MOVIE URBAN LEGEND: Test audiences were so outraged at the original ending of Deep Blue Sea that the filmmakers killed off a character who was originally set to survive.

Perhaps the most terrifying part of the creative process in either a film or a new TV show is the dreaded test audience. After spending so much time getting your artistic vision to a certain point, only to let a seemingly random group of people off of the street get to mess with your ideas just because they MIGHT represent the views of the masses who would go to see your movie? That's downright frightening for any creative person. In the past, I've done a number of legends about how test audiences have dramatically changed the way that major movies and TV shows have turned out. For instance, test audiences balked at the original ending of Pretty in Pink, leading to reshoots featuring the female lead choosing a different guy to be with at prom. Test audiences dramatically altered the approach of The Big Bang Theory, with its original pilot being very different than what we ultimately saw (basically, Leonard and Sheldon stayed, everything else went, and even there, Sheldon's character was originally a bit of a horny mess). A particularly amusing example involved test audiences for Mad Dog and Glory finding it impossible to believe that Bill Murray's character would be able to beat up Robert DeNiro's character, so the final fight between the two (over a woman they both love) was reshot to make it an even fight (originally, Murray's character pummels DeNiro's character until he realizes that he really doesn't care enough about the woman in question, so he stops hitting him and just lets them be together. The reshot version has Murray's character reach the same conclusion after a more evenly matched fight).

A very specific type of test audience reaction, though, is when the test audiences turn on a very specific character. For instance, in the hit baseball comedy, Major League, Margaret Whitten played Rachel Phelps, a woman who received the ownership of the Cleveland Indians in a divorce settlement, and so she plans on moving the team to Florida, but must have the team hit certain attendance figures to trigger an out in her stadium agreement. So she tears the team apart, hoping that the fans will stop supporting the awful new roster, and then she'll be able to move the franchise. However, shockingly, the rag tag team of misfits starts to WIN. The impetus for the team starting to win was the discovery of her plot, as the team does its best to ruin her plans. In the original version of the film, though, Phelps was then revealed to have secretly orchestrated the whole thing. She knew the team COULD win, but she couldn't afford the original team, so she faked the whole thing to allow her to put together a group of misfits she knew were better than people expected. She never actually wanted to move the team, and in fact, she LOVED the team. Well, audiences just weren't prepared for that dramatic shift, as they had gotten too used to hating her by that point, so the filmmakers removed the twist and kept her as an outright villain. That same sort of "don't try to sell us on this character, we hate them" approach was used by test audiences when they forced a dramatic change to the ending of 1999's Deep Blue Sea.

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HOW DID DEEP BLUE SEA ORIGINALLY END?

The plot of Deep Blue Sea is that two scientists, played by Saffron Burrows and Stellan Skarsgård (Dr. Susan McCallister and Dr. Jim Whitlock), were experimenting in the brains of mako sharks to discover a way to sort of re-animate dead brain cells, which would then be used to cure Alzheimer's disease patients. They would be able to do this using a protein complex found in the shark's brains. The problem, though, was that the scientists discovered that the brains of the sharks were too small to harvest enough protein complex. So McCallister and Whitlock then decided to genetically engineer the sharks so that their brains would be much larger, thus providing more protein complex. Well, as a side effect of this genetic engineering, the sharks were now much smarter and thus much more deadly.

After Whitlock is killed, the sharks break loose within the confines of the research facility, and slowly begin to kill the personnel on the facility one by one (including a shocking moment when the shark eats a character played by Samuel L. Jackson right after he gives a big dramatic speech), as they plan their escape. The sharks escaping the facility would be very bad, because they would then breed with other sharks, and, well, I think you get why that would be a very bad thing. In the end, everyone dies except for McCallister and Carter Blake (Thomas Jane), the shark's "wrangler," but they at least kill all the sharks and keep them from escaping. The two survivors share a kiss. Here's a screenshot of the deleted ending....

Deep_Blue_Sea_1999_deleted_shot

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WHAT ENDING DID THE TEST AUDIENCES "FORCE" ON DEEP BLUE SEA?

Well, just a MONTH before the film was released, test audiences were shown the movie, and they HATED that McCallister survived. As they all seemed to note, she was the VILLAIN of the movie, it was her genetic engineering of the sharks that led to them becoming smart and extra deadly, so why did she get a heroic ending in the movie?

Director Renny Harlin later explained why the ending had to be changed:

Yeah, it was one of those great surprises where we thought, okay, we hope it works. At the test screening, as you might remember, the audience was really with the movie and when Sam Jackson gets eaten, the audience was screaming and laughing and we thought, okay, it’s a home run. When it came to the last seven minutes of the film, all of a sudden it just fell flat like a pancake and people kind of hated it. We were like, what the hell happened?

It just shows how sometimes you can be clueless and you’re so deep in the project that you can’t read the audience’s mind. Basically what had happened was that the audience felt so deeply that the scientist character, the woman who was behind the whole experiment with the sharks, that it was all her fault. In their minds, she was the bad guy and in our minds, she was the heroine and we thought saving her was the key. Basically, we had test cards that said, “Kill the bitch.” It was an amazing revelation.

I remember us all sitting down and going, “Holy shit, we are in trouble. How do we fix this?” It was my idea, I said, “Okay, we don’t have time for a big reshoot but I have an idea. When she falls in the water, what if she doesn’t survive. She gets eaten by the sharks and L.L. Cool J is the hero. Everybody likes him, and Thomas Jane.” We did a one-day reshoot at Universal Studios’ tank and it was a really simple shoot we did in order to change the ending of it. We did some CG work on the sharks and stuff like that, but it was a super fast fix and it saved the movie because the audience got what they wanted. It just goes to show that no matter how smart we think we are, it’s the audience who will tell us how it’s really supposed to be.

So now, Thomas Jane's character and LL Cool J's Preacher (the facility's cook) were the only survivors. Crazy. Now, could you read something into the fact that both times the test audiences just couldn't accept a character, that they were women (I mean, "kill the bitch"? For serious?), probably, but it IS fair to note that McCallister really DID lead to a lot of people dying through some underhanded tactics.

The legend is...

STATUS: True

Thanks to Fred Topel and Renny Harlin for that awesome piece of information!

Be sure to check out my archive of Movie Legends Revealed for more urban legends about the world of film.

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is bcronin@legendsrevealed.com.