Birdman’s most argued-about ending is the one that was never filmed. The released version closes on Riggan Thomson’s daughter looking out a hospital window at something the camera refuses to show; the discarded version closed on Johnny Depp putting on a wig and doing Jack Sparrow’s voice. Nobody cut that scene from a finished film. It was written, cast in the writers’ heads, and abandoned mid-shoot.
There’s no deleted footage sitting on a disc or a streaming extra to track down. The Depp ending exists only as a story its co-writer told on a podcast three months after the film opened, and the swap is the reason Birdman’s ending still gets debated twelve years later.
Spoiler Warning
What follows spoils Birdman’s closing minutes, the ending that replaced the Depp joke, and the full detail of a scene that was scripted and then thrown out.
The ending Dinelaris described
Co-writer Alexander Dinelaris laid it out on the Feb. 6, 2015 episode of The Q&A with Jeff Goldsmith, the podcast’s yearly roundtable of Oscar-nominated screenwriters. Collider and The Film Stage both transcribed what he said.
Riggan shoots himself on stage. The camera circles the standing ovation the way Emmanuel Lubezki and Alejandro G. Iñárritu moved it through the whole film. A host in the James Lipton or Charlie Rose mold sits across from Michael Keaton, reading him a rave review. Then the camera prowls backstage to a dressing room, where Depp sits at the mirror putting on Riggan’s wig, a Pirates of the Caribbean 5 poster behind him, and says, in Jack Sparrow’s voice, “What the fuck are we doing here, mate?”
Dinelaris called it “the satire of the endless loop,” and the joke only lands because of who Keaton is: a former Batman playing a washed-up superhero actor, handing the same curse to a man with four Pirates films between 2003 and 2011 already behind him. Then Dinelaris gave the real punchline: “We couldn’t get Johnny Depp or even the poster.” The scene was never shot.
Why Iñárritu tore it up
Iñárritu got there first, in a Playlist interview published Jan. 8, 2015. The film had a different ending, he said, and partway through shooting he knew “it was a piece of shit.” He rewrote it with Dinelaris and Nicolás Giacobone, and he has refused ever since to describe what it replaced: “I will never tell you. It would be so embarrassing. It was bad.” The line he’s comfortable with, from the same conversation, is the one that aged better: “Now I feel very good about the ending. It feels very fair.”
That rewrite, credited to Iñárritu, Giacobone, Dinelaris and Armando Bó, went on to win Best Original Screenplay at the Feb. 22, 2015 ceremony where Birdman also took Best Picture, Best Director and Best Cinematography, a script whose final scene was reconceived on set, sixteen days after Dinelaris described the one it replaced on a podcast.
What the window bought instead
In the finished film, Riggan brings a loaded gun onto the stage for the play’s last scene and shoots off his own nose in front of an audience that stands and cheers. He wakes up bandaged to rave reviews, opens the hospital window, and climbs onto the ledge while the camera drifts away. Sam runs in, finds the room empty, looks down, then up, and smiles. Collider’s breakdown points out how deliberately the film has trained viewers to distrust that kind of image by then: a telekinetic rampage earlier in the film turns out to be a man throwing furniture by hand, and a flight over Manhattan ends with a cab driver demanding his fare.
Three readings survive that final shot: Riggan dies on stage and the hospital scene is his fantasy, he genuinely flies, or he survives the gunshot only to jump for real. The film never picks one.
That’s the real difference between the two endings. The Depp version answers its own question with a joke, and the target of the joke is the industry: an actor trapped replaying the same part forever. The window leaves the question open, and the only person left in the frame is a daughter whose smile could mean two opposite things. A punchline closes an argument. An open window keeps one going.
The accidental rhyme with Ebenezer
Depp’s current weekend makes the discarded joke look like it was aimed at the wrong decade. His Scrooge turn in Ebenezer took $6.7 million on opening day from 3,535 theaters and is projected to finish first for the weekend around $20 million on a $38 million budget, with an A- CinemaScore. Gold Derby reports it would be his first No. 1 finish since Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018, in a franchise that replaced him with Mads Mikkelsen in 2020. The site’s own verdict on the film and what it does with that comeback runs through the full review that argues Depp’s comeback was the real product, and whether the movie itself is worth your night is a separate question the site answers in its list of six Christmas carols worth watching instead.
The weekend also happens to land on the twelfth anniversary of Birdman’s wide release on Nov. 14, 2014. A wig and a Pirates poster would have dated the joke to a specific sequel and let the audience laugh on the way out. Twelve years on, nobody has agreed on what Sam is smiling at, and that argument has outlasted the franchise loop the film almost mocked by name.
