There's been a lot of talk about how movies end lately, particularly with the news that Baz Luhrmann was forced to reshoot the ending of his upcoming Nicole Kidman/Hugh Jackman epic, Australia, to give it a more uplifting ending (beware spoiler-heavy news items on that one - they reveal who lives and who dies) and with director Zack Synder's recent admission that he altered the ending of his greatly anticipated comic-book adaptation, Watchmen, despite having spent the past year selling the film to fanboys with the promise that he's being hyper-loyal to the original text. It all raises the question - why is it so hard to figure out how to end a movie?

The closing moments of a film can totally make or break your opinion of the preceding movie. If a director botches the finish, you can feel like the previous two hours were a complete waste of time, so it's important to close on a good note. However, now that 80% of DVDs seem to come with 3 to 5 alternate endings minimum, you have to wonder why Hollywood, after a hundred years of filmmaking, is still having such a hard time figuring out the third reel. And the issue of studio-mandated re-shot or re-edited endings is still one of the touchiest subjects in the film industry. Granted, sometimes the studio endings work (the original ending of Frank Oz's Little Shop of Horrors was WAY too dark and needed to be lightened up), sometimes they turn the film into something completely different (Adrian Lynne's original ending for Fatal Attraction is less iconic and thrilling, but MUCH more thought-provoking), and sometimes they simply ruin the film (the "Love Conquers All" studio ending for Terry Gilliam's Brazil is nigh incoherent).

In other words, while we don't like hearing that Baz Luhrmann's Australia had its ending tweaked due to studio and test-screening demands, we're willing to give it the benefit of the doubt... for now. In fact, if we ever get the god-like powers over Hollywood that we ask for from Santa every year, we'd go back in time and drop some reshot endings into lots of movies, films that had potential, but just couldn't close the deal in the end. Here are our picks for ten movies with flawed enough endings that they really could've used some re-shoots and a few extra weeks in the editing room.

[Spoiler-Warning - The Endings of Movies You Really Should've Seen Already Will Be Discussed Below.]

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1. L.A. Confidential (1997)

Really? A movie that dark, that complex, that concerned with the murky shades of gray that occur when bad white men do bad things in the name of authority... and you're going to end it with an "aw shucks," riding-into-the-sunset moment straight out of a Disney film? Really? Let's all say what we're thinking - the movie should've ended with the shot of Guy Pearce holding up his badge in dark following the bloody shoot-out at the Victory Motel. That would've worked. And, while Pearce's attempt at explaining the criminal conspiracy was a nice try, the sudden resurrection of Russell Crowe and the beyond-happy ending just seemed awkward and out-of-place. However, in Curtis Hanson's defense, that scene is 100% loyal to how James Ellroy's original novel ends, but, since so much of Ellroy's story already had to be altered to work as a movie, it doesn't make sense that they kept the author's ending when it simply didn't mesh with the rest of the film. A fantastic Oscar-worthy film that almost flubs it in the final act.

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2. The Break-Up (2006)

We know, we know. The ending of The Break-Up was already famously re-shot after test audiences didn't really care for how Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn ended things in Peyton Reed's original version. (The first ending apparently involved the two characters running into each other at a street fair, both dating almost exact doppelgangers of their old flames.) However, the re-shot ending that was released theatrically - Jennifer and Vince run into each other, happier and healthier, with a promise that they might hook up again - didn't work either, which is a shame because the rest of the film is a surprisingly clever, funny, and insightful look at how relationships tend to wind to a close. The ending of The Break-Up just seems like such a cheat. The chemistry between Aniston and Vaughn is gone, they look physically different, the dialogue is way too cutesy, and the final "look back over their shoulders" moment is a class-A eye-roller. It's got to be painful to re-shoot an ending once, but The Break-Up needed a second do-over that never happened.

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3. A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001)

This might be a case where a movie didn't need a new ending as much as it needed LESS endings. Honestly, if you ever hear anyone bitching about the 16 almost-endings of Return of the King, point them to A.I. for an even-better example of a movie that didn't know when to quit when it was ahead. Fine, you HAVE to admire the ambition behind A.I. and give kudos to Steven Spielberg for working outside of his safety zone, but the story behind A.I. is more bloated than the Gluttony guy from David Fincher's Seven and that level of excess completely derailed the film's ending. For A.I. to work, the film needed to revolve entirely around Haley Joel Osment's character of David and his struggling to deal with his almost-humanity and pangs of love for his lost mother. However, when you rocket a thousand years into the future and start a whole new story with super-advanced mechas thawing out David to do "something" (we're still confused), it threw David's personal journey into the background, placing way more emphasis on the sci-fi elements rather than the emotions. Should've ended things with the Blue Fairy, Steve.

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4. Every M. Night Shyamalan movie since The Sixth Sense (1999)

For a guy that has developed this reputation as the "king of the twist-ending," M. Night Shyamalan sure knows how to ruin the closing moments of his movies. We'll admit - we loved the ending of The Sixth Sense. One of the all-time great movie twists. But it's been really painful to watch M. Night try to re-capture that same lightning in a bottle with such disastrous results. Unbreakable was 98% of a cool movie, but the final title card, stupidly telling us the fates of Bruce and Sam Jackson, made us throw up our hands in disgust. Similarly, Signs was a fantastically involving thriller... until they actually showed us the alien and made clear that these unstoppable invaders could be defeated with baseball bats, tap water, and pantry doors. The final twist in The Village - a movie with some great performances - is downright silly, and Lady in the Water is so smug about its self-importance that it swallows any sense of fairy tale whimsy that the film needed to survive. And don't even get us started on The Happening, one of the worst movies of 2008, which simply whimpers to a halt with no explanation. Who knows? Maybe M. Night made a deal with the devil - one perfect movie ending in exchange for five bad ones. Let's just hope that the debt is finally paid, and we can all move on now.

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5. X-Men: The Last Stand (2006)

Not that we were expecting Brett Ratner to deliver anything particularly spectacular or even "good" when he inherited the X-franchise from Bryan Singer, but the final moments of X-Men: The Last Stand were even more ineptly handled than we ever could've imagined. We won't even get into how Ratner ruined the ending of the "Dark Phoenix Saga" - one of the most revered X-Men storylines of all time - by turning Famke Janssen into a confusing, deluded mess with almost no reason or logic behind her actions (can you tell we're still a little peeved?), because Ratner's real sin was how he completely robbed his own movie of any weight or meaning by being spineless with his storytelling. Two major events happen in X-Men 3 - Professor X dies and several mutants, including Magneto, are "cured" of their mutant powers - and yet Ratner shows us in the film's final moments (and after the credits) that none of those changes in status quo will last. The cure doesn't work and Prof. X is alive and well, which all begs the question - then why the hell did we sit through 95 minutes of awfulness if NOTHING actually happened? This is the perfect example of a movie without ANY consequences, and those kind of cheats make for terrible, terrible movie endings.

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6. Psycho (1960)

Before you start, yes, we feel bad about including an Alfred Hitchcock movie on this list, especially since the movie is possibly one of the most iconic horror films in the history of cinema. But, as much as we revere Hitchcock's virtuosity, we have to admit - the tacked-on psychiatrist monologue "explaining" Norman Bates' psychosis is pretty awful, particularly given how good the rest of the movie is. We've heard multiple explanations of why Hitchcock included Dr. Richmond's rambling diagnosis of Bates' madness - it was necessary to get the movie past censors, audiences at the time weren't familiar with multiple personality disorders, etc. - but, watching the movie now, the scene is like a painful speed bump that you just can't wait to climb over. (Even Gus Van Sant shortened the psychiatrist's speech in his by-the-numbers remake of Psycho.) The final moments with Norman are chilling and the rest of the film is brilliant, but, by overexplaining in such a ham-handed fashion, Hitchcock almost ruined one of his all-time classics.

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7. Office Space (1999)

We hope this one won't inspire an army of Miltons to burn down our office or put strychnine in our guacamole, but it has to be said - Mike Judge's Office Space is two-thirds of a classic comedy. The set-up is PERFECT, and the first 40 minutes of Office Space taps into the pathos of the modern cubicle-farm employee in such a dead-on fashion that the movie deserves all the flair it's been given over the years. However, the third-act, Superman III, "we're trying to steal from the company, but not really" plot device is a pretty lame way for such a great comedy to whimper to a close. Even Mike Judge himself has admitted that the ending doesn't work, telling Entertainment Weekly, "Coming out of the last test screening I had an epiphany of what the ending should be ... A complete rewrite of the third act. You could feel how it should have ended." Unfortunately, we'll never see that ending (dammit!), so we'll just have to take solace in a really, pretty damn good comedy that's 75% of a classic.

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8. The Golden Compass (2007)

Note to filmmakers: if your story has no ending, maybe it's not that great of an idea to begin with. And that was the killing curse of Chris Weitz's lavish adaptation of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass - the movie simply didn't end. OK, the end credits rolled and they turned on the house lights, but, perhaps because Weitz was so positive that he was going to obtain funding to film the other two books in Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, he didn't bother to write an ending for The Golden Compass, which was a colossal cheat for both those familiar and unfamiliar with Pullman's original book. Granted, the book has a fairly ambiguous, open-ended conclusion, but Weitz didn't even give us that ending, choosing instead to save those scenes as the opening for his yet-to-be-greenlit (and never-gonna-happen) Subtle Knife movie and thus ending Golden Compass at a random, arbitrary, and unsatisfying story beat, which left audiences wondering, "Whua?" Even George Lucas didn't assume that he was going to get funding for more Star Wars movies after his first one, so he made sure that A New Hope was a self-contained story that worked on its own and drummed up interest for more adventures. Weitz's film just arrogantly assumes that there would be more Dark Materials movies, and that arrogance is the main reason why there won't be any more. Perhaps if he could've gone back and reshot scenes to give Golden Compass a more solid ending - or even AN ending - we might've seen more Philip Pullman on the big screen, but, at the moment, the alethiometer is pointing to "NO."

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9. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)

Oh, how one terrible, terrible line reading can almost sink an entire film. Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral is a funny, funny film - and the eulogy that John Hannah gives brings tears to our eyes every damn time we see it - but the movie's Achilles' Heel is the complete lack of chemistry between Hugh Grant and Andie MacDowell, particularly in the film's closing scenes. Sure, we can buy Hugh and Andie's silly banter for most of the movie, but, as the couple finally comes together in the closing reel, what should've been clever and heartfelt just comes off as contrived and embarrassing. It's a great idea to end a romantic comedy with a man telling a woman that he loves her, but, given his experiences at weddings, he never, ever wants to get married. That's a wonderful skewering of normal rom-com cliches. However, Newell never finds the right balance between his razor-sharp dialogue and blatant heart-string pulling and, thus, the film thuds to a close with Andie MacDowell offering one of the worst, least believable line-readings in movie history - "Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed." How that scene never got re-shot will forever remain as one of the great movie mysteries of all time.

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10. Stephen King's It (1990)

This one is a little bit of a cheat since it's a made-for-television movie, but Stephen King's It has become popular enough with horror fans that it deserves to be recognized as simply a film rather than an ABC programming event. And why is It so popular? 100% of the credit for that one goes to Tim Curry's bone-chilling performance as Pennywise the demon clown from Hell. We know more people who are afraid of clowns than are afraid of spiders, so we can't believe that it took so long for a horror movie to really, really capitalize on how terrifying those pants-dropping circus freaks can be. However, It also stands as a prime example of a horror movie director having no idea of what scary actually is, because, as the movie comes to a close, director Tommy Lee Wallace trades in Pennywise's monstrous visage for a 50-foot stop-motion-animated spider, which... is just really damn silly. Evil clowns who reach up from the sewer to grab you - scary. Claymation spiders right out of Clash of the Titans - not so much. Regardless of how Stephen King's original book ends, the cash-strapped It production should've had the threat circle back to Pennywise in the end - omitting the spider entirely - because THAT would've been scary. As is, the movie just screeches to a halt and everyone spends the rest of the night talking about how lame the spider was, while keeping an eye out for roving gangs of clowns on the horizon.

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What do you think? Did we miss some obvious choices for movies that needed re-shot endings? Would you like to see Orson Welles' take another shot at the Rosebud reveal? Still smarting from the cop-out (pun intended) ending of Minority Report?

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