“World War Z”: From unhappy ending to happy ending
You may remember the year-long series I ran in which we went through the 1920 book “How to Write Photoplays,” written by Anita Loos and John Emerson. Loos was a prodigious ‘screenwriter’ [that term wasn’t popularized until years later] with 137 writing credits. Emerson has 45 writing credits. You can see every single one of those 50+ posts here.
I want to highlight two excerpts from that book with emphasis added:
People do not want very tragic stories which depress them for the next twenty-four hours. Hence the necessity for a happy ending in most stories. Few people like to cry, but every one likes to laugh. Therefore the story with many laughs has a hundred fold better chance than the one which deals with little Eva’s sad demise.
The amateur must always remember that people go to the motion picture theater to forget their troubles and become young again in a world of heroes and heroines, where everything is as it should be in the end.
So there you have it, proof that the “necessity” of a happy ending has been part of Hollywood’s conventional wisdom since its inception.
Give ’em what they expect, then give ’em what they want!
What they want is a happy ending. That’s the mantra about movies that has echoed in the halls of film studios for decades. Defy that conventional wisdom at your own risk… as the producers of World War Z discovered recently:
World War Z finally came out this weekend and it actually did quite well for itself, earning $112 million worldwide and already garnering sequel talk. This is surprising, after what seemed to be a cursed production, which included an entirely reshot third act. So what exactly was changed from the original version? In Vanity Fair’s June feature on the film, Damon Lindelof explained, “everything changes after Brad leaves Israel.” [Vague Spoiler Alert.] In the film, after some crazy stuff on the plane, Pitt and his badass Israeli soldier friend make their way to the World Health Organization facility in Wales. There, Brad Pitt realizes how humans can camouflage themselves from zombies. Having saved the day, he gets reunited with his family.
Happy ending, right? That was after a script rewrite and expensive reshoots dealing primarily with the story’s ending.
Basically, after some zombie battling, Pitt eventually figures out that zombies are susceptible to the cold and, as a result, the Russians are able to defeat the undead threat. Pitt gets his phone back and calls his wife, Karin (Mireille Enos), who hastily hangs up. Why does she hang up?
This is where it gets interesting: She hangs up because she now lives in a refugee camp in the Everglades “where you have to have something to trade to survive, and it just so happens the one thing Karin had to trade was herself.” So Karin’s new boyfriend, a certain soldier, calls Pitt back to fill him in on these details and tells him that he might as well just start a new life in Russia. That soldier was supposed to be Matthew Fox, thus explaining why the actor had a five-minute, one-line role in the finished film. The movie ends with Pitt landing on the Oregonian shore, on a mission to get his wife back.
The original ending involved the Protagonist — the Hero of the movie — discovering his Beloved had taken to shacking up with some asshole soldier?!?! I think we all can applaud the creative courage to go for a dark ending. But evidently, ‘saner’ heads prevailed. Hence the movie’s current happy ending.
Takeaway: A writer must respect their story. If it takes you to an inevitable unhappy ending, you have an aesthetic responsibility to go there. And sometimes unhappy endings work [see: Se7en].
But beware! Happy endings are the default. And in the case of World War Z, it might have made the difference between a flop and a franchise.
To read an extensive analysis of the original unhappy ending of WWZ, go here to Movie.com.
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