To be real, Get Out is still haunting us even though it’s been in theaters for almost a month.
Jordan Peele’s widely successful racial horror film is nothing like we’ve ever seen before. It has sparked a gazillion think pieces on race in post-Obama America, and it has brought in over $100 million dollars at the box office, making Peele the only first-time writer/director to do so.
— Get Out spoilers ahead.
If you’ve seen the film, you know that Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a Black photographer heads upstate with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams), to meet her parents for the weekend. Things go left REAL FAST, and in the end, Chris narrowly escapes by killing Rose’s entire family and leaving her for dead. At the very last moment, his friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), a TSA agent arrives in his TSA issued car to help him escape. The ending was refreshing as hell, especially when you consider the fact Black people nearly always die before the end of horror movies. To be real, we’re usually the first people in the film to perish. Despite all of the excitement surrounding the film’s ending, Jordan Peele recently revealed that things weren’t originally supposed to go down that way.
On the Buzzfeed podcast, Another Round, Peele explained that in earlier drafts of the script, Rod did not arrive to get his friend. Peele said, “There is an alternate ending in which the cops actually come at the end. [Chris] gets locked up and taken away for slaughtering an entire family of white people and you know he’s never getting out; if he doesn’t get shot there on the spot.”
Sir what?!!! Obviously, in an era of police brutality and mass incarceration, that’s the last ending Black people wanted to see. It hits WAY too close to home, and quite frankly it would have left most of us devastated. Peele went on to say that his initial thinking with that original ending was to prove that there is no such thing as a post-racial America.
However, as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement and everything Black people have been through in this country, Peele decided to change the ending. He said, “It was very clear that the ending needed to transform into something that gives us a hero, that gives us an escape, gives us a positive feeling when we leave this movie. […] There’s nothing more satisfying than seeing the audience go crazy when Rod shows up.”
We’re just glad that Jordan Peele let us relish in a bit of escapism with a much more satisfying ending. If Chris had gotten arrested in the end, Peele would have been dealing with a lot of pissed off moviegoers.
What do y’all think about the alternative ending? Did Jordan Peele make the right move in the end?
