6 Ridiculous Details Wisely Cut From Movie Adaptations

"Who said we were terrorists? No, seriously, you're rewriting history."

The book opens with the John McClane character (Joe Leland in the book), heading to L.A. to visit his daughter Stephanie for Christmas. But when a group of terrorists, headed by Anton "Little Tony The Red" Gruber, seize the Klaxon Oil Building, where Stephanie works, a shoe-less Leland has to fight them to save her. However, it turns out that Klaxon Oil is secretly making millions of dollars illegally selling arms to the fascist Chilean government, and Gruber plans to steal documents to expose them before cracking their safe and literally throwing their blood money out the damn window. Also, Stephanie is a coked-out space cadet in a relationship with Ellis, whom you may remember from Die Hard as the most legendary douchebag in film history.

But hey, so what if the book had a little more moral complexity than the film -- what else would you expect? But everything finally goes batshit at the book's climax. Gruber falls out of the window holding onto Stephanie's bracelet, which is pretty much exactly what happens in the movie. However, unlike the movie, both Gruber and Stephanie plummet to their deaths.

"Stephanie originally killed Dumbledooooooore!"

Watching his daughter die in front of him drives Leland totally bonkers, and he starts wandering the building "crying like a child" and ruthlessly killing the rest of Gruber's fellow activists, including loads of women. When he comes across a young terrorist in her early 20s with "rosy cheeks", Leland " this bitch in the forehead" and continues on his way.

Oh, and remember the scene in the movie where Karl, Hans Gruber's second in command, suddenly reappears after his apparent death and tries to kill John McClane, only to be shot by Al Powell?

"It's Al over now."

Well, the same scene happens in the book, but instead of triumphing over his fear of drawing his weapon and shooting Karl to save McClane, Al pulls his boss Dwayne Robinson in front of the gunfire, killing him in the process. After spending most of the movie as a saintly, heroic character, we can understand why the filmmakers decided not to have Al Powell suddenly turn into a goddamned sociopath and yank the asinine-yet-comedic Dwayne T. Robinson into a storm of life-ending bullets.

Since having Steve Martin leave a widow with 12 kids would have kind of torpedoed the wacky tone of the movie, the ending was changed to Martin deciding to change jobs to spend more time with his kids. This also would've dramatically changed the tone of Cheaper by the Dozen 2 from "continuation of lighthearted family antics" to "unofficial sequel to Ghost Dad."

Not only that, but a journalist eventually discovers that he was paid to throw the game, which means that on top of everything else, Hobbs is going to be banned from the game and have all his records wiped out.

Hear that, Peggy? You're going to be a virgin again!

Malamud's original novel was written as a King Arthur allegory, where a noble hero is eventually undone by his own misdeeds. However, the movie came out in the early 1980s, a decade in which nobody was interested in feeling bad about themselves, so they changed the ending to pretty much the exact opposite of what Malamud had written. After seeing the movie, the author supposedly said, "At last, I'm an American writer." Considering that his later novels touched on such cheery subjects like the hard lives of American immigrants and anti-Semitism in Tsarist Russia, we're going to say that comment probably wasn't a compliment.

"I silently judged when you reinheld."

But They Cut ...

The movie was based on an investigative novel of the same name by Cameron Crowe, who at age 22 posed as a high school student ( seriously) to get a closer look at the lives of teenagers and find out what they are really like. His shocking conclusion: Teenagers are assholes.

That's perfectly encapsulated by one scene that didn't make it into the movie: The father and sister of a student named Louis Crowley are killed in a car accident. That's tragic and upsetting enough, but then the dopey, loveable Jeff Spicoli bursts into Crowley's journalism class with a newspaper featuring coverage of the accident. "Look at these bitchin' photos of the crash," Spicoli shouts, before following it up with: "You can see the people inside and everything."

You dick.

The class is understandably horrified, and Crowley begins to cry. After this incident, nobody speaks to Spicoli for a month, although honestly he probably didn't notice, what with being stoned literally all of the time.

But They Cut ...

In Walter Kirn's original novel, Bingham has actually submitted a letter of resignation to his company and is on a quest to earn as many frequent-flier miles as he can before his boss discovers his resignation and cancels his company credit card. Then we discover at the end of the story that Bingham is terminally ill, and he plans to donate all of his miles to children's hospitals. Having successfully Shyamalaned the hell out of us, Kirn ends his novel by having Bingham get on a plane bound for the Mayo Clinic for treatment.

"But it's not face cancer, right?"

Director Jason Reitman did reference the book slightly when Clooney's character mishears a flight attendant asking another passenger "Would you like the can, sir?" as "Would you like the cancer?" However, other than that, Reitman claims he never even considered going with the twist ending, possibly because the recent release of The Happening had just provoked legislation to make adding a twist ending to your film a capital offense.