"…it had a different ending but in the middle of shooting, I knew it was a piece of shit," Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu told us quite candidly last month. "I felt it and the film began to breathe by itself, and the characters began to grow. I went in and wrote it with Alexander [Dinelaris] and Nico [Giacobone], and I am so happy that I changed it. Now I feel very good about the ending. It feels very fair." But what about the scrapped finale? At the time, Inarritu didn’t share with us what he originally had in mind, only to say, "It would be so embarrassing. It was bad." Well, now we know.
Co-writer Dinelaris has spilled the beans on "The Q&A Podcast" (via Screen Rant), and we’ll just let him explain what the filmmakers originally had in mind **SPOILERS AHEAD**:
“Then the camera prowled like it did the whole film, went back stage through the halls we’ve seen the whole time and we’d get to the dressing room where literally Johnny Depp would be sitting looking in the mirror and putting on his Riggan Thomson wig and then the poster of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean 5′ would be in the back. In Jack Sparrow’s voice [it would say], ‘What the f*** are we doing here, mate?’ It was going to be the satire of the endless loop of that.”
And, it’s a bit easy to see why that was axed. Aside from the fact they couldn’t get Depp (who we’d guess thought this hit too close to the bone) nor do a parody of ‘Pirates 5’ (probably for legal reasons), it’s just a little too on the nose. Given everything that happens prior to Riggan Thomson’s leap out of the hospital window (a beautifully, enigmatic way to close the film with Emma Stone‘s beaming face watching him), suddenly flipping to a real life celebrity cameo would’ve been jarring and a bit easy. So here’s to better ideas winning the day.
