Stephen King's The Mist:

In keeping with my interest in this movie here's a news update on the ending (no spoilers!) from scifi wire

Mist Alters King's Ending

Frank Darabont—who wrote and directed the upcoming SF movie The Mist based on Stephen King's novella—told SCI FI Wire that he ended the movie very differently from the book. The film, like the book, centers on a group of increasingly panicked people trapped in a supermarket after a mysterious and creature-laden mist rolls into their small Maine town.

King's finale was open to interpretation; Darabont's is not. "That was the ending that always made sense to me," he said in an interview. "I always felt that the movie needed a definitive ending, and it really fell in line with my philosophy of 'This is a horror movie, and it should send people out of the theater horrified and disturbed.' I always knew that the ending was a risk. It's kind of a bold move, but I thought, 'Well, why take half-measures?' We have seen plenty of movies where they kind of wimp out, and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to try to make something that counted in the genre."

Darabont (The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption), added that the film's final moments came to him more than a decade ago. "It's the one ending that's always made sense to me," he said. "When I say 'wimp out,' I don't necessarily mean in literature, but in a movie. I was always one of those people who hated The Birds, even when I was a kid, because there was no ending to the movie. I didn't much care for that. It's not a judgment on Steve's story as much as it on I just don't think it would work in a film."

King, according to Darabont, concurred. "We had plenty of conversations about that," Darabont said. "From the earliest days he said, 'What are you going to do for the ending?' The nicest result of it was that, when he first read the screenplay, he paid me a great compliment. And I still have the e-mail. He said, 'Wow, I love the ending. If I'd thought of it, I'd have used it in the story.'" The Mist opens on Nov. 21. —Ian Spelling

Thanks to SCIFI.COM