A Warner Bros. test screening in San Jose on a November evening in 1986 came dangerously near to disaster. The audience had just witnessed the finale of Little Shop of Horrors, the Off-Broadway musical’s adaptation, which director Frank Oz had spent about $5 million filming. It was a large-scale, effects-heavy scene in which the carnivorous plant Audrey II escapes, multiplies, and then devours New York City, Washington, DC, the Statue of Liberty, and finally the entire planet. Every significant human character had perished. The plant had prevailed. On Apocalypse, the screen turned black.
The numbers on the score cards apparently caused the studio executives in attendance to become silent. It wasn’t simply the ending that the test audience didn’t enjoy. They were furious. A number of viewers had shed tears, but not in the planned cathartic manner; rather, they were genuinely distressed to see characters they had cared about for ninety minutes slaughtered off without mercy or conclusion. The atmosphere in the screening room thereafter, according to one producer, was more akin to a post-mortem than a preview. To make sure the results weren’t an anomaly, a second exam was scheduled. They weren’t. The cataclysmic conclusion was abandoned. The version of Oz that made it to theaters and became the cherished movie that people have been watching on home video ever since was reshot in a way that kept both Rick Moranis and Ellen Greene’s characters intact, gave them a happy ending, and included a house with a garden, including one tiny, menacing plant in the final frame.
One of the things that makes Little Shop of Horrors such an interesting case study in how test screenings alter big studio releases is the tale of what was lost. Oz had stayed true to the darkly humorous original conclusion of the stage musical; the play ends with the plant triumphing and humanity losing, all presented as a warning B-movie fable. According to Oz, the original film’s ending was smart, costly, technically ambitious, and precisely what the material demanded. The audience presumably understood the artistic reasoning, but they disagreed with the emotional one. They had been so close to the characters that it felt more like betrayal than theatrical irony to watch them die. Test screenings are most effective when they fill the gap between what a movie is trying to express and what an audience is prepared to accept.
It’s important to remember that the original Oz conclusion wasn’t completely lost. In 2012, the director’s cut home video edition was published along with a partial reconstruction of the footage that had survived on work prints and production materials. The restored original is darker, stranger, and more formally fascinating, while the theatrical version is warmer and more rewarding in the moment, according to critics and movie buffs who have seen both versions. The intriguing thing is that, given the nature of the movie, neither version is blatantly incorrect. Which ending was better artistically was not determined by the test screening. It established what final audiences in 1986 were prepared to leave a theater after seeing.
The next year’s film Fatal Attraction encountered the same issue from the opposite angle. Glenn Close’s character committed suicide while listening to an opera in the film’s original ending, which linked Michael Douglas in the tragedy and left the spectator with moral complexity rather than catharsis. After identifying with the Douglas family for two hours, test audiences desired something more actively fulfilling. They desired the threat to be eliminated and dealt with. The studio paid attention. The altercation in the bathtub was captured on camera. The gun that finishes the movie is fired by Anne Archer’s character. A movie with artistic pretenses became a true box office success because to this pulpy, suspenseful, and powerful scene. Depending on what you believe the movie was genuinely attempting to be, you can decide whether or not that trade-off was worthwhile.
The window between a test audience’s experience and a social media post has shrunk to hours or less in the streaming era, making the test screening procedure even more difficult. In response, studios have restricted screenings to invited industry insiders rather than recruited members of the general public, confiscated phones during preview screenings, and required attendees to sign increasingly stringent NDAs. The issue is not entirely resolved by any of this. Video continues to leak. Views continue to spread. The case of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, where Warner Bros. eventually released a four-hour director’s cut due to years of persistent fan pressure and the existence of a documented alternate version, demonstrated what happens when the difference between the tested version and the original vision becomes a public discussion rather than an internal one.
