HIJACK!!
I understand the screenwriter changed the ending quite a bit for the movie. So, hopefully the movie turns out better for all y’all. I’m betting David Mamet came up with a worthy ending. (Except his script is getting reworked a bit 
)
END HIJACK
Nothing to add to the crappy endings bit… sorry
Screeme
I’ll have to go with Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, after 900 pages of excellent buildup, great characters, and 63 sub-plots, the ending was kinda dumb.
At least I got a nifty Perl program out of it 
Next to “Highlander,” which had Queen singing “Princes of the Universe.” I’m a Highlander geek (TV show only, hate the movies), but I’m hoping, since the fourth movie stars the guy from the TV show, that it doesn’t stink utterly. “Highlander: The TV Series” (its official name) had an appropriate but unremarkable two-part wrap-up.
The most striking ending for a series I can recall was that of the wildly uneven “Forever Knight.” In the last two episodes the title character and three other main characters die in what amount to three suicides and a murder. The series was too inconsistent to be much good, but that was a really gutsy way to end it.
Catrandom
Uh, PLT, Season 4 just ended in May. There was a rumor going around on several of the fan and scoop sites that one of the main characters would be killed off (I think it was Oz), but that turned out to be false.
Whedon has done an excellent job with the characters he created and along with Neil Gaiman should be held up as the gold standard of How to Tie Everything Together In A Way That Makes Sense. The last season had its rough spots, transition from high school to college, but I look forward to the next season because Whedon isn’t shy about letting the characters grow and change. I really, really doubt he would kill them all off.
. . .
Oh, and several years ago, Peter David published a fan fiction wherein Sam of Quantum Leap leaped into Vincent of Beauty & the Beast, saved Catherine from dying, and then got to leap home. Very nice touch, as those are two of the crappiest series endings I can think of.
I’d have to vote for Peter Benchley’s “Jaws”. In the novel, the shark just kind of winds down, and dies after having taken so much damage. I was always under the impression that Benchley was out of typing paper and needed to wrap up quickly. Thankfully, they didn’t see fit to end the movie on such a sorry note.
Hey, Mustapha, just thinking of the Blackadder/TNG contrast did you ever see the final episode of Blake’s 7?
The show ended with Avon standing over Blake (who he’d just shot) and then the Federation troops closed in. People get shot, Avon smiles, screen goes black, credits roll, sounds of gunfire ensue.
Although there are some fan arguments that the main characters didn’t all die in the final confrontation, I thought the scene made a pretty convincing and final end of it.
Sadly, I don’t remember the Blake’s 7 ending, since it’s been so long since the series aired. I do remember Avon though, always liked him, he and old Bladders are very much alike.
Just responding to a couple of items:
Actually, Mamet’s script isn’t just being rewritten, it isn’t being used at all. It was these hassles (among others) that made Jodie Foster bow out; and Mamet went to go shoot his own movie, State and Main, so De Laurentiis dumped the Mamet script and started over with a different writer.
This was supposed to be a reference to Moby Dick. On the DVD there is some discussion of Spielberg’s insistence on changing the ending to a crowd-pleasing kaboom, over Benchley’s objections.
Definitely Hannibal, as I said in my “Thank Ridley Scott” post. I didn’t mind the grossness, I can enjoy a “bad” ending (I thought the book “Thinner” had a great ending), but please, when you spend two novels building a character, you can’t just make her completely change personality so you have a creepy end to your book!
As for TV, no doubt, Space Above and Beyond was the worst! It was like the writers found out they were being cancelled, and wrote an episode that basically said, “Fuck you!”
i hope you got a more recent edition of hte perl script… my book had the buggy one.
and as i understand it, he’s planning on continuing the story as a series, so i think the ending was supposed to be a little loose. i will concede that it was pretty sudden, but all his stuff is.
Did anyone get the idea that the FBI really ticked off Thomas Harris? It seems they went from being heroes in Red Dragon and Silence to bozos in Hannibal.
I have to disagree about the Babylon 5 endings. B5 4th season finale–incredible, spectacular, mind-blowing. B5 5th season finale–horrible. The episode itself was quite good. But as a finale for a 5-year arc? No way. Joe threw away half of season 5 on those idiot psy-brains, then had one incredible episode after another, then droppped every lose end he had to create an incredibly unsatisfying ending. Sure, he ended it. But he never finished telling the story (and he had a whole year–he thought he was cancelled after season 4).
Apparently, you have to shell out $6 a pop to buy all those novels if you want to know how all those characters end up where there are in the last episode. So much for “we’re no deep-space franchise.” Sheesh.
Oh, oh, oh!
Talk about a horrible ending to an otherwise pretty good movie:
Dead Calm.
I was left slack jawed at the end of this thriller when…
SPOILER
the bad guy gets offed when a flare gun is shot into his mouth. Naturally, this causes his head to explode in a dramaticly ludicrous manner.
So out of place with the rest of this movie.