10 Movies With the Most Wildly Different Alternate Endings

We all know the endings of our favorite movies, right? The Hobbits save Middle-earth from Sauron. Butch and Sundance leap out of hiding straight into a hail of bullets. “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Movies tend to stick to one single, memorable ending, because that’s what we all like and expect. A story should have a conclusion, and the conclusion should be definitive. Otherwise, an audience may get confused, or the message of the movie may get muddled.

Because moviemaking is such a complicated business, sometimes extra stuff gets shot and never used. (Really, that happens most of the time.) Often, some of that extra footage has to do with the ending. Maybe there was an extra few seconds that were cut, or a scene that wasn’t quite necessary or didn’t work. Or maybe there were multiple possibilities for the ending of the movie, and only one ended up being used.

Thanks to DVD special features and other such avenues, filmmakers can show us all this extra stuff, including all the extra possibilities for a film’s final shot. Maybe the original ending was too confusing to test audiences and the studio mandated edits, or maybe they weren’t exactly sure which ending would work until they were piecing it all together, or maybe a movie has multiple endings on purpose in order to play around with its own format. Whatever the reason, there are movies out there that have more endings than others, and we’ve gathered the best ones together in this list. (Spoiler alert, obviously.)

READ MORE: The Best Ambiguous Movie Endings