They Gave it a Happy Ending! (Spoilers, naturally)

Cafe Society
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I’m thinking mainly of stage musicals, but it can be any movie, musical, stage play, or what have you.

There are plenty of cases where the original book, play, or whatever had a downbeat, unhappy, or unresolved ending, but they clearly changed it because they wanted the audience to go out feeing good about things.

The example that first started me thinking about this was Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians/Then There Were none/(Ten little Nigger Boys), the one that started the trope of "One of the people on this island is a murderer, killing the rest of us off. In the novel, all of the people brought to the island have a dark, seriously guilty secret, but the judge responsible for the setup wanted to see them all punished, and so each gets killed off. In the stage play, two of them turnm out to be not really guilty. And wouldn’t you know it, it’s the Attractive Young Man and Attractive Young Woman who have fallen for each other, so they go off arm in arm at the end. Awwww…
But I realized they did this a lot. In Shaw’s original play Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle goes off with brainless Freddy. In the first film version, with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard, Eliza comes back to Professor Higgins. She does in the musical My Fair Lady, as well, and in the movie they made of it.

In the novel Wicked (as in all versions of The Wizard of Oz) the Wicked Witch of the West gets dissolved (“You Liquidated her, eh?” says the Wizard in the 1939 film), but in the stage musical Wicked she fakes her own death and survives.

Similarly, although the Phantom of the Pera survives in Gaston Leroux’s original novel, he generally dies in movie interpretations (including Lon Chaney’s 1925 silent film). But in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical he survives (and even went on to a sequel musical).

The 1995 film of The Scarlet Letter twists the novel severely out of shape, most notably by giving it a pretty happy ending, with Dimmesdale and Hester both living and together at the end,

Similarly, the silent film The Sea Beast, based on Moby Dick and starring John Barrymore, has him not only surviving, but coming back to live with his sweetheart (!!!) The mind truly boggles.

The ending of The African Queen differs from the C.S. Forester novel. In the novel, Charley and Rose’s scheme to turn the African Queen into a torpedo to sink the German ship Louisa doesn’t succeed.Interestingly, the film made one change for the worse - in the novel the Germans don’t try to execute them, but turn them over to the British. But, of course, in the film they don’t end up being executed anyway.

I realize that there are plenty of cases of stories being altered from the source material, but I’m looking in particular for cases where the change was introduced precisely for that Happy Ending.

As proof that this has been going on for a long time, consider this – for over 150 years Shakespeare’s ultra-tragic play King Lear was performed in a drastically altered way, The version by Nahum Tate has Lear restored to his throne at the end, and Cordelia marrying Edgar. Tate’s version was phased out from 1823 to 1845, and rarely performed today

(To be fair, though, the source material – Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain actually does have Leir restored to the throne. Shakespeare made the original story even bleaker.)

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At the end of the film Cujo, the little boy is still alive.

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In the novel of Jurassic Park, Malcolm dies of an infection in his broken leg and doesn’t make it off the island. So, a happy ending for his character, at least. I don’t think Hammond made it out, either. Heck, the Costa Rican government didn’t firebomb the entire island in the movie.

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The musical Rent is based on Puccini’s La boheme. In the opera, Mimi dies at the end. In Rent, she get up from her deathbed (after a scene showing her die) because their friend Angel (who died a few scenes before) stopped her from going to the white light. It’s so blatantly tacked on that it left me cold.

Not really what you’re looking for, but in Nicholas Nickleby, they stage a version of Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending. I suspect that sort of thing may have been done from time to time when Dickens was writing.

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Sphere is a really good book, but a middling movie. It changed a huge detail on the ending, though.

In the book, the female character(Beth) gives a wry smile at the end that indicates she kept her superpower, the ability to make others do your will. They all gave it up, she kept it. The hint is that she will be using her power to control everyone and…well, who knows?

The movie just ends with them giving up their power and it skips the evil twist from Beth.

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Since I’m coincidentally listening to it…

The original film The Little Shop of Horrors ended badly for Seymore, Mushnik, and Audrey.
The stage musical based on it ended badly for the Earth at large.

So far, so unhappy.

The theatrical release of the film based on the musical altered the ending so that Seymore and Audrey survived and the Earth wasn’t be-planted (for now).

(The Director’s Cut restored the stage ending.)

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Oddly enough, a radio adaptation of “Pebble in the Sky” gave a sad ending to a story that originally had a happy one (since this adaptation dropped the main character from the story, he wasn’t around to save the day, and the day therefore did not get saved).

Hans Christian Andersen’s version of The Little Mermaid does not end nearly so happily for her as the Disney version does (it doesn’t “middle” very well for her, either).

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Similarly, the John Carpenter version of The Thing, while truer to Campbell’s original story Who Goes There?, goes beyond that story’s “happy ending” to give it a pretty downbeat and ambiguous one. I’ve never been very happy with it.

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Meh. She goes to heaven which is the ultimate happy ending in that century. Especially since presumably pagan merfolk don’t go there.

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The book JAWS includes a sexual relationship between Hooper and Brody’s wife and somehow Brody finds out. (I forget how). Hooper dies in the ensuing battle with the shark and Brody is left to swim home alone knowing the truth about what happened between them.

This of course differs in the movie where no such affair happens, Hooper survives and he and Brody amiably swim back after killing the shark.

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This is one of the things that makes me despise Rent. Two and a half hours of crap music (sole exception: “Seasons of Love”) that, along with the book, beat you over the head with the message, “Don’t ever compromise your art. Don’t sell out. Don’t pander to the masses.” And then Mimi lives at the end.

I could have sworn I saw a black & white film adaptation of Our Town, starring Paul Newman as George and Eva Marie Saint or someone similar as Emily, in which Emily came back to life at the end. Unfortunately, it seems as though I’ve been hit by the Mandela Effect. Still, the 1940 version with William Holden as George has Emily live at the end, too.

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In fact, the theatrical release was originally filmed with the plants victorious. They spent $5 million on a special-effects-filled ending that showed the plants taking over the world after killing Audrey and Seymore. But the initial audience reactions to this were so negative that they were forced to scrap it and reshoot a happy ending. Oz said that Warner Bros. requires a test screening to have at least a 55% positive rating from the audience, and the film with the original ending got 13%.

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Let’s go with I Am Legend which has been adapted a few times. In the original novel the protagonist dies at the end realizing that humanity has been replaced by this new race of vampires.

Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price has the titular character dying at the end realizing he was was in fact the last man on Earth. Okay, so this adaptation ends the same.

The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston ends with our protagonist dying but some humans get away with his blood which will provide them with a serum to cure the disease that turns people into vampires.

I Am Legend starring Will Smith ends with the protagonist dying but some survivors make their way out of New York to a settlement of people with the cure discovered by Smith.

So 1/3 adaptations stayed true to the source material. Not bad.

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In the movie The Natural, Roy Hobbs hits the final home run and wins the game. In the novel, he strikes out.

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In the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, she is finally lost forever because he violates the condition of not looking at her until they both arrive at the surface of the Earth. Gluck’s 1762 opera Orfeo ed Euridice gave the story a happy ending. Orfeo ed Euridice - Wikipedia

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In the 1999 film version of Animal Farm (a post-Fall-of-the-Berlin-Wall version, natch) “Animal Farm” has collapsed, and the film ends with the surviving animals preparing to work with a new generation of humans together in a spirit of inter-species cooperation and fraternity. (The original Orwell novel, of course, ends with “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Which in context is definitely not a Happy Ending.)

I, uh, guess the film’s new human farmers won’t be keeping pigs (or any other animals) for meat.

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It feels a little sick to call it a happy ending, but the movie version of A Clockwork Orange ends with the main character cured of his anti-crime treatment and ready to get back to sex and ultra-violence. In the book, his treatment is also reversed, but then he sees the error of his old ways and becomes boring.

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Speaking of Orwell, in the 1956 British version of 1984, well , here:

While not exactly a “happy ending”, at least they’re being defiant and not defeated.

On the other hand, all the reports I’ve encountered of this alternate ending seem a bit apocryphal. I’ve never seen this alternate version available anywhere. Although IMDB also has this to say:

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Wouldn’t you know it – TV Tropes has a page devoted to this topic, with multiple examples –Revised Ending - TV Tropes

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This is half way there:

The Towering Inferno was based on two books; the ending of, “The Tower,” is the downer–the fire can’t be stopped, the whole building burns, everyone on the top floors dies. “The Glass Inferno,” has the (extremely implausible) ending Irwin Allen used for the movie.