Personally, I had a hard time thinking of the utter extinction of humanity as “heartwarming”.
Other than the absurd ending, the main thing that bothered me with the movie was that I found the abandoned time-travelling spaceship the sphere was in far more interesting than the alien artifact itself. Who cares about some enigmatic blob when you’ve got tons of future tech to reverse-engineer?
A House of Dynamite (2025) is generally considered to have a cop-out ending because the film ends just as the incoming missile would explode but there are actually much bigger problems with it and this thread reminded me to make another thread about the film.
Hitchcock’s Suspicion seems to have a cop-out ending forced by the studio. The ending was changed to make a nonsense of the previous plot development and of the behaviour of the characters involved.
On the other hand a lot of Hitchcock’s movies make little sense in retrospect. ‘Fake it’ was his motto.
I disagree. The Star Child ending isn’t random or evasive — it’s the natural conclusion to a story about consciousness, human evolution, and contact with an intelligence way above our pay grade. A literal explanation would cheapen it. Kubrick tossed us into the deep end of the cosmic pool, flailing around for meaning instead of being spoon-fed an answer. It’s a feature, not a cop-out.
Yes. I saw The Final Countdown when it was released (I was ten years old), and even then, I was rather moved by the ending. Life has those moments when you’re hoping to accomplish something, only to be thwarted at the last moment; this example was deliciously excruciating (to me) because it came so close to altering big history, which could have unintended consequences (a theme explored from the other angle a few years later, in Back to the Future). To me, the cop-out would have been the cheap, too-expected decimation of the Zeroes.
The last scene, as I recall, shows one of the modern characters who had been left behind in 1941, now (in 1980) an elderly man. (I think he had chosen to stay, for love?). It made you think about how significant that was, even for just one person, and how much more significant (maybe not all in good ways) it would have been had a bunch of pilots (and their hardware) also never had a chance to return to 1980.
The Bad Seed 1956. It was originally a book and stage play, and you can tell but still a fun, enjoyable movie. Due to the Hays Code, the ending was changed in an eye rolling Hand of God thing. There was a 1985 made for TV movie that included the original ending.
Wicked. Yes, I said it.
Both the movie and the stage production substantially changed the ending and, indeed, the tone of the book. In the book, Elphaba dies, Fiero dies and the overall sense is of despair and horror at a fascist government takeover. It is not a happy book (nor are any of the sequels) and does not have a happy ending. The movie stuck with most of the plot but jettisoned the ending.
One classic case is the original Don Siegel Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was supposed to end with Kevin McCarthy’s desperately trying to warn people about the invasion (“You’re next! You’re next!”) and being dismissed as a madman. They added a hopeful ending where an overturned truck carrying seed pods reveals the truth. But McCarthy always wanted to have a shot the original didn’t have, one from inside one of the cars showing him shouting.
He finally got a chance to do that shot in Philip Kaufman’s 1979 remake. (and they repeated it in the “Area 52” sequence in Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action).
On the subject of film adaptations of novels, we could mention Jurassic Park.
The ending is a cop out of sorts, because they…(spoiler for the novel)
let cuddly old Richard Attenborough, sorry John Hammond live, but he died in the novel. Same goes for Ian Malcolm because presumably Jeff Goldblum was too famous to die.
The Ice Harvest originally ended with John Cusack’s character being killed when the RV backs up into him, as in the novel. The filmmakers decided this was too depressing and reshot it so he’s knocked to the ground but shakily stands up a few seconds later.
Oh yes, Suspicion–that’s the movie where the guy is clearly trying to kill his (wife? fiancee?), right? Eventually stops the car on a lonely cliff road so he can push her over the edge? And then it turns out it was all a mistake and they drive away together to live happily ever after?
Totally ridiculous. I know I felt cheated.
Sounds like Weapons of Choice. Like the author watched The Final Countdown and wanted a better ending. The future fleet stays back in WWI and alters history.
I haven’t read it yet, so I can;t say how it goes, but it is on my short pile.
I was going to mention it, the first trilogy is good IIRC, but the author right wing nuttery (already slightly detectable in the first books) gets out of control in later sequels.
The Steven Spielberg version of War of the Worlds has such a “everything is tied up in a bow” ending for the characters that my head canon is that everything that happens after Tom Cruise is sucked into the Alien tripod is all in his mind Owl Creek Bridge style just before he is killed.
The Aliens dying is of course from the source material but the way the house in Boston is untouched and they come to the door like he is a neighbor there to borrow some sugar and the son is alive and well is so out of place and surreal.
I wanted to mention a cop-out in the middle: in TWO-FACED WOMAN, a woman tries to win back her husband by making a play for him while pretending to be her own sister.
Now, maybe that’s a bad idea for a movie. Or maybe it’s a good one? Anyway, “a new scene was added to the film in which Larry Blake determines almost immediately that Katherine is actually his estranged wife Karin, posing as her spurious twin sister and chooses to play along with her pretense rather than actually consider having an affair with his sister-in-law.” So now all scenes where she’s putting on an act are, retroactively, him knowing the truth and playing along…
Here’s a related thread from 2017 (contained therein is a link to an even older thread).
Nobody can say “Splash the Zeroes” like Kirk Douglas. My favorite part of the film.
I do agree, mostly, but the Stargate sequence is the weakest part of the movie, really. Wormholes don’t look like that. Kubrick just has a menu of fancy slit-scan effects he wanted to shoehorn in to the film, which were relatively new at the time but just look like psychedelic fluff.
The Wizard of Oz. The studio didn’t want Oz to be real, as it is in the book, because they didn’t think the audience would accept a true fantasy story.