Will Ferrell reveals original axed ‘Anchorman’ ending
Believe it or not, it’s been 20 years since Will Ferrell starred in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. The movie caused an entire generation to spend far too much time shouting its many memorable quotes at each other any time the opportunity presented itself.
Ferrell gave rise to a comedy icon in the obliviously idiotic television personality, with the sharp-dressed man and his equally bumbling associates joining forces to create an enduring favourite. As tends to be the case when the actor and his cohorts are involved, there was plenty of improvisation on set.
So much, in fact, that following Anchorman’s theatrical run an entire sequel was cobbled together from discarded footage, with Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie debuting alongside the original film on home video. They have completely different endings, though, and there’s a reason for that.
In the Anchorman everyone knows and loves, Ron’s dog Baxter saves the newsman and love interest Veronica Corningstone from being mauled by a bear before it’s revealed they become co-anchors on a major show. In The Lost Movie, it’s a fight against the terrorist group The Alarm Clock.
As Ferrell explained during an appearance on co-star Christina Applegate’s MeSsy podcast, lukewarm scores from test audiences necessitated the change. “We put the movie together, we do our first test screening. You test screen your movie, and it’s a score from zero to 100,” he said.
“We were like, ‘That seemed to play pretty great’. We get the score back; it’s a 50. Not good. It’s not good,” Ferrell continued.
In The Lost Movie, a terrorist group known as The Alarm Clock abducts Veronica, leading to a climactic showdown between the organisation and Ron’s cabal of anchormen. As Ferrell admitted, audiences “just didn’t like that storyline at all.” As a result, “we had to basically reshoot the ending” so as not to end the film on a bum note, even if it did see the light of day eventually.
Following the test screening, Ferrell and director Adam McKay were given five days of reshoots by studio DreamWorks, which saw them come up with the zoological finale that clearly passed the test audience litmus test and made it into the final cut.
It’s not exactly an obvious jump to go from a kidnapping and rescue scenario to a dog conversing with a bear, but that’s the scattershot nature of Anchorman in a nutshell. Preview crowds had spoken, and they simply weren’t interested in the terrorist angle.
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