‘Escape Room’ Almost Had a “More Nihilistic” Ending, Which Was Changed After Test Screenings [Exclusive]

Escape Room (read our review) was the first horror hit of the year. Taking the escape room craze to the extreme was a natural fit for horror, but the film really outdid itself with its final escape room. Now that Escape Room is coming out on home video, we talked with director Adam Robitel about that crazy ending.

Spoiler alert for people who haven’t watched Escape Room yet.

After Zoey (Taylor Russell) survives all the deadly escape rooms Minos built for her and five other unwitting participants, she found Minos’s warehouse headquarters in New York and bought tickets for her and Ben (Logan Miller) to confront them. The film ends with an escape room on a crashing plane, but this isn’t Zoey’s flight. It’s just the test run for Minos’s latest game, which they plan to execute on Zoey and Ben’s flight.

Robitel told us Escape Room originally had a more conventional ending.

“In full disclosure, we had a test screening of an original ending which was much more nihilistic where Zoey ends up going back to her dorm room,” Robitel said.

“She’s been gaslit obviously and she finds a clue in one of her puzzle books that leads her back to the academic hall where we first met her. And underneath her desk, she finds a little note from the Puzzle Maker and her mother’s compass pendant. It was a really fucked up also implying that Minos maybe even had something to do with her mother’s plane crash. She’s like deer in headlights and it felt a little obvious. Then the puzzle maker voice comes on the loudspeaker and it’s like, ‘You ready to play again?’”

That doesn’t sound bad. It still shows that Minos is a monolithic corporation that will always have a new game, but it’s kind of a let down after the ice room and the upside down room.

“One of the things that became clear out of that test screening was the audience wanted two things,” Robitel continued. “They wanted Ben and Zoey to have some sort of closure and they wanted a little bit of a peek behind the curtain of who Minos was. So I had this challenge of how do I make them proactive? How do I do this game of a checkmate?”

With that, Robitel had to come up with one more escape room that would top all the others.

“I felt like the movie’s all about these beautiful sets,” he said.

“I thought how fun would it be if we set up a little checkmate where Zoey gets the drop on where they’re located, but you also show that Minos is still watching them and planning a nefarious, horrible idea. The plane became a cool misdirect where you think you’re watching one thing and at the last minute, the curtain is pulled back.”

The new ending was still a controversial choice, but we at Bloody-Disgusting are glad he risked it.

“I got very excited about it and a lot of people felt like it wouldn’t work because Zoey wasn’t on the plane,” Robitel said. “It was all a big mind meld kind of thing. Ultimately it seemed to work. Some people really feel like it’s weird and some people are like, ‘Oh, that’s really clever.’ It was a tricky ending to stick, as they all are.”

Escape Room is now on digital and comes out on DVD and Blu-ray Tuesday, April 23.