At the end of the Jaws novel, both Quint and Hooper are killed by the shark. But in the movie, Hooper lives. The movie also took out the cringe-inducing sex scene between Hooper and Ellen Brody, for the benefit of all humanity.
What about films like Brazil and Blade Runner, which had studio mandated happy endings, and later director’s cut unhappy ones?
A whole separate topic of its own.
You can start a thread about it.
In the novel version of Misery, the protagonist gets a foot chopped off with an axe and a thumb cut off with a knife. In the movie he “just” gets his ankles broken with a sledgehammer.
Yes, that’s much happier. I guess it’s the best you can expect from something called “Misery”
Tyrion Lannister isn’t as badly beat up by circumstances in the HBO series than he is in the books, after all.
Isn’t it kind of up to the ballet production whether Swan Lake has a happy or an unhappy ending? I thought I read that at least some early productions had the lovers triumph, or perhaps I’m mistaken, but these days you’re as likely to see a happy ending to the ballet (with the lovers surviving; some of the “unhappy” endings are qualified when we see Odette and Siegfried’s spirits ascending to heaven) as a sad one.