As she screams, the credits begin to roll. Hailing from the United Kingdom, the American version of The Descent concluded with Sarah Carter ( Shauna Macdonald) seemingly escaping the caves she and her friends were trapped in, getting into her car, and then getting spooked by one final jump scare in the form of a hallucination of friend Juno ( Natalie Mendoza). Though a wildly different film from one where Gosling and McAdams smooch in the rain, the Neil Marshall horror film The Descent is another perfect example of how a movie’s downer ending can get tweaked for a certain territory. Neil Marshall's 'Descent' Is Another Example of an Altered Movie Ending For a Different Market This is a common refrain across these altered endings, as most of them hinge on wanting to not disturb or alienate moviegoers. However, given that the revised ending dilutes the original conclusion and makes it ambiguous whether or not the elderly couple pass away, it’s likely this tweak was done to make something more palatable to the general public. But it’s actually a common practice for certain films, albeit for wildly diverging reasons.Įven with the multitude of possibilities for why a movie can get a different ending, no concrete purpose for the existence of this alternate Notebook ending has ever been revealed nor why it was just restricted to Netflix UK. Considering how famous The Notebook is, not to mention that it hails from a high-profile American film studio, it may be baffling to realize there were multiple endings floating around for the movie in different markets.

So it was when Netflix UK uploaded an alternate version of The Notebook, one where an awkward shot of birds soaring above a lake closes out the feature instead.

The notoriety of this ending means that, if somebody were to adjust it, that would cause quite a stir. In the proper theatrical cut, the film closes with these older lovers passing away in each other’s arms. These two are also the elderly couple in the movies framing device, who’d been previously reading the period-era exploits of the film’s younger leads as if they were different fictional beings. This touching conclusion involves the reveal that the young couple in the 1930s (played by Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams) that we've been following this whole movie is not what they seem. At this point, every part of The Notebook has become famous enough that you don't even need to have seen the movie or be that much of a fan to know its ending.

The notebook original book