8 Lost Movie Scenes That Were Found Years Later
4. Election - Alternate Ending
1999’s Election, if you’ve never heard of it before, sounds like the most quintessential 90s movie: a black comedy starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon doing emotional damage to each other over the process of a student body election. Unfortunately, for all of its successes, it gets lost among all the other great films that were released around the turn of the millennium.
An appropriate segue then into the fact that the film had an alternate ending shot that is closer to the Tom Perrotta novel it was based upon that also got very much lost. Precisely who found it exactly isn’t clear but the important thing is whoever it was picked up the right VHS at a yard sale one day in 2011. Yep, the alternate ending for Election was discovered in a box on somebody’s front garden.
The original ending ends on a much more touching note with Broderick’s Jim and Witherspoon’s Tracy meeting a few years later by chance and putting the past behind them. It’s interesting to see but another case where the decision to cut it was correct. The film’s final, much more spiteful, ending with Broderick throwing a drink at Witherspoon' car in a fit of rage fits the tone far more appropriately.
Still, maybe don’t throw your extra footage into a box in the attic eh, directors?