To be very clear: If you somehow did not read the headline of this post, we will restate — this is a discussion about the ending of Gone Girl the movie. There will be spoilers for both the book and the movie. If you are not prepared to have literally everything spoiled for you, do not read this post. (Counter-warning: If you do read this post and then complain about spoilers, we will hunt you down with the vengeance of a thousand Amys.)
So … it’s the same. Exactly the same, as far as we can remember: the speech about Nick on TV (“that’s the man I want to be withâ€); the one burst of domestic violence; Nick working with Detective Boney and Go to make a case against Amy; the frozen sperm and the pregnancy; the “we’re gonna be a happy family!†ending. Desi’s mother doesn’t make an appearance, but that is a very small change in what is essentially an identical plot.
But why did we expect anything different? Vulture’s Jennifer Vineyard spoke with Gillian Flynn about the ending controversy, and her story is basically: Blame Ben Affleck and blogs.
The story is, we were never actually thinking about changing the ending. I can tell you how it happened: There was a quote from David that kind of got misunderstood, where Ben had said, “Oh my gosh, Gillian threw out the whole third act!†Well, I probably had. When I rewrite, when I find something’s not working, I’ll try to Frankenstein it and everything, “Ah! I’m going to rewrite it!†So I was streamlining the third act and figuring out what scenes to put in there, but I think people thought that meant I had thrown out the ending. And then that got picked up by all the aggregation sites, and pretty soon, it was [reported as] me who was saying it, and bragging about it. I did a Reddit thing where I tried to clarify, and then it was being reported, “Stepping back from her earlier comment that she had thrown out the ending, Gillian is now saying …†It was like, “Ugh!†They don’t even bother to check the original source.
It was fun watching it take on its own, weird life, and watching different people start weighing in on it. And also, they could have … I’m pretty accessible. They could have actually called and gotten me on the phone, or gotten someone, and I would have happily clarified it. But after a certain point, we were like, “It’s sort of fun to just let it have its own life.â€
So yeah, sorry about that.