Hollywood history.