Ambiguity doesn't sit easily in Hollywood. Nor does senseless death. If a major studio is bankrolling your film, you'd better bring your story to a neat and morally unambiguous ending.
You can have death, but only if it's a heroic act of self-sacrifice. Just ask Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis) in the final moments of Armageddon. With humanity facing annihilation from a massive asteroid, Stamper bites the bullet and blows himself up to save the world. Robert Neville (Will Smith) faces a similar fate in last year's I Am Legend, the adaptation of Richard Matheson's post-apocalyptic novel about one man's fight against a deadly virus and a horde of infected mutants. Believing he may be the only man unaffected by the virus, Neville, a virologist, single-handedly comes up with a cure and then blows himself up to protect a woman and child from the marauding mutants.
Or did he? When the DVD of I Am Legend is released on April 21, Neville is not so much an all American hero as a New Yorker packing up his SUV for a weekend in the country. The original ending included on the DVD shows a very different outcome, one that is reputedly much closer to the Matheson's novel. Neville does not blast himself into the afterlife; in fact no-one dies. Instead, Neville and his survivor pals are spared by the infected mutants and head off in their gas guzzler to a safe house in Vermont.
Warner Bros are said to have ditched this ending for a more commercial finale. It wouldn't be the first time box-office receipts have taken precedence over fidelity to the original text or artistic integrity. Director Ridley Scott originally wanted to bring Blade Runner to a close with the suggestion that Rick (Harrison Ford) was a replicant. Adrian Lyne also had a bleak vision for 1980s bunny-boiler Fatal Attraction: the original script saw Alex (Glenn Close) commit suicide and Dan (Michael Douglas) arrested for her murder.
Even comedies aren't impervious to a bit of tweaking. Dante (Brian O'Halloran) was due to be shot at the end of Kevin Smith's Clerks and bride-to-be Melanie (Reese Witherspoon) was meant to be struck by lightning at the end of Sweet Home Alabama. "No one thought it was funny - especially when the parents were looking at their dead daughter," said director Andy Tennant at the time.
It doesn't take a test audience to see that there aren't many laughs in a dead bride on her wedding day - but I Am Legend is a bleak slice of sci-fi, not a chick flick. Surely that audience can handle a bit of uncertainty?
