12 Depressing Alternate Endings That Were Way Better Than The Originals

2. Pretty Woman

Everyone knows the Pretty Woman ending. It's lovely: Edward arrives like a knight in shining armour to save his prostitute with a heart mistress, and sweeps her off her feet by climbing up a fire escape with some roses, as if being a high-paid, handsome business man with Richard Gere's hair and face wasn't enough of a "gesture."

The original script was a lot darker though - in it Vivian was a drug addict quite infamously - and the originally scripted ending was much more of a grim full-stop on the romance. Instead of driving up to rescue Vivian from a life of hawking her body bits around for cash, Edward instead turns up with a wedge of money to cover the cost of their not-at-all sordid week together, and drives away without sweeping her off her feet.

So instead of redemption, we get the vision of Vivian forever condemned to a life of drugs, prostitution and probably doom, which would have been a much more biting commentary on the dangers of amorality, wrapped in a cautionary tale. But then Disney came along, and thought the original script was too nasty, and turned it into a fairytale.

The Problem

Romance used to sell movies, and the bleak notion that a man who is willing to pay a prostitute for her company wouldn't fall in love with her because she sings badly in the bath, and would go back to his life to find a more suitable mate, obviously didn't fly with the Disney execs who binned the original script.

Presumably, the frequent drug references didn't help either.