But Originally …
The studio hated this ending, a.k.a. the biggest reason most people even talk about this movie today (the second biggest is the fact that the Riddler in The Batman has similar journaling habits to John Doe). In fact, they hated it so much that they went through enough alternate endings to stitch together a whole other movie. First, they ordered the writer to ditch the “head in the box” scene and write a stereotypical cop movie ending where Mills and Somerset go on a race against time to save Mills’ wife from the killer, who presumably has a large curly mustache and a monocle in this version. Another draft included a climactic shootout in an abandoned church, which ended with Doe burning alive near a convenient tableau of the seven deadly sins.
New Line Cinema
That was the movie the studio wanted to make. Fortunately, someone screwed up and sent potential director David Fincher the wrong version of the script, and he signed on for the movie specifically to make the “head in the box” moment. But then, the studio was like “We didn’t say whose head” and insisted on replacing Mills’ wife with the family dog (in the ending, we mean, not the making out scenes and such). Pitt put his foot down and said no, his wife has to die in this movie, dammit. The studio went “Fine, we’re going back to the original ending … but Morgan Freeman shoots Doe, not you, for some reason.” They even storyboarded this version, which ends with a one-liner worthy of Lethal Weapon:
New Line Cinema
In yet another version, Mills shoots Somerset to prevent him from preventing him from shooting Doe. And then there’s Fincher’s preferred ending, according to the film’s DVD commentary: he wanted the screen to cut to black right after Mills shoots Doe, followed by a few moments of complete darkness to let the brutal ending sink in. But when they screened the film in New York, the theater employees ignored Fincher’s instructions and turned on the lights as soon as the gunshot was heard, so the director agreed to that add “irrelevant” epilogue with Mills arrested and Somerset quoting Ernest Hemingway. And that’s how we got the seventh and final ending. At least Fincher got away with making the scene look as dark as humanly possible as a shout out to his Sopranos-esque idea.
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Top image: Marvel Studios