'10 Cloverfield Lane' Ending That Might Have Been?
Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman in ‘10 Cloverfield Lane’ (Photo: Michele K. Short/Paramount Pictures via AP)
If you’ve seen 10 Cloverfield Lane – and if you haven’t, you may want to stop right here, because LOTS of spoilers ahead – you know that the movie’s final act veers into tonally and narratively different territory from what’s come before.
Just to repeat: SPOILERS AHEAD.
After spending all of the film trapped in that underground bunker with Howard (John Goodman), Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Michelle manages to escape and get outside where, initially, it doesn’t seem like there has been an attack like the one Howard described. But soon enough, Michelle realizes the world is not the same because it’s been invaded … by aliens … who, in at least one case, look like cousins of the monster from 2008′s Cloverfield.
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If that ending felt a little strange, that’s because, as noted by Collider, the original script features a totally different, alien-free ending. Collider points us to a post by The Film Stage detailing how the final moments of the movie were originally going to play out: Michelle escapes from Howard, who’s still alive, and drives away from his farm. “After traveling down empty roads and finding no one around to help her, she crests a hill and sees the Chicago skyline, smoldering and destroyed,” The Film Stage says of the initial screenplay. “No explanation is given. We don’t even know what she will do next, only that she now knows that Howard, for all his oddity, was correct. The final line in the script is, ‘She slowly pulls down the mask on the hazmat suit before taking a breath.’”
Clearly, some of those elements remain in the version of 10 Cloverfield Lane that’s screening in theaters; Michelle still learns that Howard was correct, and there is a shot of her pulling down the mask on her DIY hazmat ensemble. But the nature of what caused the national emergency is no longer ambiguous and we also know that Michelle resolves to drive right into the chaos unfolding in Houston.
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It’s natural to conclude that the alien element was added to more obviously connect this film to Cloverfield, although, as Collider points out, 10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg has said that’s not the case. Regardless of why the change was made, keeping things open-ended seems like a more interesting narrative choice and, I would argue, one that would still have been very much in keeping with the sense of mystery so intrinsic to both Cloverfield and 10 Cloverfield Lane, from a plot and publicity standpoint. The new ending is fine for 10 Cloverfield Lane, which maintains a tension level that refuses to allow audiences to fully exhale until it’s all over. But it’s fascinating to consider what it might have been like if the conclusion had been left closer to its original form.
Watch ‘10 Cloverfield Lane’ star Mary Elizabeth Winstead talk about the film’s ‘emotional roller coaster’:
