Will Smith’s Hancock: What Happened in the Original Darker Ending

Will Smith’s superhero vehicle Hancock won few new fans for the actor, but the film originally had a far darker ending which could have made the film an edgy blockbuster hit. Released in 2008, the darkly comic superhero movie Hancock had an intriguing premise that seemed to be full of potential for comedy, action, and tragedy alike. The film came at the end of a string of hits for Smith, and although it performed well at the box office, Hancock’s uneven tone meant it earned the ire of critics. Alongside the flawed Richard Matheson adaptation, I Am Legend and the schmaltzy Seven Pounds, Hancock contributed to Smith’s dwindling reputation as a superstar and soon Smith took a career break to focus on his family.

The film followed Smith as the titular anti-hero, a superpowered being who has turned to alcoholism to cope with the public’s refusal to respect his abilities. When he saves a cynical publicist played by Jason Bateman from certain death, the character promises to repay him by improving Hancock’s public image. What follows is a series of goofy set-pieces and a side of bittersweet drama as Smith’s hero sincerely tries to improve himself, but a dark twist late in the film sees the story turn sad. Mary, the wife of Bateman’s character, is revealed to be an immortal much like Hancock, and the viewer learns that the pair were lovers decades earlier.

This revelation drags down the tone of the movie as Hancock is forced to start taking itself seriously. Smith soon starts succumbing to wounds thanks to a plot contrivance. Eventually, the film’s semi-sad ending sees him exile himself to the moon so Bateman’s publicist and Mary can live in peace. But ironically the original, much more intense ending was actually far more interesting. Much like the darker original script for recent hit Palm Springs, the original screenplay for Hancock was praised for its dark tone and compared to Mike Figgis’ tragic classic Leaving Las Vegas. This iteration of the film closed on a bleak, brutal, and bloody note. Critics agreed that the finished film was an imperfect movie and that the tonal switch into self-serious melodrama after the halfway mark doomed the light-hearted humor of the opening scenes. But Hancock’s original ending was a more daring climax as well as a gorier, sadder one.

How Hancock Escaped Extended Development Hell

The production history of Hancock was a long and tortured story. For many years, the film was in development hell like fellow superhero movie The Flash. The movie went through many rounds of revisions before it finally reached the big screen. Initially, screenwriter Vincent Ngo’s spec script titled Tonight, He Comes was written way back in 1996 and attracted the attention of Top Gun director Tony Scott. The project was later attached to Heat director Michael Mann, but the neo-noir master opted to make 2006’s Miami Vice instead. Eventually, Peter Berg came on board to direct after falling for the original spec script’s intense, gritty tone. In fact, Berg was the one who compared the original draft to Leaving Las Vegas, calling that version of Hancock “a scathing character study of this suicidal alcoholic superhero”.

However, despite this complimentary appraisal, Berg was keen to make the movie more multiplex-friendly. In an interview, the director noted that “we thought the idea was cool, but we did want to lighten it up”. Even Berg’s later comments on a potential Hancock sequel focused on the relationship between Hancock and Mary instead of returning to the original draft. So what was in the original script that needed to be toned down so much? Well, Tonight, He Comes did not follow the story of a depressed superhero finding his long-lost mate through the intervention of a friendly publicist. In the original draft, like the finished film, Hancock does end up living with a suburban family, but in this version, the father of the family is a security guard instead of working in PR, his wife doesn’t know Hancock, and their son plays a far larger role in proceedings. In the first draft script, Hancock also suffers severe PTSD and this is implied to be the cause of his violent outbursts.

The Darker Original Ending

In this original draft, the movie opens on the film’s narrator discussing the experience of witnessing something traumatic. Throughout the film, the audience assumes this narrator is Will Smith’s Hancock and the trauma he’s talking about is the decades of tragedies he has seen. The film makes it clear that these tragedies have taken a severe psychological toll on the superpowered being, resulting in attempts to better himself before he loses his mind. These attempts are unsuccessful, as the film’s climax sees him turn to violence after failing to stop another tragedy. Near the end of the movie, a collapsing building kills the family’s loving mother Mary after she is kidnapped. Enraged and driven insane, Hancock himself proceeds to slaughter an entire police department in frustration.

But after this incredibly violent sequence, the film’s bombshell twist – which ranks up there with Fight Club‘s twist for impact – reveals that the narrator isn’t Hancock himself at all. Instead, the viewer discovers that Hancock transferred his powers to the family’s young son Aaron and sent him back in time to save his mother. The traumatic incident that the narrator, Aaron, was talking about witnessing was walking in on his parents having sex, and his heart-breaking madness comes from trying and failing to save his mother’s life. He has been through this before and will go through it all over again, as the now-superpowered Aaron is trapped in a never-ending loop and is unable to save his mother from her inevitable fate. It’s this frustration and hopelessness that drives his tragic downfall and makes the outburst of homicidal madness inevitable.

Why They Changed It

It is understandable that the film-makers behind Hancock decided not to use this bleak and brutal twist ending for the finished film. In 2008 very few blockbusters carried an R-rating, and the few which did were not comic book adaptations or superhero stories. It would be almost a decade before the likes of Joker and the Deadpool series made darker, more adult comic book movies seem not only viable but profitable, and by then it was clear that a Hancock sequel wasn’t happening. Nonetheless, the ending of Vincent Ngo’s Tonight, He Comes is a darker, more interesting piece of subversive superhero cinema than the sanitized and tonally uneven film which Hancock eventually became. Whilst the apprehension of the creators is understandable, it is a shame that the film missed its chance to make cinema history as one of the earliest thoughtful superhero deconstructions. At a time when the likes of The Dark Knight and Watchmen were pushing the boundaries of superhero cinema, it’s disappointing that Hancock played it safe when the film had such a striking potential ending.

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Cathal Gunning
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Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies and TV online since 2020. His obsessions include The Simpsons, Stephen King, the Scream series, and the horror genre in general. He has spent more time thinking about Stranger Things than the writers of Stranger Things, and he has never seen a Star War.

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