Anne Hathaway Convinced Director To Change Colossal Ending

***SPOILER WARNING!***

Gloria (Anne Hathaway) was living with her charming, British boyfriend (played by Dan Stevens) in New York, but when she was laid off from work, the writer’s life went downhill. Now that she has been unemployed for over a year and drinking all day and all night, her boyfriend breaks up with her and kicks her out of his apartment. With no money to her name, she moves back and quickly runs into Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), a childhood friend she hasn’t seen in years.

At first, he appears to be a super nice guy, giving her a job at his bar and hooking her up with tons of free stuff — such as booze, a large television, and even a futon.

Everything changes when Gloria realizes that she is responsible for a giant monster that suddenly manifests in Seoul, South Korea. In her drunken state, she thinks it is fun and reveals her secret to Oscar and two of his friends. She quickly sobers up when a simple fall causes death and destruction. However, when Oscar helps her up, a giant robot manifests in Seoul and he controls it. That’s the turning point in the film.

All of a sudden, Oscar no longer has to pretend to be a nice guy. Deep down he hates himself and it makes him feel good to see Gloria at her worst. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn that Oscar was never really Gloria’s friend. He was, and still is, a bully. And now that he can control a giant robot, and control Gloria by threatening to harm the people of Seoul if she doesn’t obey him, Oscar goes full a-hole.

To stop him, Gloria flies to Seoul and, now that she’s over there, her kaiju-like avatar appears in her hometown, scoops up Oscar, and tosses him to his death right after he calls her a “b-tch.”

What you may not know is that that wasn’t the original ending. Hathaway had concerns about its conclusion, so she convinced director/writer Nacho Vigalondo to changed it.

“Initially, [Gloria] threw him away in a more dry way,” Vigalondo explained to SR at SWSX. “It was like a visual confrontation. Two days before shooting the scene, Anne Hathaway called me, on a Sunday.” (Note: Vigalondo only refers to the acclaimed American actress warmly and by her full name.) “She was all of a sudden worried about the scene. She was like, ‘Okay. Can we make the movie in a way that she doesn’t kill him?’ Because it’s capital punishment.”

“And I was like, ‘Okay, once we meet that level of destruction, when she’s holding him? The movie is at its basics,’” he continued. “There’s no blood. There’s no dialogue. It’s just this pure thing, a pure elemental scene happening in showdown. It’s like the end of a spaghetti Western. You’ve reached a peak level of destruction. And after that? You can’t go back to plot. The movie ends there. Because he’s not only an abuser, he’s genocidal. Oscar commits genocide, the biggest crime, because he doesn’t care about other people. So if the guy ends up forgiven?…At the end of the day, it’s not about killing this character. It’s about killing what he represents. But at the same time, within the plot of the film, the ending has to be satisfactory.”

So, in order to make it satisfactory, the solution was to add the “b-tch” dialogue. “This guy, he’s not accepting from every level the lack of power,” Vigalondo explained. “He needs to be powerful. He’s addicted to power. He can’t let other persons be more powerful than him. So because of panic, because of the stress of being in her hands, he reveals his real nature. He’s not afraid. He’s just angry and desperate to be respected.”

After Gloria (Anne Hathaway) loses her job and is kicked out of her boyfriend’s apartment, she leaves her life in New York and move back to her hometown. When news reports surface that a giant creature is destroying Seoul, Korea, Gloria gradually comes to the realization that she is somehow connected to this far-off phenomenon. As events begin to spin out of control, Gloria must determine why her seemingly insignificant existence has such a colossal effect on the fate of the world.

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The film stars Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises) as Gloria, Dan Stevens (Beauty and the Beast) as Gloria’s ex-boyfriend, Jason Sudeikis (Saturday Night Live) as, Austin Stowell (Bridge of Spies) as Joel, and Tim Blake Nelson (The Incredible Hulk) as Garth.

It was written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo (Timecrimes, Extraterrestrial). “Colossal is my most ambitious script so far, and probably also the most personal one,” Vigalondo stated. “Having Anne and this terrific team around goes beyond my craziest expectations.”

Colossal is now playing!