The Big Blue alternate ending: Americans saw a different final scene — and Luc Besson blamed it for the flop
The Big Blue sold more than nine million tickets in France, but American audiences got a different movie with a different last scene, and it sank.
Luc Besson's Le Grand Bleu follows two lifelong rivals in freediving, Jacques Mayol (Jean-Marc Barr) and Enzo Molinari (Jean Reno), loosely based on the real divers Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca, with Rosanna Arquette as Johana, the New Yorker who falls for Jacques. It opened the 1988 Cannes Film Festival, where part of the audience booed, and went on to sell 9,193,873 tickets in France. Éric Serra's score won the César for best music.
The ending Europe saw
In Besson's version, Jacques makes one last dive at night, to a depth no one comes back from. Johana, pregnant with his child, begs him not to go, then lets him. At the bottom, a dolphin appears out of the dark. Jacques lets go of the line and swims after it, and the credits roll.
The movie never says what happens next, and it doesn't have to.
The ending Americans saw
Columbia released The Big Blue in the US on August 19, 1988, and it wasn't the same film. Here's how the versions compare:
- French theatrical cut — 132 minutes, Serra's score, Jacques disappears into the dark.
- US cut — 119 minutes, a new score by Bill Conti of Rocky fame, and an extra final scene.
- Version longue — 168 minutes, released in France in 1989, with Serra's score and Besson's original ending.
The extra scene starts where Besson's film stops. After Jacques swims off with the dolphin, the camera rises through the water to the surface, where Jacques and the dolphin play together in the light as Conti's music swells.
The flop
The American version opened in 967 theaters and made $1.6 million its first weekend. It finished with $3.5 million in the US. Critics weren't kind either: it holds a 35 on Metacritic.
What Besson blamed
Besson didn't blame American audiences. He blamed the people who sold them the movie. In a Reddit AMA on October 18, 2017, a fan asked why The Big Blue didn't do as well outside France, and Besson rephrased the question: "why didn't the Big Blue work in America?"
"Probably because the distributor sold the film like: Rambo Under Water," Besson answered.
He added, "Then in the rest of the world the film worked damn good."
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The American cut came out only on VHS and LaserDisc, both long out of print, and the Conti score never got a soundtrack release. In the same AMA, a fan asked whether there was any chance of a digital release with Conti's music. Besson's reply: "I hate Bill's music in the film. Sorry."
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