Well, “Mercutio” and “Tybalt” both die as well. The difference is that “Juliet” and “Paris” both survive. (And “Paris” kills “Romeo,” rather than being killed by him, instead of Romeo committing suicide.)
A slightly different case: Jack Finney’s The Body-Snatchers had a happy ending, wherein the aliens, frustrated at earthling resistance, said, “Screw it, let’s blow this popsicle stand,” and left.
But then the 1956 movie got made, with the perfect ending: the lone survivor of the invaded town, knowing that the pods were being exported across America, is running in traffic, yelling at people to listen to him. It’s clear that everyone is going to think he’s a lunatic and ignore his warnings until it’s too late.
But then the studio couldn’t stand this downbeat ending, so they insisted on a frame-story, in which the survivor is recounting the events to a cop–and the cop believes him! It’s clear that America is going to stop this foreign menace.
So, happy–>sad–>back to happy.
Then the 1978 movie got made, and it was back to a bleak ending.
I thought of this, but I consider her going back to Higgins to be a more depressing ending, so wasn’t sure it counted.
Not only that – they got Kevin McCarthy back to play the guy yelling “You’re next!” at the cars, only it happens at the beginning of the 1978 film.
They got him to do it again in Looney Tunes – Back in Action in 2003.
As Susan Hayward said about The Snows of Kilimanjaro, they only changed one thing from the novel - Harry doesn’t die at the end.
Spoilering this because “His Dark Materials” just started-
The movie version of “The Golden Compass” cuts out the entire ending of the book where
Asriel kills Roger.
My wife has only seen the movie, not read the books, so I’m very interested to see her reaction to when the show gets to that point.
Oh boy… that ending is completely out of step with the spirit and feel of the whole movie. It’s a down ending for the sake of a down ending.
The original novels The Day of the Triffids (1951) differs in many ways from the 1962 movie. However, both have an ending in which the house where the good guys have taken refuge is taken over by bad guys (representatives of a despotic government in the book, convicts in the movie), but manage to escape when the house is attacked by triffids, who destroy the bad guys. They head for other refuges where other good guys are holding out (the Isle of Wight in the book, France in the movie). The movie, however, tacks on an ending where a lighthouse keeper discovers that salt water dissolves the monsters, giving them a way to eradicate them easily.
Brian De Palma [del]ripped off[/del] homaged Vertigo (with a few elements [del]stolen[/del] borrowed from Rear Window) and while in 1984 he could include elements that Hitchcock in 1958 could not (nudity, cursing and graphic violence) De Palma decided the improvement that really needed to be made was adding a happy ending.
The original Corman film and the play it’s based off end the same way, the plants win
Seymour entered into a Faustian bargain with A2, he may not have directly committed murder as he never actually performed the killing act, but his actions resulted in deaths, he’s at least guilty of manslaughter.
In the “Hollywood” ending, both Mushnik and Scrivello end up dead and Seymour gets away with it.
Being struck mute, dancing on bleeding glass in soles feet, sisters shave their heads for nothing, getting your heart broken and doing ‘good deeds for people for 300 years’=‘meh’.
At the end of the Corman film, after Audrey II eats Seymour and his face appears in her last flower, the flower dies (like the previous ones) and she appears to be dead. While she’s killed Seymour, there’s no indication that she or her offspring are going to take over. The plant hasn’t “won.”
Yeah, the Hans Christian Anderson story is actually horrifically sadistic. OK, the Little Mermaid gets to go to heaven after extreme suffering, but there’s no reason Ariel wouldn’t go to heaven after a long and happy life with Eric.
The World According to Garp. Garp is shout dead in the book, and the final chapter is a rundown of what happened to the people in his life. The movie ended with Garp and his wife Helen in a helicopter, being transported to a hospital. Garp was alive and talking.
Rumor has it that they wanted to keep Garp alive in case there was talk of a sequel. There was not.
At the end of the novel ** Far From the Madding Crowd**, Bathsheba marries the reliable Gabriel, but it is made clear that she will never fully reconcile herself to the fact that she is no longer with her first husband, the late, dashing Frank Troy. The fantastic 1967 film demonstrates this. However, the pointless 2015 film version makes it an unreservedly happy ending, with unrestrained smiles all round. Such happiness does not belong in the world of the Thomas Hardy big 6 novels.
Something interesting about the movie version–it makes Seymour a little less culpable for Mushnik’s death. (Orin’s death was the same as in the play–Seymour just stood aside and let it happen–only the song that went with it was cut.) In the stage version, Seymour deliberately misled Mushnik into climbing into A2’s pod by telling him he’d hid the day’s profits in there for safekeeping. In the (musical) movie, he does the same thing that he did with Orin…just stands aside and lets it happen while A2 sneaks up on Mushnik. I guess this was to make him seem more redeemable, as is his willingness to risk his own life to take on A2.
I can see why they changed the ending for the movie. For one thing, as Frank Oz himself said, there’s no curtain call in a movie so the audience can see the actors are okay…they’d gotten to know and love Seymour and Audrey and thought the ending was unnecessarily cruel.
For another, having seen the ending (great special effects aside), the feel of it is quite different. The stage ending had a sense of black comedy, with A2’s victims in the blossoms as in the Roger Corman movie. But we don’t get a sense of that in the movie’s original ending–all we see are completely innocent people getting killed and menaced, so I can see where that would be disturbing. (Plus, during the original “Mean Green Mother”, there are all these really disturbing closeups of Seymour’s terrified face as A2 slowly lifts him toward his jaws, so I can also see where THAT would be upsetting.)
How about Little Big Man? The movie ends with a character admitting sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn’t, but in the book the magic does work. You may or may not think one is happier than the other.
This is what I came here to write. I was appalled. And the stupid singing… I really like Audrey Hepburn, BUT!!! :mad: