Drew Barrymore is recalling the original ending to her and Adam Sandler’s 2004 rom-com, 50 First Dates.
In a clip from her talk show uploaded on Instagram Sunday, the actress is asked by her cohost Ross Mathews if any of her movies ever had “a different ending that you changed after, I don’t know, focus groups or consulting or feeling different?”
The question immediately jogged Barrymore’s memory. “Something that always sticks in my mind is the original ending of 50 First Kisses, as it was called at the time,” she replied. “Yeah, it was a drama set in Seattle.”
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50 First Dates tells the unexpected love story between Lucy (Barrymore), an art teacher with anterograde amnesia with no recollection of any day after her accident, and marine veterinarian Henry (Sandler). The couple manage to fall in love and start a family while navigating her condition at the end of the film but, as Barrymore revealed, their happily ever after wasn’t always assured.
“The original ending was her saying, ‘You should go and live your life, because this is no life here,’” she told Mathews. “And he goes away, as he does, and he comes back and he walks into the restaurant and he just sits down and says, ‘Hi, I’m Henry.’ And the film ends.”
To say Mathews was shocked by the bittersweet ending was an understatement. “Do you see what I’m talking about!” he told the audience. “Honestly, can I just tell you: Thank you. Thank you for changing it.”
Barrymore isn’t the only one who has shared an alternative ending to 50 First Dates. Speaking with Entertainment Weekly in 2019, director Peter Segal revealed that its original script ended with “Lucy waking up in bed and immediately looking at a mural on the ceiling that tells the story of her accident and life” over the years.
“It was a mural that she painted that, unlike the mural in her father’s garage, which they painted over each day so she had a blank canvas to work on, this one Henry left up so that when she woke up in the morning she could see a pictorial timeline of her last day to reintroduce her,” he explained. “So by the time she finished panning with her eyes from left to right, she would come to rest on Henry, and unlike earlier in the movie when she woke up in bed with him and he was a stranger again and she screamed and had a reaction, it was a way of reintroducing her to her life again.”
It seemed like a fitting ending for the couple until they pivoted to focus on Henry realizing his dream of studying walruses in their natural habitat. “The idea came up, well, what if Lucy, her father, and their child were all there with him, and that just seemed really exciting and very emotional to me,” he said. “The hardest thing in movies is come up with a strong beginning and a strong end, and if you have that, you’ve got a shot, and I think to this day, it’s the best ending to any movie that I’ve done.”
In 2020, Barrymore and Sandler reprised their roles on her talk show and provided an update on Lucy and Henry’s marriage. “Hi Lucy, good morning! It’s me, Henry,” Sandler said. “We are on, I think, our 5,000th date together and it’s been great. I want to catch you up.”
Watch Barrymore recall the scrapped alternate ending in the clip above.