Will Ferrell Recalls ‘Anchorman’ Reshoots After Poor Test Screenings: ‘It Got an Entirely New Ending’
Will Ferrell is dropping details on the original “Anchorman” ending that never set sail.
During co-star Christina Applegate’s “Messy” podcast, co-hosted by Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Ferrell reflected on the 20th anniversary of the beloved film.
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“It was such a hard movie to get made in the first place and when it finally came around to when, ‘Oh wait, now Dreamworks wants to make it,’ it just felt like we were playing with the house’s money. So we were like, ‘OK, gosh, they’re letting us make this crazy movie. Let’s just do all the comedy things we’ve wanted to try that other people have said, “No, you can’t do that in a comedy,”‘” Ferrell said. “We were just breaking the rules and having so much fun.”
Yet that fun went a little off the rails when it came to the planned third act. After poor test screenings, Ferrell realized that the Patty Hearst-inspired storyline didn’t resonate with audiences.
“So here’s an interesting thing about ‘Anchorman.’ 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. 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 said. “And that can either go one way or the other. There’s a panic button that’s hit, or, luckily, the studio was like, ‘Let’s figure it out.’ They gave us a budget for reshoots. Judd [Apatow] really helped to be a steady hand in that regard. And so all of that, the whole pandas and the bears and all that, that’s five days of a re-shoot. An entirely new ending was shot.”
Ferrell added of the planned ending, “[In] the original movie, Christina’s character is abducted by a vigilante group. They were kind of like a comedic version of Patty Hearst. They’re making a political statement and she’s taken up to the conservatory and we have to go rescue her. They just didn’t like that storyline at all. We just lost the audience. When it was the news team and all of us interacting, we would get them back. We had to basically reshoot the ending.”
Of course, the outtakes were included in the “Wake Up, Ron Burgundy” spinoff film that served as an unrated version of the first scripted storyline.
Ferrell previously told the Ringer in 2017 that Paul Thomas Anderson helped steer even the early ideas for “Anchorman” away from being “too kooky.”
“The first version of ‘Anchorman’ is basically the movie ‘Alive,’ where the year is 1976, and we are flying to Philadelphia, and all the newsmen from around the country are flying in to have some big convention,” Ferrell said. “[My character] Ron convinces the pilot that he knows how to fly the charter jet, and he immediately crash-lands it in the mountains. And it’s just the story of them surviving and trying to get off the mountainside. They clipped a cargo plane, and the cargo plane crashed as well, close to them, and it was carrying only boxes of orangutans and Chinese throwing stars. So throughout the movie we’re being stalked by orangutans who are killing, one by one, the team off with throwing stars. And Veronica Corningstone keeps saying things like, ‘Guys, I know if we just head down we’ll hit civilization.’ And we keep telling her, ‘Wrong.’ She doesn’t know what we’re talking about. So that was the first version of the movie.”
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