Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler's “50 First Dates” celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, and Barrymore revealed on her daytime talk show of the same name the original ending of the 2004 classic romantic comedy. The film wasn't supposed to have a happy ending for the two main characters, Henry (Sandler) and Lucy (Barrymore).
“One of the things that always sticks in my mind is the original ending of 50 First Kisses, as it was called at the time,” Barry Moore said. “Yes, it was a drama set in Seattle. The original ending was her saying, ‘You should go and live your life, because this is not life here.’ And he goes away, as he does, and he comes back and walks into the restaurant and sits down and says, ‘Hi, I’m Henry.’ And the movie ends.”
Barrymore's co-host Ross Matthews responded to the revelation by saying, “Honestly, can I just say, 'Thank you. Thank you for changing that.'”
The film is about the love story between marine vet Henry (Sandler) and art teacher Lucy, who suffers from anterograde amnesia. Lucy regains her memory at the beginning of each day, so she has no recollection of ever falling in love with Henry. The film's theatrical sequence ends with the two of them together as they join their daughter on a boat in Alaska, where Henry continues his work.
In 2019, 50 First Dates director Peter Segal spoke to Entertainment Weekly about another alternate ending for the film in which Henry makes a grand gesture to help Lucy remember their vivid story. That version of the film ended with Lucy “waking up in bed and immediately looking at a mural on the ceiling that tells the story of her accident and her life” over the years.
“It was a mural that she painted, unlike the mural in her dad’s garage, which they painted every day so she had a blank canvas to work on, Henry left this mural so that when she woke up in the morning she could see a timeline of her last day to re-present it,” Segal said. “So by the time she finished moving her eyes from left to right, she was lingering on Henry, and unlike earlier in the film when she woke up in bed with him and he was a stranger again and she screamed and had a reaction, this was a way of introducing him back into her life.”
“It seemed like a fitting end for the couple until they shifted focus to Henry fulfilling his dream of studying walruses in their natural habitat,” the director continued. “The idea came up, ‘Well, what if Lucy and her father and their child were all there with him,’ and it seemed very exciting and very moving to me. The hardest thing about films is to come up with a strong beginning and a strong ending, and if you have that, you have a chance. I think to this day, it’s the best ending of any film I’ve done.”
Seagal has directed Sandler's films at several points in his career, including Anger Management (2003) and The Longest Yard (2005).
