'Get Out' Could Have Had a Darker Ending

Jordan Peele’s Get Out has been dominating box offices due to its cultural relevance. Marking Peele’s first foray into serious horror, Get Out focuses on “the fears of being a black man today.” Part of the reason why Get Out has left audience members satisfied is its ending. However, the film almost took a different route entirely. If you haven’t seen the movie, stop reading as spoilers lay ahead.

Peele admitted on BuzzFeed’s Another Round podcast that the ending was almost a bleaker one. In the final cut of the film, Daniel manages to escape, but Peele almost had him arrested due to the body count he accrued in self defense. “He 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,” Peele said about the incredibly grim alternate ending. Peele went on to state:

“In the beginning, when I was first making this movie the idea was, ‘Okay, we’re in this post-racial world, apparently.’ That was the whole idea. People were saying, like, ‘We’ve got Obama so racism is over, let’s not talk about it.’ It’s a wrap. That’s what the movie was meant to address. These are all clues, if you don’t already know, that racism isn’t over… So the ending in that era was meant to say, ‘Look, you think race isn’t an issue?,’ Well at the end, we all know this is how this movie would end right here.”

“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.”