5 'Happy' Movie Endings (That Aren't)

The Horrible Aftermath:

First of all, we're explicitly told that the energy produced by laughter is "10 times more powerful than screams." That's all well and good, but the monster world doesn't exactly appear to be in the grips of an energy crisis. A sudden 1,000 percent increase in energy efficiency means that you can lay off 80 percent of your workforce and still double your output, so the world of Monsters, Inc. is about to have an unemployment rate higher than any Third World country.

Secondly, it takes absolutely no effort to make children laugh (for example, Cars is far and away the most successful Pixar movie, and Cars is about as funny as a dead clown). At the end of Monsters, Inc., Mike gets his entire daily quota of laughter from a single child just by delivering a mighty belch. That is the very definition of unskilled labor. Anyone who graduated from Monsters University now has a degree in scaring that isn't worth the paper it's printed on, since all it takes to throw kids into fits of hysterical laughter is a long, whistling fart.

And all of this is in a world where scream production was the center of their economy -- imagine the Middle East if overnight somebody invented a technology that rendered oil worthless. Sure, energy is suddenly cheap, and that'll surely make for some lower air conditioning bills, but that's not much of a silver lining in a devastating economic depression. A crisis that, by the way, will soon flood the streets with thousands of unemployable monsters, each harboring a bitter grudge against human children.

Max Da Costa, who is apparently the only poor white person still in existence, battles his way up to the orbiting gated community of Elysium and sacrifices his life to install a virus that makes Elysium's hyper-advanced medical technology (consisting of beds that instantly heal people of any ailment) available to everyone back home on Earth, regardless of race or financial standing. It's a scathing piece of social commentary about explosions, robot police, and Jodie Foster's laughably imprecise French accent.

The Horrible Aftermath:

Free health care for everyone is fine and dandy, but it doesn't fix the underlying issue: Earth is still poor, crime-ridden, and overpopulated. Now that Max has provided universal health care, those three problems are only going to get worse -- people are going to live longer, which means there are going to be even fewer jobs available, which is going to drive even more people toward crime as a way of making ends meet. All he has really succeeded in doing is creating even more competition for scarce resources.

After all, it's not like the wealthy, stable infrastructure of Elysium is going to hang its head and sulk back to Earth -- all of the rich people (and all of their money) are going to stay right the hell in space. And when those magical cancer-erasing beds are shipped down to Earth, what do you think is going to be the number one target for all of those charming, desperate criminals Max hung out with?

We watch them (along with Max himself) engage in kidnapping, hijacking, and extortion, all within a 20-minute period, so there's little doubt that the primary trade is going to become the ransoming of medical beds to people who desperately need them. After all, guys like Kruger, the sociopathic mercenary, aren't going to suddenly forget they're ruthless criminals just because health care is available to everyone.

Meanwhile, the 1 percent will remain on their orbiting Scrooge McDuck halo, continuing to not give a shit.

Want proof? Check this out -- despite being a film series known for global intrigue and exotic locales, James Bond doesn't set foot in China, or even see a single Chinese person, until 30 years later in Tomorrow Never Dies (he does go to Hong Kong a few times, but it was still part of England back then, and it was presumably spared from America's plutonium wrath). That's just about enough time for a new generation to recover from the fallout (both political and radioactive) of a massive nuclear counterstrike. This also kind of explains why every Chinese person seemed to want to kill him in Skyfall.

Think about it -- Dementors can't be killed except by a very specific spell uttered by a seriously formidable wizard. The only reason they'd agreed to help Voldemort was because he promised them plenty of delicious, delicious souls once he'd burned Hogwarts to the ground. Now, with many of the powerful wizards killed or injured, and Voldemort way too dead to keep up his end of the bargain, why wouldn't the Dementors just mosey on over to the muggle world and kill every last person they find? There's literally nothing to hold them back.

One thing that remains consistent throughout the Harry Potter movies is the utter ineptitude of the Ministry of Magic (not to mention its wholesale corruption). They can't even protect their own people from Death Eaters, Dementors, and werewolves under normal circumstances, let alone anyone in the muggleverse. Are we supposed to believe that the wizarding world suddenly got their shit together after the Ministry of Magic was overthrown, Hogwarts was destroyed, and half of the wizards and witches on the planet got smoked during the fighting? The Dementors are going to mow through London like Meatloaf riding his motorcycle through a Shoney's buffet line.

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Related Reading: The craziest endings are the ones that never hit theaters. Like the Scott Pilgrim original ending that had him dump Ramona's ass. We've got some more terrible implied endings for you: Metropolis will never recover from the last Superman movie. And if you'd prefer your happy endings revised for accuracy, just click here.