The artist obviously drew it based on first hand experience.
Incidentally, if you have not been to the TV Tropes web site before, don’t get in too deeply. Whole days can go by before you realize it.
Remember, the movie was SUPPOSED to parallel the opera Madama Buitterfly! Michael Douglas was supposed to be like Pinkerton, who callously impregnated Cio Cio San, and drove her to suicide.
If Glenn Close DOESN’T commit suicide, what was the point of the whole opera theme?
Limitless, the very, very good Bradley Cooper / Robert De Niro technothriller, has a significantly different ending than the Alan Glynn book (published originally as The Dark Fields) which inspired it.
The book:
Eddie is going through withdrawal with no superpills left, alone and probably dying, in a seedy Vermont motel. The book we just read is his hastily-scrawled description of how he came to be there. He sees the President begin a speech on TV - probably to announce the invasion of Mexico after a long-brewing crisis there - and realizes the President is a superpill addict, too.
The movie:
Eddie is a polished, confident, almost-certain-to-win U.S. Senate candidate who easily fends off frenemy billionaire Carl Van Loon’s attempt to control him or, as is implied, let him die when his pill supply is cut off. Eddie still has his adorable girlfriend and is probably going to end up in the White House someday.
I confess I prefer the movie.
They should’ve left off the ending card. Next year’s team WINS the state title. Without their star QB, star defensive player, and many other key players who were departing seniors. The new team had essentially rookies in those positions and managed to win it all!! THAT, folks, is your classic underdog story with a superb happy ending.
The film version of On the Beach had a relatively “happy” ending in comparison to the book. Which, if you seen the film, tells you how bleak the book’s ending was.
How much worse could it possibly be?
Maybe I don’t need to know.
I actually popped into the thread thinking about this very change, but since the thread is supposed to be about annoying happy endings I wasn’t going to.
The book, to me, was nearly unreadable. I gave up halfway through (didn’t even get that far with Maguire’s treatment of Cinderella). I read the summary on Wikipedia.
The play had, to me, a much better ending. Elphaba finally finds some measure of happiness, after a pretty awful life. At the expense of losing everything else she has ever cared about, true, and of course Fiyero has also lost virtually everything (but her).
Reading the synopsis in Wikipedia, I found the original ending hideously, slit-your-wrists depressing.
A different take on “happy endings”: that some shows won’t go where the story is leading them. That the show’s so-called reality is not really what it seems. That the leads died in a particular episode, or that the viewer’s understanding of the underlying reality is wrong. (Of course, such a downer of an ending would also be the end of the show…)
I have an interpretation of the X-Files episode Field Trip that makes the entire rest of the series a tacked-on happy ending. I have always believed the intrepid agents never got free of the cave. So the “tacked on” happy ending is that they lived, and went on for 3 more seasons.
If you took the events in the “hallucination” part of the Deep Space 9’s episode Far Beyond the Stars as fact, then the “happy ending” is that DS9 is real. People would not want to believe life is really as depressing as Benny Russell’s is.
And, although I’ve never watched Buffy, I have always had a fondness forNormal Again once I read about it. Deep down, I think the events of Buffy being mentally ill is the actual true reality. (Not because I hate the show or anything, I just love that interpretation. And I was never invested in the show, so it doesn’t ruin it for me to take that interpretation.)
I just looked this up on IMDB because the 1939 Of mice and Men popped up on my DVR and I noted he was billed as Lon Chaney, Jr. The biography on IMDB claims it was 1935, five years after his father’s death that a producer insisted on him changing his billing to Lon Chaney, Jr.
The Reese Witherspoon film Vanity Fair (2004) has a decidedly more upbeat ending than the Thackeray novel. Still a decent movie though.
These Three - the first film adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s stage The Children’s Hour.
Basic synopsis of the play “the Children’s Hour”:
Karen and Martha jointly run a boarding school for girls. (Karen is engaged to be married at the start of the play.) One of their students is a nasty, spiteful little bad seed girl who spreads a rumor that Karen and Martha are lesbian lovers. The rumor spreads, students are withdrawn from the school in droves, Karen’s fiance leaves her, the two teachers are utterly ruined - all because of a lie started by a nasty brat. In the climax of the play, Martha confesses to Karen that she is a lesbian, and does in fact have ‘lustful thoughts’ about Karen. Consumed with self-loathing, Martha shoots herself.
Despite the play being a massive Broadway success, the plot of course would never fly in the mid 1930s. Thus, playwright Hellman herself wrote a new version of the play in which:
The little girl spreads the rumor that Martha was having an affair with Karen’s fiance. The rumor still leads to the school being shut down, and Martha confesses she did have feelings for Karen’s fiance, but never acted on them. Nevertheless, Karen patches things up with her fiance, the little girl’s lies are exposed but the women forgive her, Martha doesn’t kill herself and nobody has same-sex feelings for anybody!
Interestingly enough, Hellman wrote the screenplay for We Three that removed the lesbian angle. But the film was remade with the original story-line and title in '61.
Happy ending?
I saw this movie when I was a kid: my Dad took me to the movies. I had seen one poignant scene in particular long before the ending: a man with no legs pleading for help.
As for the deathbed scene, with the elder Chaney formally presenting his makeup case to his son… the general tone of the movie caught me; I started to cry as the dying man wrote “JR.” on the case.
I was only 8 when I saw this. 
I didn’t think the book was gibberish. What it was was insanely depressing. There’s not a happy moment in the damned thing, and I’m astounded that anyone could read that and think “Hey, this would make a neat musical!” It’s like turning “The Road” into “Singin’ In the Rain”.
An early version of lampshade hanging (warning: TV Tropes).
No mention of Breakfast at Tiffany’s yet? The book was fairly ambiguous, so you can’t say just how sad it was, but the movie clearly went for happy. That’s regardless of all the other changes in the movie.
I saw one back around 1990 - terrible too.
(Bolding mine)
I dunno…lesbian sex is usually pretty happy at the time
I think that was the first movie I ever saw where I had alraedy read the book, and oddly enough I liked the movie version better at the time.
The Handmaid’s Tale. They gave a happy ending to the movie version: Offred slits the Commander’s throat; then escapes with the rebels. The movie ends with her hiding in a isolated trailer in the mountains. I have got to admit I had certain visceral enjoyment of that ending (Yeah! at least one of the bad guys got part of what he deserved), but at the same time the book was so much more than that. The book ending though ambiguous was better in more profound ways.
That would’ve made for a 'way more interesting movie!
In the movie (the 1959 version)The final scene shows the submarine heading back to America so the crew can die at home. Moira is last seen watching the sub depart (with her lover on board) from a cliff overlooking the harbor.
In the novelThe crew has no plan to go back to America. They just sail the sub out to sea so they can sink it and drown. In the last scene with Martha she’s taken her suicide pills and is waiting to die as she watches the sub sail away.