Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The romantic link between Arthur Dent and Trillion was cemented in the gushy, sweet ending. Definitely non-canonical. Ruined not only the story, but also any chance of continuing the series as Douglas Adams wrote it.
I think the ending of AI diminished the film, but not because it was “happy”. I think it was a bad ending because it seemed obviously tacked-on, and was a slightly different tone than the rest of the film because it featured less hard sci-fi. But the worst part was that it was implausible, rather than being merely impossible.
– If it had been “You can’t get your mother back no matter what?” Both plausible and scientifically accurate. This would have been a less happy but better ending.
– If the robots had found a way to reincarnate the mother? Well, it relies on unknown technology, but once you buy into that, it’s plausible. This would have been a happier, yet still better, ending.
– They have the technology to bring back the mother, but it requires a one time destruction of information and will only last one day? Sure, right. You injected implausibility just to be emotionally manipulative.
They were lying.
They never brought her back. That was a simulation. Also, there’s no DNA in hair without follicles.
Is this the (relatively) recent movie with Martin Freeman? I think Doug Adams helped write the movie before he died.
Maybe he cut it because the math didn’t make sense. It’s said early in the movie that within the range of the psychic wierdos there are no murders. Colin Farrell gets murdered after that, but I don’t think four murders a year is all that scary. 
The movie needed to end with Tom Cruise in the suspended animation stuff, one way or another.
“Catch Me If You Can” - which was released the same year as “Minority Report” - is a flawless movie from the first frame to the last… I wonder if maybe he does better when he’s aiming a bit lower? Lincoln ended great, Munich was great… but the ending of War of the Worlds was BAD. It’s like the size of the special effects budget is directly proportional to the shittiness of the ending.
I also saw the Lincoln Center revival of My Fair Lady. Part of the reason why the new end works so well is because, at least as played by Lauren Ambrose who was the first Eliza in the revival, Eliza clearly shows she has absolutely zero romantic interest in Henry Higgins from square one. The possibility that Eliza would suddenly develop romantic feelings for Higgins seemed absurd the way the revival was directed.
On the other hand, I think Higgins, as portrayed by Harry Hadden-Paton, begins to realize over the course of the show, particularly during I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face, that Eliza is a person worthy of being loved, and, rather than the misogyny and self-centeredness he’s shown throughout the play, maybe he is capable of loving and respecting someone else and being loved and respected in return. So there is a “happy ending” in the sense that Eliza has established herself to be an independent woman who will be just fine, and maybe, just maybe Higgins can have a loving relationship with someone else in the future. So a happy ending that seems appropriate, just not the one that is shown in the movie or usually on stage.
As I’ve noted many times in the past, this same happy ending was used for the 1938 Leslie Howard/ Wendy Hiller movie, directed by Anthony Asquith. The screenwriters – there were three of them – added scenes and dialogue, including that damned ending where Eliza comes back to higgins. Shaw, who was still alive, was rightly pissed. Amazingly, he let the producer go on to do thre more adaptations of his work.
In the published version of the “book” of My Fair Lady, the musical adaptation by Lerner and Loewe, Alan Jay Lerner admits to changing the ending, because he didn’t think Shaw was right. But he didn’t acknowledge that somebody else had already changed it.
Shaw himself wrote a screenplay for Pygmalion, which was not used by Asquith, or by anyone else, to my knowledge. I’d like to see a version of that, someday.
Another pointless “happy ending” is in the 1956 version of 1984
I’ve heard about this for years, but never seen this alternate version. I hope this isn’t another case of the inaccurate case of King Kong vs. Godzilla, where one of the different versions, purportedly released in different countries, didn’t actually exist.
This site suggests that there might not have been two different versions, that the assertion that there was can be explained by confusion with another Orwell adaptation
Or the alternate ending to Big.
I recently saw a stage production of Our Town. I looked for a film version available and watched the 1940 version. The film ended by revealing that the third act was all a dream!
I heard it on a recent podcast I forgot the name of but they tracked down the source of the “Japan has a different ending to Godzilla Vs Kong” rumor, basically an American Godzilla fanzine in the late 70s heard an unsourced rumor that was the case and subsequently every single English language source used that as gospel because it wasn’t until the late 90s you could actually get a Japanese copy of the movie for relatively cheap.
So yeah there is literally nothing different between the endings besides differences in soundtracks.
Adams wrote the screenplay.
I disagree. I often cite the ending of Lincoln as an example of Spielberg’s flaws as a director.
As you noted, I feel Spielberg does better at lower levels. He can make entertaining lightweight family movies. But when he tries to make great epics, he fails.
I feel his problem is he can’t handle the idea of greatness. He takes a story that should be about great people and great things and tries to tell it the same way he tells a story about a shark or some kids looking for a treasure chest.
As I said, Lincoln was an example of this. It should have been a story about how some men came to see that slavery was immoral and black people deserved the same freedom as white people. But Spielberg couldn’t handle that level. He had to add a climatic scene where Thaddeus Stevens goes home to his girlfriend, who is black. Even if the relationship is historically accurate, it wasn’t what the cause was about; Stevens had been an advocate for abolition years before he met Lydia Smith. But Spielberg felt like he had to reduce the cause of emancipation to a simple explanation like a white man was in love with a black woman.
Yes, and I believe Adams has said that the movie, the radio show, the book, etc. are all their own individual stories and are all equal. So it’s not really “ruining” the story from the book, it’s just a new story.
I understood the ending of AI, but it was still poorly done, because if you want your audience to understand that they were robots, why the Hell would you make them look like stereotypical Greys? Nor is it especially happy: The future-robots were all sociopaths, which makes sense when your realize that all robots after him were modeled after the sociopathic David.
To diverge a bit from the OP, can I mention Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale? It’s a classic tragedy, that hits all of the right tragic beats, until a magical ending that magically fixes everything, with no credit to any of the characters.
On the other hand, ruined by a sad ending, is Love’s Labour Lost, a straightforward romcom right up until the last scene when suddenly half of all of the couples have to leave for a funeral.
You want a play with a ludicrously happy ending that comes out of nowhere? Try The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay.
Of course, the fact that the happy ending is ludicrous is exactly the point.
The Threepenny Opera (the one that gave us the “oh the shark bites…with his teeth dear” song) was adapted from The Beggar’s Opera, so presumably, it, too, has a ridiculously happy ending. But I’ve never seen it.
It does. There’s a film version with Raul Julia as MacHeath, Bill Nighy as Tiger Brown and, weirdly, Roger Daltrey as the Street Singer/Narrator that’s not half-bad.
At the end of Changing Lanes, all the problems with the major characters get fixed. Ben Affleck’s character suddenly develops a conscience, and manages to convince the wife of Samuel L. Jackson’s character not to take their child out of state after having gained sole custody. The conversation where Affleck convinces her not to go takes place off screen, possibly because it’s hard to imagine what he could have said to her that would have changed her mind.
It would have been a better movie if both the Affleck and Jackson characters ended up alone and miserable, full of regret over how they screwed up their lives so badly.
That wasn’t what ruined that movie, it was whatever screenwriter who went through and took every single punchline from Douglas Adams jokes. I know a lot of them by heart, and spent half the movie going “WHERE’S THE REST OF THAT???”.
For instance they’d take this, and remove the bold bits:
“They are one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy - not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without an order, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters. If you want to get a lift from a Vogon, forget it. They are vile and ill tempered. If you want to get a drink from a Vogon, stick your finger down his throat. If you want to annoy a vogon, feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.”
Shawshank. I believe the original cut ended on the bus with “I hope.” Didn’t ruin the film, but the beach scene was unnecessary