10 Times Movies Panicked And CHANGED THE ENDING Just Before Release

1989's classic sports comedy Major League is centered around a season of the Cleveland Indians baseball team, where their vindictive new owner, Rachel Phelps (Margaret Whitton), attempts to put together an intentionally terrible team so she can move them to Miami when they fail.

The film ends with the Indians of course avoiding this fate, much to Phelps' hatchet-faced fury, yet this ending was actually cobbled together last-minute after test audiences responded negatively to the original twist ending.

During principal photography, Major League ended with a surprise reveal that Phelps actually concocted the Miami scheme to motivate the team to succeed, and she wasn't actually the villain she seemed to be.

Test audiences preferred Phelps as a villain, though, and so around a month before the film's release, actress Margaret Whitton was recalled for a hasty reshoot which maintained her villainy.

Because Whitton was busy filming in the UK and couldn't return to the States, a replica of the owner's box from Milwaukee County Stadium was quickly built at Pinewood Studios, with the wig she wore for the original shoot being express-delivered to the set.

Due to the frantic nature of the reshoot, the crew of the horror film Nightbreed - which was shooting in Pinewood at the time - oversaw creating the set and shooting the new shots of Phelps looking miserable.

Whitton was ultimately disappointed with the decision to reshoot the ending, as her performance throughout the movie is acted with the intention of informing the climactic twist, which was of course ripped away in the final weeks before release.

But a test screening with the new ending scored far more favourably with audiences, and Major League ultimately went on to gross $75 million against a mere $11 million budget.