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Focus Group Ending: Difference between revisions
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This trope is closely related to [[Executive Meddling]].
Subtrope of [[Revised Ending]]. See also [[Democracy Is Bad]] and [[Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup]].
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* Iranian film ''Taste of Cherry'' by Abbas Kiarostami ends with an idyllic scene featuring the production crew and some assorted others relaxing on a flowery hillside. It's lovely, but the footage seemed thrown in for no readily apparent reason. Test groups responded to it negatively and it was taken out of some theatrical runs, but restored for the DVD release. The director says he put it in there to remind us all that it's just a movie, and after the movie's depressing events he thought the audience deserved a break.
* The 2004 remake of ''[[Dawn of the Dead (2004 film)|Dawn of the Dead]]'' had extra footage shot and interspersed with the credits after test audiences complained about the original abrupt ending.
* ''[[Snake Eyes]]'': Before the focus groups got their hands (er, eyes) on it, De Palma had an chase through a flooded tunnel and the bad guy getting run over by a globe which has been [[Chekhov's Gun|lying on the ground since the start of the movie]]. When it came to theaters, the chase doesn't go through a flooded tunnel (thus at odds with Nic Cage's reference to it in the epilogue), the globe gets washed off by a wave, and the bad guy kills himself.
* ''[[Star Trek Generations]]'': {{spoiler|Kirk's}} [[Trope Namer|trope-naming]] [[Dropped a Bridge on Him|ignoble death]] was actually an improvement over him getting unceremoniously shot in the back.
* In ''[[Deep Blue Sea]]'', test audiences so despised the female scientist heroine (to the point of loudly screaming "Die, Bitch!" throughout the film), as well as the [[Black Dude Dies First|killing of LL Cool J's character]], that the final ending was changed so that the Black Dude lives while the scientist lady gets munched on by a shark at the very end.
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=== [[Live Action TV]] ===
* When the pilot for ''[[Justified (TV series)|Justified]]'' was shown to focus groups, they loved the character of Boyd Crowder as portrayed by Walton Goggins and hated that he is killed at the end of the episode. Despite the fact that they tried to be very faithful to the Elmore Leonard short story the show is based on, a decision was made to reshoot the ending of the pilot and keep the character alive. The complicated relationship between the show's hero Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder has since become the keystone of the show and is responsible for much of its popularity and critical acclaim.
* Unlike most things in this page, ''[[ER]]'' had a focus group ''beginning''. In the pilot, Nurse Carol Hathaway was going to commit suicide by drug
=== Theatre ===
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