Michael Moriatis/Paramount+
In the first unreleased version of Fatal Attraction, the hit 1987 erotic thriller about a deadly affair, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) kills herself with a knife that has Dan Gallagher’s (Michael Douglas) fingerprints on it, and Dan is arrested for her murder. The ending provided a melancholic, poetic justice of sorts, wherein Alex died but Dan still had to face some of the consequences of his actions. Test audiences, however, reportedly hated it.
According to Paramount powerhouse Sherry Lansing’s 2017 biography, audiences wanted to see Alex killed, brutally, and at the hands of Dan’s wife, Beth (Anne Archer). “They want us to terminate the bitch with extreme prejudice,” Lansing recalled another Paramount exec saying.
The ending was reshot and Alex met a violent end, wherein she shows up at the Gallagher family home with a knife and attacks Beth. After Dan tries to drown her in a bathtub, Beth gets the chance to shoot and kill the other woman. The film wound up being a smash hit and ultimately reigned at Number 3 at the U.S. box office that year. The new ending was widely lauded, with the exception of Close, who—in an oral history pegged to the film’s 30th anniversary—decried the decision to turn a character she loved “into a murdering psychopath.”