McG Considered Releasing 'This Means War' With Alternate Endings

It takes a gutsy filmmaker — and, perhaps more to the point, a gutsy studio — to emulate the strange release of the 1985 film Clue. When originally released, Clue went out with three different endings, and audiences didn't know which one they were going to see. (There's also a reported fourth ending, but that's a topic for another post.) The endings were collected for the home video release, and most people have seen the edit of Clue where each possible ending is played in succession.

McG has just finished This Means War, the film in which Tom Hardy and Chris Pine play best friends and fellow CIA operatives who discover they're both dating the same woman, played by Reese Witherspoon. It's a big, weird romcom, essentially, and as such might not be the most serious movie around. And so at one stage of development, the idea of doing Clue-style multiple endings was thrown around. No real spoilers follow, but if you don't want to know anything at all about how this movie might end, beware what lies below the jump.Movieline reports that at a press day for This Means War, McG said,

We wanted to have flexibility and even talked about two endings and releasing it on 3,000 screens — 1,500 have this [ending] and 1,500 have that one, and just not saying anything... But it felt a little gimmicky in the end.

One ending would have had Witherspoon's character choosing Hardy, the other Pine. McG also joked about a third ending, "where the two boys end up in each other's arms." But the concept behind this movie was evidently too important to be trifled with by releasing multiple endings. Too bad. (Personally, I'm hoping that Reese also turns out to be some sort of intelligence agent who is playing the guys against one another, and ends up killing them both in the end.)

Perhaps the best quote of the day references McG's last big film, however, rather than This Means War, when Tom Hardy insisted that he should have shot the man on man ending:

I know, I know...I pussed out on the ending of Terminator 4... so I should've gone for the dark ending of this one.

This Means War opens next Tuesday, February 14.