Have you seen Bird Box?
You probably have.
Something like 1,467 million people streamed it during its first week on Netflix.
Well, maybe not quite that many but it was still a significant number of people who sat down over Christmas to watch Sandra Bullock be blindfolded for two hours.
If you’re one of the extremely few people who haven’t seen it though or, God forbid, don’t even know what it’s about, here’s a quick summary.
Sandra Bullock and her kids that she doesn’t want end up on a river in a post apocalyptic world where you can’t look outside or else some unknown force/monster/whatever will get you and you’ll kill yourself.
It’s almost like a cross between the atrocious film The Happening, and the really quite good film A Quiet Place, with a lot of extra questionable dialogue thrown in and also John Malcovich is there.
Despite this, people are going mad for this movie – so mad that they’ve even started carrying out a little thing called the Bird Box Challenge where they do seemingly normal tasks while blindfolded… just like the people in the film.
Still though, no matter how you feel about the film or the reams of people who are clearly going to end up in hospital because of it, there is something about the story’s original ending that pretty much changes everything.
Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen it yet.
At the end of the movie, Sandra Bullock and her kids end up in a school for the blind, meaning that everyone who lives there is therefore safe from the monster because they can’t see.
Lovely.
The original ending however, in the book written by Josh Malerman, is a lot darker.
It sees the family reach the sanctuary, only to discover that everybody there has blinded themselves to live.
Yeah, see? Told you it was grim.
The film’s director Susanne Bier has since revealed that they opted to change the ending for Netflix to leave people with a more positive feeling.
“In a way, pretty much everything I’ve done has had some sort of a hopeful ending,” she told Polygon.
“I’m not particularly interested for the audience to leave, from the cinema or their own screen, with a kind of completely bleak point of view.
“That’s not really what I believe in.”
