Details on an Alternate Ending For BRIGHTBURN and How The Franchise Could Continue

The James Gunn-produced super powered horror thriller Brightburn was released this weekend and I’m sure many of you went to the theater to check it out. I did, and I thought it was ok.

I didn’t love the movie. I liked it, I thought it was well made with a solid script and great acting, but damn… it was a bummer of a story. There was really no redeeming value to it, it was just a dark film that left me feeling bummed out and joyless at the end.

Regardless of how it left me feeling, the creative team did a great job bringing their story to life. If their objective was to make you feel like crap by the end of the movie, they totally succeeded!

During a recently interview with /Film, screenwriters Brian and Mark Gunn, shared details on an alternate ending for the film that they came up with, and also discussed potential sequel plans.

If you haven’t seen Brightburn yet, proceed with caution:


During the climax of the film, Tori Breyer (Elizabeth Banks), the woman who adopted the villainous alien Brandon (Jackson A. Dunn), tries to use a piece of the ship he fell to Earth in to kill him. That is the only material that is able to pierce his skin. This attempt to kill him doesn’t work, though, and he ends up grabbing her flying her up into the sky and dropping her to her death. You see what I mean when I say the movie bummed me out!

Brian revealed that in the original screenplay, Tori actually succeeded in killing Brandon saying, “In our original draft, the mother, Tori, was victorious. She killed her son and then I think we all kinda realized the movie is about the kid. He has to survive. We all thought it was more shocking for him to win.”

Yeah, it definitely was more shocking, but I was hoping that she would put an end to Brandon’s super-powered murder spree. But, they wanted to keep the film open for a sequel and keep that murder spree going.

When it comes to that sequel, the future stories were set up by Michael Rooker, who popped up as a conspiracy theorist during the credits. During that sequence, he was going off about other supervillains who are going to terrorize the world. Mark went on to say:

“Michael Rooker character is a conspiracy guy and he talks about how there are these other supervillains out there terrorizing the world, that they’re all of a piece with Brandon and that the world needs to get its act together and stop them before we all die.”

Some of the villains that Rooker described sounded like they were based on other popular heroes like Aquaman and Wonder Woman. Mark added:

“There may have been some similarities between the characters he was describing and other popular movie characters, but again we like the idea of a universe where your expectations of certain superhero tropes are subverted.”

So I guess we can expect to see more of these supervillains show up and wreak havoc on the world. The question is… will there be a hero?

It’ll be interesting to see where the story goes for the next film. Since this first movie was set in a small town, I imagine that the sequel would take place in a big city.

Did you like Brightburn? What would you want to see in a sequel?

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