Original Kingdom Ending

Now I know it should go without saying, but just to cover my ass, to proceed any further will lead you deep into SPOILER territory.

Now, I caught THE KINGDOM a couple of weeks ago, and while I wasn’t particularly impressed with a lot of the movie, I thought that the ending was absolutely incredible. The revelation that both parties had said the same thing kept me up for hours. So it’s extremely interesting to me to find out today that, in fact, in Matthew Carnahan’s original script, the ending was far different. Here’s what director Peter Berg had to say: The original draft that Matt wrote had a much darker ending and in that film, this character of Haytham was much more conflicted and by this point in the film he was very ensure about where he stood and which side he stood…. In the original draft, at this moment, when Jamie went to say good bye Jamie hugged him and he realized that Ali [Suliman] was carrying a bomb on him and the character of Haytham detonated the bomb and the entire team was killed and it was a very powerful ending… At the end we decided it was just too much and would be hard for anyone to recover from so we changed it.

I’m not sure how true that is, but I’m glad they changed it. You can check it out over HERE with a couple of visual aids.