I am Legend: Damn those misguided suits

For I assume it was such a character who put the kibosh on this alternate ending for I am Legend - spoilers ahoy of course. I really quite enjoyed the film, and it was only the ending that spoiled everything for me. I can sympathise with the filmmakers for avoiding the ending of the book, although I'm sure the cinema going public would have accepted a well adapted version of it, but this seems an(almost) happy medium. It ties up a lot of the good work the film had done earlier, like the apparent intelligence of the floppy cgi putty creatures, using dogs and setting traps etc, and just downright makes a lot more sense. You can even nearly see Smith come to some sort of "realisation", as though he were feeling an emotion that was not his.

The suits here may have fallen foul of a "reverse se7en effect", whereby after some test screening some spotty subordinate poring over the comment slips piped up with "Horror fans like a fucked up ending", and everyone nodded in agreement. While this may be true when properly used, having your hero pointlessly blow himself up with a grenade is fucked up for all the wrong reasons. Lets not even mention the cowardly u-turn, "oh its the hippie commune there's still hope crikey will smith is a legend" finale, wisely culled in this new version, which has hope, sure, but not a lot.

It seems to me that these mainstream films, which really have no excuse for being bad because they're mainstream, should be paying more attention to the integrity of the story according to the progression of its themes and characters, and spending less time ruinously changing things because some test audience "didn't get it."

Update - Warner seem to have managed to get the video taken off gametrailers, but you can still see it at First Showing.