SciFiSam, I don’t recall any point where it was said that Gere’s character had been divorced twice as Pretty Woman began. It was mentioned that he had been divorced once and that he broke up with his girlfriend as the movie began. The interesting thing is that the movie was originally going to be much darker in an earlier version of the script:
A lot of romantic comedies end happy only because they end when they do. But, think about these couples in these mismatched romantic comedies and how many of them would actually make it.
I come back to movies like Knocked Up. It ends with them happily driving off as an actual couple. Zero chance those two are together a year later.
It is impossible to know in any movie of any kind whether a putative happy ending will last for the rest of the characters’ lives unless it ends with the death of everyone in the movie.
That’s so obvious I’m not sure what the point is. Based on the characters and situations presented in the movies, it’s possible to predict the odds that a relationship will work out.
In the How I Met Your Mother finale the show is shown to be an extended shaggy dog story, with Ted asking for his kids’ “permission” to have a romantic relationship with long time friend Robyn. Only the last 9 seasons have been a perfect showcase of why this is a terrible idea, and almost guaranteed to fizzle out acrimoniously within a couple of weeks tops.
Enough with the negative waves, Gatopescado. 
I figured they made a right turn to Switzerland and ended up alright.
^ Woof, woof, woof! That’s my other dog imitation.
Not films, but I’ve ranted here previously about the endings of the Professor Layton games.
In the first one, the Professor solves the puzzles, defeats the villain, and saves the young girl…or, rather, a young girl is handed over to a strange man as a prize for solving a lot of puzzles, and her only human friend is left behind to maintain a crumbling village populated only by malfunctioning robots for the rest of his life. In the third one, the antagonist embarks on his evil plan because he was orphaned at a young age by an accident…and then tears a hole in the middle of London that would have killed tens of thousands. But we’re supposed to feel bad for him because he’s an orphan.
The second one isn’t quite as bad, although it requires two people to experience the same hallucination for days. And after the third I gave up.
That’s the reason I actively disliked that they even thought about a sequel…and then did
one without actually addressing what the effects would be. It made retroactively dislike the first movie.
I think Dune falls into this category - people tend to think that it’s a happy ending because Good Guy Paul Atreides takes his rightful place on the throne, humiliates the emperor, and crushes the Harkonnens. Nice little wrap up to a tale of good guys or bad guys. But it’s clear that the Fremen are about to start a Jihad against the whole rest of the galaxy, which will kill untold trillions of people and rip apart the Fremen’s traditional culture, and Paul is powerless to stop it from happening. A major theme in the book is that heroes are not actually a good thing to have around you, but it’s easy to miss for a lot of people.
The Family Man with Nic Cage and Téa Leoni.
Cage finds himself in an alternate timeline where a different choice made years ago meant that he ended up married to Leoni and they have two cute kids.
Cage learns An Important Lesson and returns to his original timeline to restart with Leoni.
But the kids are gone. They are no more. They have ceased to be. It’s like they’ve been murdered. That ain’t right.
Hot Tub Time Machine.
Bear with me on this one.
A bunch of emotionally damaged losers find a hot tub that’s also a time machine, and takes them back to when they were teenagers during a pivotal moment in their lives. Assorted hijinks and shenanigans ensue. At the end, they all use the time machine to return to their original times, except Rob Cordray, the most dysfunctional of the bunch, who stays behind. When they get back, everything’s different! This guy’s a successful music executive! Another guy’s wife never cheated on him! Everything’s better in every way, in part because Rob Cordray was there all along, using his knowledge of the future to nudge them in the right direction (and also founding Google).
Except, none of them have the skills to handle the high-powered jobs they now hold. They haven’t spent twenty years working their way up to the top. They still have all the traumas that made them fuck-ups the first time around, and they’ve had basically no time to really work on them. That guy who’s wife cheated on him in the original time line? She’s not a cheater this time around, but he’s still carrying all the emotional baggage of being cheated on. All of their lives are going to disintegrate almost immediately, because none of them are equipped to deal with the new lives they find themselves thrust into.
The Robert Kraft Story rimshot
You’re right on all counts, but you also left off the unhappy ending for their alt-timeline selves, who were happily leading their music-exec, non-cheating wife lives when blammo! Here come the dysfunctional guys jumping ahead in the timeline and wiping out the other ones.
You’re right, he’d only been divorced once, sorry. But his ex-girlfriend was literally in the process of moving out of their home. It doesn’t set him up as a good potential long-term partner, quite apart from everything else that makes it unlikely.
I think I’ve posted this before, but “Speed” has a tacked on happy ending.
Sure, Keanu gets the girl. But…let’s see. His best friend was blown up mere hours ago by the mad bomber. In the course of stopping the bomber, they destroyed a cargo jet and an entire subway train (not to mention any workers who were hanging around when the car jumped out of the ground). It would have been massively cheaper just to pay the ransom. Keanu is going to be dealing with lawsuits for years.
I have read the version of the screenplay where he throws her out of his car, leaves her hysterical in the middle of the street, and drives off. It is definitely more consistent, and thematically appropriate, than the “happy ending” which was obviously mandated by a studio executive and tacked on.
And that is called paying the Danegeld…
Or to put it another way, if they pay one ransom, how many other ransom demands will they get?
I’ve always thought the ending of Corpse Bride sucks. Basic plot: young man is unwillingly about to enter an arranged marriage with a woman he hardly knows. He meets a girl from a different culture. After experiencing a bit of culture shock, he falls in love with her. His fiancée learns of the matter. Then she dies. Sort of. Ceases to exist, anyway. And the young man is left again facing an arranged marriage with someone he doesn’t love, and who knows he loves someone else. Their life together doesn’t promise to be a happy one.
Yup. But even the happy ending isn’t very happy.
And Kit is still working as a street prostitute and helping another young woman work as a street prostitute. Kit says you “gotta have a goal” and she’s looking into a beauty course, but she’s still going to be working as a street prostitute. She’s an addict who’s suddenly been given a lot of money and has a pimp on her back. I’ve known (and still know) sex workers who would defend their right to do their job but street prostitution is dangerous. Pretty woman even showed that, with one of Vivian’s friends being murdered and left in a dumpster, and then ignored it except for a comment when Vivian meets Kit at the hotel and gives her money.
Hey, I guess in some ways it did succeed in showing a lot of the dark side of street prostitution by hiding it in a sugar-coated romance, even without the deleted scenes.
Basically any Disney movie that features a princess or entrenched aristocracy that remains in power at the end. It’s great that the heroine found true love, but she’s still the daughter of a tyrant and the wife of a future tyrant.
Or, because I like to be progressive, maybe she’ll prove to be a tyrant herself!
Take Aladdin, for instance. The people really needed bread (as evidenced by Aladdin, an able-bodies working age young man having to steal to feed himself and a couple of street urchins), but what they got were higher taxes to replenish the treasury after an overly decadent royal wedding.