Movies

This 'Sausage Party' Alternate Ending Was Just A Little Too Weird To Exist

sausage party alternate ending
By Jacob Hall

It's hard to believe that the final twenty minutes of Sausage Party actually exist. Up until that point, Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan's R-rated talking food comedy is ambitious and weird and uneven, often hitting scenes of genuine brilliance and occasionally getting bogged down in material that doesn't quite work. But then the ending happens and your jaw hits the floor and you start to wonder if someone has been pumping noxious fumes into the room for the past hour and you're just in the midst of a pre-death hallucination because how else could this possibly exist.

And as newly released featurette reveals, that ending originally went on a little longer and went to another, even weirder place.

The Sausage Party alternate ending was teased on Twitter to promote the digital release of the film in the iTunes store. Vernon, Tiernan, and screenwriters Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are among the talking heads here, explaining that they found themselves tinkering with the film's final moments, not sure how and when to end the movie. After all, how do you top an army of sentient food declaring war on the human race using toothpicks laced with bath salts as the weapon of choice and then having a massive, graphic orgy throughout the supermarket? It's all kind of downhill from there.

The theatrical version of the movie ends with the food realizing that they're actually in a movie and venturing through a portal to our dimension to confront their creators, the final moment of weird satire in a film built around giving the finger to organized religion. But the original version took things a step further...

Interestingly, this extended ending is the one that I saw when the film held a work-in-progress screening at the SXSW Film Festival earlier this year. In this extended ending, the characters venture through the portal and arrive in a live-action Los Angeles, where they see Seth Rogen, Edward Norton, and Michael Cera (all of whom voice characters in the movie) devouring hot dogs in a nearby diner. As the trio chats about life and what-not, the team of dimension-hopping food approaches them and readies for an attack.

And having seen it, I can tell you that they were right to remove it from the final cut. It's admirably weird and totally bonkers, but it's a letdown after that truly absurd climax. With this extra five minutes, the movie goes on a little too long, petering out rather than ending with a bang (pun unintended, but I'll take it). I'm happy this footage exists and I'm happy that people who enjoyed the movie will have the chance to check it out, but everyone involved made the right choice.

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