THE MIST Director Frank Darabont Stands by His Brutal, Gut Punch Ending

Fun fact, Frank Darabont’s feature film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist was the very first review that I ever wrote that was published online. I sent the review to Ain’t It Cool News back in the day, and they published it! That first review lit a spark in me that led to me wanting to start a movie geek website of my own, now here we are 15 years later!

Anyway, The Mist was such a great film! I was already a huge fan of King’s novella and the 3D-audio play. But, this movie brought the story to life in an amazing way, but it also changed the ending of the story and it was quite controversial at the time.

When I first saw the film at a test audience screening, that ending felt like a brutal punch to the gut. It was an ending that really hurt. I get what Darabont was trying to do with it and I was actually fine with the ending because of the emotion that it brought out in me. I know people like those happy Hollywood endings, but this was not that, this ending was devastating, and Darabont was willing to take audiences to that dark place.

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 (Thomas 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. Darabont has no regrets about this telling /Film's Eric Vespe:

"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 Darapont’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."

The movie could have had a happier ending, where the survivors head for Hartford in their car and live to hope for another day. But as the filmmaker said: "Life doesn't always hand you a happy ending, does it?" In fact, Darabont turned down a bigger budget for the film because he wanted to keep his ending. Paramount Pictures wanted to make it for $60 million, and when Darabont didn't want to go that route there was another producer who wanted to do it for $40 million, but that wasn’t going to work. Then Bob Weinstein jumped in:

"I walked away from the $40 million budget, and the only person who stepped up and had the cojones to greenlight it was Bob [Weinstein]. I got a call from Bob and he said, 'I love your script, totally fine with the ending, but you gotta make it for this price,' which was a bit less than half of what the other guy was offering. So I had that night of the soul where I'm going, 'Instead of paying myself my directing fee, I'll take scale. Instead of having some luxury of time to shoot, I'll have to shoot on half the schedule.' I've never, ever done a movie like that before."

Darabont ended up going to Stephen King for some advice on what to do and he said: "He responded by saying, 'Okay, so take the pay cut. Work for scale. Why not? It's the movie that you want to make. And by the way, there is a great tradition in our genre of working with lower budgets and restrained resources. Go make your low-budget movie.' And I thought, 'Okay, by God, I will.'"

He then asked Bob Weinstein to stay out of his way while shooting the movie because he didn’t want there to be any changes from his original vision. Weinstein agreed and we got the movie we got and Darabont got his ending.

What did you think of The Mist and the ending of the film?