Alfred Hitchcock shot three different endings for “Topaz.” No one liked any of them. I think he finally gave up and let Universal pick one. All three endings are on the DVD release. It’s one of his lesser efforts.
Back when people liked Woody Allen, he made a sentimental comedy/drama called “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” which I love. The studio objected to the downbeat ending and asked him to film a happy ending. He did. The ending of the final product is a tear-jerker. When asked why he didn’t use the happy ending, Woody said “That was the happy ending.”
The movie Clue had and was released with 3 different endings. Different theaters got different endings. AFAIK the movie was the same except for the final reveal, and the home releases of the movie include all 3 endings.
The first filmed ending of First Blood had John Rambo being shot to death by Colonel Trautman but that ending was NEVER released theatrical.
Similarly the first ending of Kevin Smith’s Clerks ended with Dante being shot to death in a robbery but after it was criticized at the first screening Smith cut the death scene from the film.
Wikipedia notes the two endings of Fatal Attraction. I had always heard there was a third ending, where Dan kills Alex, but it wasn’t used because no one wanted to Dan come out looking like some kind of hero.
As a theater projectionist, I can recall two cases where a studio changed a film after opening day, and shipped replacement reels with the request that we switch the original ones out.
The French film Queen Margot had some early graphicly violent scenes - men getting run through with pikes and such. A lot of that was excised from the new version - maybe as much as a minute. (I sneakily decided to leave the old reels in place, nobody complained. In case anyone wonders who has “final cut” on a film - it’s me!)
The other film was “Marvin’s Room”. I ran the first reel and the replacement side by side, could not detect a difference. Might have been a technical fault, but I didn’t see it.
In a similar vein, we once got two prints of an Australian movie called “Shame”, to run in two separate houses in our multiplex. Both arrived at the same time, but I eventually noticed one print had cleaned-up dialogue, and the other had all the curse words. Strange.
This is deviating somewhat from the topic of the thread, but I consider The Purple Rose of Cairo to be an example of something I call anti-romantic comedies, which a number of Allen’s films are examples of. They seem to be romantic comedies for most of the the film, but at the end it becomes clear that the couple at the center of the film don’t stay together. There are various ways that this becomes clear. Sometimes it’s actually a moderately happy ending and sometimes it’s a miserable one. Allen does a lot of this. There is also a category of anti-romantic dramas. There are romances that don’t work out, and a lot of people have problems with movies that don’t have happy endings, even when the happy ending doesn’t make sense.
1931’s The Champ, a story about a washed-up alcoholic boxer making a comeback.
from the trivia page The film did fine at its first preview until the last reel. As originally written, Champ loses his comeback boxing match, then dies as his son weeps. After going along with the sentimental story until that moment, audiences felt cheated by the downbeat ending. As a result, production chief Irving Thalberg ordered the final scene reshot so that Champ won the match. At the next preview, the audience cheered at the end.
a famous case of there NOT being a different ending is, of course, the original King Kong vs. Godzilla
Nevertheless, it should be noted that the American version of the film is different from the Japanese version, as the Wikipedia article makes clear. But there’s only one ending.
The 1925 version of Phantom of the Opera has a complicated release history. There are three main versions, but lots of minute variations, and at least one alternate ending was filmed, with others discussed
Another film I noticed this on was the Lasse Hallstrom film “The Shipping News.” I don’t remember the exact details but I saw the film multiple times and some prints were edited with certain scenes cut shorter and one or two scenes removed. It was bizarre because it was such a non-offensive random film, but there were definitely two versions running simultaneously because I remember thinking when it got to a particular shot “Oh this is the edited one!” or “Oh good this has the extra scenes.”