A famous movie, book, TV show, comic strip, etc. Not just a minor change either, but one where you truly feel the writer blew it completely and you can’t sleep at night thinking about it. The ending that just gnaws at me is Calvin & Hobbes. It was nothing special. What I would have done is:
Panel 1: An adult Calvin awake in bed. Someone is next to him but we can’t tell who it is.
Panel 2: Adult Calvin rummaging in a box in the garage
Panel 3: Carrying Hobbes as a stuffed animal
Panel 4: Adult Calvin putting stuffed Hobbes in the bed with a boy. Looks like young Calvin but hair is different.
Panel 5: Hobbes now alive. Hobbes and boy asleep but hugging each other.
Identity, the movie with John Cusack.
Rather than have the climactic reveal just BEFORE the confrontation/shootout, thus ruining it and removing any sort of drama from it, they should have had the final shootout first, then had Cusack’s character wake up as the strait-jacketed mental patient and find out that he HAD been MPD but had defeated it through his fantasy.
Albert Camus’ The Stranger should have ended with Mersault explicitly being shot. Just because I hated him that much.
On a more whimsical note, in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Godot should have shown up at the beginning of Act II, asked Vladimir and Estragon whom they’re waiting for, boggled, then walked off shaking his head. Especially if his name is never revealed. Then continue with Act II as Becket wrote it.
We Were Soldiers, I’d replace the cavalry charge ending with one closer to the actual ending, with American reinforcements arriving and both sides withdrawing exhausted from the battle.
Across The Universe, I dunno, maybe add two or three more songs to it. The plot just wrapped up so fast I got whiplash from it in this otherwise great movie.
The Matrix Revolutions: Any ending other than the trainwreck the writers decided to go with. Anything. Machines break their promise and destroy Zion anyway? Fine. Mr. Smith wins? That’ll work. Just not “Neo combines himself with Smith and the Oracle and the Creator discuss on a park bench”, for fuck’s sake.
The recent Charlie and the Chocolate Factory remake: I’d cut out the diabetes-inducing end–and the entire horrible-tortured-childhood subplot. Willy Wonka was perfectly fine without any backstory, thank you very much.
Signs. Should have revealed at the end the “invasion” turned out to be of the supernatural/religious. Angels and demons or some such. Would have fit much better with Mel’s pastor character, and the faith and destiny rap M. Night was trying to spell out. I think it would have made for a much better twist as well and much more ominous in tone.
Definitely a different ending to the television series Beauty and the Beast. Actually, from what I understand, they needed to go back to the episode where Catherine gave birth to Vincent’s son and then died. That stank.
Atlas Shrugged- everything as is except Eddie Willers grovelling in front of the stalled engine is stopped when a small plane lands and Dagny’s voice laughs/barks out “Goddamit Eddie, get over here! I’m not paying you to loaf.”
SEINFELD- last ep as is except when the judge sentences the gang to jail, Newman starts laughing so hard he chokes on the snacks he’s been stuffing into his face.
Kramer thinks “My friend is choking!” and runs to his aid.
Elaine thinks “I’ve - I’ve always loved Newman!” and runs to his aid.
George thinks “Hey, maybe I can get the judge to go easy on me!” and runs to his aid.
Jerry sneers at all of them & thinks “Let the fat bastard choke!”
XENA- the whole “Fall of The Olympian Gods before the Coming One God of Love” is continued with Xena, Gabby & Eve aiding this traveling couple who is being besieged by the Olympians. Finally only Ares & Aphrodite are left and join the three to make sure the couple reach their destination…
a traditional Nativity scene in which the couple have their baby, as they all look on. Then Xena & Gabby look at each other, lean in, lips almost touching and …
Oh hell yes. What made the 1st and 2nd movies great was the mindfuck, and the 3rd one just didn’t have anything of the kind. In between the 2nd and 3rd movies, I read so many interesting theories that would have been much better than what they actually did. Here’s a few endings I came up with a while back:
The obvious one: it turns out they were still inside the Matrix all along. Or maybe they were in a smaller sub-Matrix. The Architect says that 99% accept the Matrix if given a choice - what if the other option is merely a different programmed reality? They realize this when they think about how Neo was able to stop the Sentinels and be jacked into the Matrix supposedly without a plug in his brain. They spend most of the third movie figuring out how to break out into the actual real world. When they get out they find the Matrix has been running not for 100 years, not for 600 years, but for twenty thousand; it’s been running for so long that the remaining machines are derelict hulks unable to move, let alone be a threat to anyone. They free the rest of the humans and everyone lives happily ever after.
Neo makes it to what we think is the machine city and we find out that the people we thought were the humans were actually the machines and vice versa. The humans won the war in the first place, and kept the machines, which had adopted human appearance at the very beginning, in a programmed reality because they couldn’t bring themselves to kill the sentient programs. A treaty is drawn up and the remaining machines are freed from the Matrix.
Neo saves the day and the humans are freed as in the ending they use, but there are unintended consequences. The mass exodus of people from the Matrix causes widespread panic among those who stay behind. There is rioting, looting, a general breakdown of society. Governments fall and the humanity within the Matrix reverts to a tribal existence, constantly at war with one another. Meanwhile, the sudden thousand-fold increase of the human population outside strains the life support capacities of Zion to past the breaking point. Many simply starve. Other groups try to survive on the surface, but almost all of them die. The partial ending of the Matrix comes to be regarded as one of the worst moments in human history; Neo is eventually seen as a mass-murderer, and the peace agreement he made with the machines is soon shattered as the horrible trauma wrought on the human race leads to new attacks on the machine city. Before what remains of the population is finally exterminated, it is recognized that things had gone too far and it would have been better if everyone had stayed in the Matrix.
Rather than being trapped by the revelation that the One is just another method of the machines’ control, rather than working within the framework the machines have provided, Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo remember that they’re all hackers. They hack into the machines’ computer system and disable all of their Sentinels and all of their weapons, stopping the attack on Zion and ending the war. You could even throw in a nifty Tron-like sequence inside the machines’ programs.
The humans and the machines annihilate each other in a cataclysmic end to the war. The words “one million years later” flash on the screen, followed by a scene reminiscent of that from 2001: we see something resembling a large ape pick up a robot arm and use it as a primitive tool. The cycle begins again.
