Why Clue's Director Scrapped A Morbid Fourth Ending To The Whodunit Classic

Fans of the cult classic "Clue" know that the movie famously has three different endings — and apparently, there was almost a fourth one, but the director walked things back after it was a bit too intense for the film's overall tone.

Those same fans likely also have known about this fourth ending for a while, as it's not exactly a secret... but in a new interview with star Tim Curry, he opened up about what his character, Wadsworth, did in that ending. To be blunt, he murdered everybody. "I ran around the house killing everybody," Curry recalled while speaking to Empire Magazine about his extensive career, in which Wadsworth was just one of many, many iconic roles. Director Jonathan Lynn, also speaking to Empire, agreed with his star. "It wasn't funny enough," says the director. "It wasn't surprising enough. It ended the film on an anti-climax. So I just took it out. Three was enough."

Curry did also say that while Wadsworth went on a killing spree when "Clue" was all said and done, the role nearly killed him (kind of). "It was a bit scary, because he never draws breath!" Curry said of the character. Not only that, but the sequence where he reveals different solutions to the mystery across all three endings took a bit too much out of him. "It was exhausting," Curry remembered. "Actually, when we finished that sequence, I had to go to the company nurse. My blood pressure was through the roof!"

Lynn — who also directed the beloved comedy "My Cousin Vinny" — has revealed that there was a fourth ending to Clue before, including way back in 2012 while speaking to Abnormal Use. When the interviewer asked about that fourth ending, Lynn confirmed that it existed — and he also said he has no idea what even happened to it after filming. "I have no idea," Lynn said, asked about the ending's fate. "I cut it out because it really wasn't very good. I looked at it, and I thought, 'No, no, no, we've got to get rid of that.'"

There's not a ton of information about the fourth ending, but an article on Cracked notes that there's a record of it in "Clue: The Storybook." That details a scene where Wadsworth maniacally tells every other character that he poisoned their champagne — and they're as good as dead — before ripping the phones off of the walls so they can't call anybody for help. As Cracked notes, Wadsworth succeeds in trapping everybody inside the house, but he's probably torn to shreds by police dogs when the cops do arrive. If this is all accurate, then it definitely makes sense as to why this ending wasn't included with the other three.

So what does happen across the three endings of Clue? Whether you haven't seen the movie (shame on you!) or it's just been a little while, we'll walk you through them. Wadsworth introduces each possibility, starting with Ending A, where the maid, Yvette (Colleen Camp), kills several people on Miss Scarlett's (Lesley Ann Warren) orders so she can sell everyone's secrets. In Ending B, Mrs. Peacock (Eileen Brennan) killed the victims so that nobody would find out she was working with a foreign government and against the United States, and in Ending C, a bunch of people committed various murders. That last one ends with Mr. Green (Michael McKean) unmasking himself as an FBI agent investigating all of the shady figures at the party, concluding with the now-iconic line, "I'm going to go home and sleep with my wife." 

Why were there three endings in the first place? Alas, John Landis, who worked with Lynn on the story, thought the gambit would be a surefire way to attract more viewers while "Clue" ran in theaters, and that... definitely didn't work. As Lynn recounted in Buzzfeed's oral history of the movie, "Landis thought it would be really great box office. He thought that what would happen was that people, having enjoyed the film so much, would then go back and pay again and see the other endings. In reality, what happened is that the audience decided they didn't know which ending to go to, so they didn't go at all."

In any case, "Clue" is now a cult classic — and it's a good thing that the fourth ending is lost to time.