The first time I saw Frank Darabont’s feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist, it was at a test audience screening. I was a big fan of King’s story and I also enjoyed that 3D sound audio play that was released, and when the movie finished with that new ending, it felt like I was punched in the gut. It hurt so bad, but at the same time, I admired that Darabont took such a big swing like that. Up until that point, I had never felt anything like that while watching a movie before.
The question is… if that movie was made today, would that ending have made it into the movie? The film’s star Thomas Jane isn’t sure if they would’ve gotten away with it. During a past interview with the Daily Dead, he said:
“I know [director] Frank Darabont was offered more money, like double the budget, if he’d have just changed the ending. And we all said, ‘No, we’ll take less money.’ […] I don’t know if you could get away with a ‘Mist’ today, it might be tough, but we snuck that one in and we’re proud of it.”
King’s novella ends with the main character of the story, David Drayton, catching a possible word through radio static; he then whispers two words in his son’s ear. King writes, “One of them is Hartford. The other is hope.”
In the movie, Drayton (Jane) shoots his son and three of the other survivors to spare them the horrors of being brutally killed by terrifying monsters. The gut punch came when not long after Drayton killed them all, help arrived.
Jane might be right. I think the studio might have pushed harder to keep the hopeful ending, and I don’t think the studio would have made the offer that they made Darabont, to give the film a bigger budget if they kept the original ending. Regardless, what’s done is done, and it’s something that they don’t have to worry about now. They got their way and while some people liked it, it also pissed a lot of audiences off.
Darabont previously talked about the movie, and he said he has no regrets about it:
“Hey, I love a happy ending just as much as anybody. It’s satisfying. I get a happy ending, God knows. But I also love ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ I also love ‘The Thing.’ I also love those movies that really just dare to challenge the audience. Sometimes shit doesn’t work out and sometimes you made the wrong decisions even if you meant well. Life is like that.”
King actually supported Darabont’s new ending, and the director continued:
“When Steve read the script, and I said, ‘I won’t make it if you don’t want me to,’ he said, ‘We need movies that dare to piss people off. We need movies like that, too.’ We need that ‘Night of the Living Dead’ thing, where it’s not just tied up in a nice bow and there’s just this reassuring happy Hallmark bumper sticker thing.”
What do you think? DO you think Darabont would have been able to get away with that ending today?