“A movie that people either love or despise”: The Robin Williams film ruined by test screenings
Whenever Robin Williams starred in a comedy, everybody involved knew the best way to get the most out of the star was to let him be himself, with his signature stream-of-consciousness style and improvisational riffing making him a legend of stand-up, televised, and silver screen comedy.
There was no point in hiring Williams and then tying his hands behind his back when the goal was to have audiences rolling in the aisles, but that obviously didn’t apply to drama. When it was time to get serious, he was beholden to the words on the page, and he was every bit as good buttoned-down as he was letting rip.
Williams may have had plenty of input on his more freewheeling star vehicles, regularly leaving the editors with mountainous volumes of footage to comb through for the best take, but when he played it straight, he often found himself left at the mercy of a studio that did what it thought was best for business.
Clearly, it didn’t work out as planned when 1998’s fantasy drama What Dreams May Come flopped at the box office after falling short of reclaiming its production budget in ticket sales. It did win an Academy Award for ‘Best Visual Effects’, but the muted reception poured plenty of scorn on the film boasting plenty of style with very little substance.
In the adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel, Williams stars as Chris Nielsen, a doctor who dies in a car accident and then embarks on a journey through the spirit world. His new reality can be whatever he wants to make it, but when his wife commits suicide and is condemned to hell, he embarks on a dangerous journey to the underworld in order to save her soul.
Director Vincent Ward shot an ending that was faithful to the book, with Chris and spouse Annie guaranteed to meet again in their reincarnated lives, but she’ll be forced to pay for her previous sins by dying young and leaving him as a widower before they reunite in heaven. In the movie, they reascend and choose to be reincarnated to live a full and happy life together in a much more saccharine conclusion.
It all felt a little too neat, tidy, and cloying, something Williams was fully in agreement with. “What Dreams May Come could have been extraordinary,” he lamented to Matt Mueller. “But then they got anxious and started to have test screenings, which you can’t do for a movie like that.”
Williams admitted those test screenings were the reason why “we ended up with this weird ending that was just, ‘What? Why did you do that?'” This led him to brand What Dreams May Come as “a movie that people either love or despise,” thanks almost entirely to a studio-mandated ending based on the opinions of a small few who witnessed the original cut.
The leading man evidently believed it was fine with a greater hint of ambiguity, but the studio’s insistence on sending the audience home happy backfired when not nearly enough of them turned up to see the movie on the big screen.
