Get Out's Dark Alternate Endings Explained

When Jordan Peele's directorial debut "Get Out" hit theaters in 2017, it changed the cinematic landscape, and that's not an exaggeration. The film, which presents a deeply disturbing modern spin on classics like "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "The Stepford Wives," is part of college curriculums, earned Peele an Academy Award for best original screenplay, kicked off a trend of "social thrillers," and is critically regarded as one of the best films of the 21st century. The entire film is, frankly, a masterpiece, but the extremely satisfying ending really brings it to a perfect close, and you might not know that it almost ended very, very differently.

Here's how the film goes, more or less. Chris, played by Daniel Kaluuya, goes to visit his girlfriend Rose Armitage's (Allison Williams) family in upstate New York and meets her parents, Missy and Dean (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford). Everything seems fine at first — in fact, Missy and Dean are maybe a little too excited about Chris — but that's when increasingly strange things start happening. The hired help on the property, Walter and Georgina (Marcus Henderson and Betty Gabriel), keep acting really, really weird. Missy hypnotizes Chris and puts him in what she calls "the sunken place," leaving Chris confused and troubled. Then, when the Armitages have a garden party, it's revealed that they run a human trafficking ring where they abduct Black men and women, at which point Dean performs surgery on the kidnapped person and the white person who "chose" them to let the white person inherit a Black body. ("Black is in fashion," a party guest says at one point to a clearly baffled Chris.) Perhaps worst of all, Rose was always in on the whole thing ... and she's been luring in unwilling subjects for years by pretending to fall in love with them (including, naturally, Walter and Georgina, a Black man and woman who actually house the souls of Dean's parents).

The movie ends with Chris staging a bloody escape from the Armitage compound, crashing a car with Georgina in the back seat, and narrowly dodging Rose's shotgun blasts; when he's able to get the upper hand and use his camera flash to "wake" Walter and get him to shoot Rose, he starts to strangle her. Thankfully, Chris' friend Rod (Lil Rel Howery), a TSA agent, arrives just in time to save his friend, and Chris, well, "gets out."

Here's the thing. This movie almost ended in a much less satisfying manner — and no, we're not talking about Peele's political joke.

Jordan Peele actually shot another ending for "Get Out," and what happens in it is that Chris goes to prison for killing the Armitages. When Rod goes to visit him in prison and urges him to tell the authorities the truth, Chris simply accepts his fate, saying at least the Armitages can't harm anyone anymore. In the movie's commentary (via NME), Peele explained, "The cops get him, and you're meant to think: 'Oh snap, wait a second, is that a good thing is that a bad thing?' And then you cut to 6 months later and Chris is in prison, now, the idea here is he's been through such mental shock and torment, and the house and everything... all the evidence has burnt down. And of course this is a system that values the rich white people, and takes their side. So, my feeling, is what would happen in this movie is Chris would end up in jail just because of how it looks."

So what happened? Why did Peele switch up the ending? In an oral history of the film in Vulture, QC Entertainment's Sean McKittrick, who produced the film, said audiences just hated it. "We tested the movie with the original "sad truth" ending where, when the cop shows up, it's an actual cop and Chris goes to jail," McKittrick revealed. "The audience was absolutely loving it, and then it was like we punched everybody in the gut."

According to McKittrick, the audience just couldn't bear to see Chris "lose," so to speak. "You could feel the air being sucked out of the room," he continued. "The country was different. We weren't in the Obama era, we were in this new world where all the racism crept out from under the rocks again. It was always an ending that we debated back and forth, so we decided to go back and shoot the pieces for the other ending where Chris wins."

There was, apparently, a third ending for "Get Out," but this one didn't get filmed. While Jordan Peele made an appearance on "Talking with Chris Hardwick" via (Yahoo!) in the spring of 2017, Peele remained relatively tight-lipped about this third possibility, but told Hardwick this: "Rod comes to break into the gated community [where Chris ends up], finds his way in. He's looking for Chris and he sees Chris looking in a window on Main Street, and he goes 'Chris!' and Chris turns to him and goes, 'I assure you, I don't know who you're talking about.'"

All in all, the ending we saw in the theatrical release of "Get Out" is perfect, and star Bradley Whitford agreed in that Vulture feature. "The ending he ended up with does a brilliant thing, because when Chris is strangling Rose in the driveway, you see the red police lights, and then you see the door open and it says 'Airport' and it's a huge laugh, and everybody has that same laugh and release," Whitford mused. "You understand from Chris's POV that if the cops come, he's a dead man. That is absolutely brilliant, non-lecturing storytelling."

As for Peele, he spoke to his comedy past and said that's why he was able to think on his feet and really perfect the ending of his groundbreaking, award-winning film. "I think my improv training just put me in this mind frame of, with each problem, there's not one solution, there's not two solutions, there's an infinite amount of great solutions," the Oscar winner said. "That includes the ending. When I realized the original, downer ending wasn't working, I didn't freak out. I looked at it as an opportunity to come up with a better ending."

You can rent or buy "Get Out" on major streaming platforms now.