David Fincher Had Another Ending to SE7EN He Wanted to Shoot, But the Studio Stepped In and Said No

David Fincher is the mastermind director behind dramatic thrillers like The Game, Fight Club, Panic Room, Zodiac, The Social Network, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Gone Girl, and the brilliant series Mindhunter, but it all started with one of his darkest films in his portfolio, Se7en.

Back when the film hit its 20th anniversary, The Telegraph (via /Film) did a write-up all about the movie and its alternate endings we almost saw.

These include an ending where Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) kills Doe, an ending where Detective Mills (Brad Pitt) shoots Somerset to keep him from killing Doe, an ending where there's a race against time to save Mills' pregnant wife, Tracy (Gwyneth Paltrow), an ending where there's a dead dog in the notorious box, and an ending that takes place in a burning church.

But even with all those to choose from, Fincher favored yet another ending above all of those.

At the end of the actual movie, the killer John Doe (Kevin Spacey) has lured Somerset and Mills out to the middle of nowhere, with the promise that he's going to reveal the bodies of his last two victims. Fincher draws out the suspense as a delivery van suddenly appears, driving down the long dusty road to where the three men are. The van delivers a box, which we all know by now contains Tracy's severed head. Doe's plan is realized when Mills "becomes wrath," the seventh and final deadly sin, in which he kills Doe in a blind rage, thereby also punishing Doe for his own sin of envy. The two final bodies (three, if you count the baby) are Tracy and Doe himself.

This is where, if Fincher had gotten his way, the audience would have then seen a sudden cut to black as soon as Mills shoots Doe, leaving the audience hanging with a long moment of silence before the closing credits started to roll.

Instead, we got the studio’s ending, in which Somerset watches a police car drive away with Mills later that night. "Ernest Hemingway once wrote, 'The world is a fine place and worth fighting for,’" Somerset narrates. "I agree with the second part."

This was surely an easier letdown. I like a movie that gives me a little wrap up after such an intense punch to the gut, so I actually side with the studio on that one. But now that I’ve seen the movie plenty of times, it might be fun just to watch that version and see how it lands all this time later. Though I’m sure it would be much different seeing it that way your first time around.