'Interstellar' almost had a super-depressing ending

Interstellar, which returns to theaters for one night on April 7, could have had a dramatically different ending, according to director Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan, who co-wrote the film.

Speaking to a group at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab (really the prime audience for anything Interstellar-related), Nolan revealed that the original ending was much darker, but also, a little simpler (spoilers follow).

If you remember the original ending, Matthew McConaughey's character Cooper heads into a black hole but ends up in this 5-dimensional thingy (that's a technical term) that allows him to communicate with Murph in the past through magic morse code books and dust, and thus give her the data she needs to solve Brand's equation She solves it and everybody lives happily ever after (well Murph dies of old age while her father is still young but you get the point). But in the original ending things didn't turn out so well.

According to a Nerdist writer in the audience, Nolan said the ending of the original script was more straightforward, lacking the whole five-dimensions thing. Instead  it “had the Einstein-Rosen bridge (wormhole) collapse when Cooper tries to send the data back.” So no return home for Cooper it seems, and potentially no happy ending for the entire human race. And that also means Anne Hathaway is all alone in a distant galaxy, trying to start a new world. Not super cheerful, but it requires a lot less suspension of disbelief than that magic five-dimensional tesseract.

br />