Se7en is a movie that thrives on its dark ending; in fact, the ending is so essential to the movie as a whole that both director David Fincher and star Brad Pitt said they wouldn't do the movie unless the original ending from Andrew Kevin Walker's script remained in tact. That ending, of course, meant Gwyneth Paltrow's head in a box, and this bleak finish has come to be known as one of the most horrific and unexpected in all of movie history. Originally, New Line tried to get Fincher to incorporate a far "happier" ending, which would have seen Morgan Freeman's Detective Somerset shooting John Doe instead of Brad Pitt's Mills, essentially ending his own career to stop Mills from making the same mistake. Nobody thought this worked very well, of course, and - thankfully - the depressing ending was incorporated instead, with one addition: Somerset's fairly unnecessary "optimistic" Hemingway quote.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.
