'My Best Friend's Wedding' wasn't supposed to end the way it did. Here is how it originally ended
My Best Friend’s Wedding was way ahead of its time and had one of the most perfect movie endings ever. Julianne (Julia Roberts) doesn't get the guy she loved but she realizes she doesn't need him to be happy. She also finds love "without sex but with a lot of dancing" in her best friend George who shows up at the wedding to check on her. As it turns out, that wasn't the ending that the makers had initially filmed.
The 1997 hit's writer, Ron Bass, said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly that Julianne's fate was very different in the first cut of the film.
Originally, the movie had a scene where Julianne meets another man at the very end of the movie. This scene was written to avoid the film ending on a sad note.
Bass said, “During a preview screening, the entire audience just goes dead; they hated it. So all the credit we got with the audience for her not getting the guy, we lost in that moment where another guy steps in.”
Thankfully, and also by ample luck, the filmmakers had the time to make changes that would go on to save the movie's fate. The very next day after the screening, the makers rewrote some scenes and added new ones throughout the movie. The actors improvised a lot of these scene including the now-iconic scene with George.
“One of the biggest reasons that I wrote the piece was to make the point that love is love,” says Bass. “The person in the world that she loved the most and that loved her the most was her best friend.”