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WITH a budget of $120 million and an A-list cast including Oscar winner Nicole Kidman, director Baz Luhrmann's new movie Australia promised a Titanic-style blockbuster from an epic tale of adventure across the outback.
But it seems the film's tragic ending proved a little too harrowing for Hollywood studio chiefs. After 'intense' discussions with officials at 20th Century Fox, Luhrmann agreed to rewrite the final scenes to keep alive Kidman's love interest, played by Hugh Jackman.
The decision was made after negative responses to the movie's initial cut at test screenings. One reviewer said: "There is no reason to kill off Wolvie (Jackman played Wolverine in the X-Men trilogy)."
Apart from sparing the audience the extra cost of tissues, the studio apparently felt that a more uplifting ending would spell greater success at the box office.
The film stars Kidman as an English aristocrat who inherits a cattle ranch in Australia at the start of the Second World War. After rival owners plot to seize her land, she teams up with a cattle drover, played by Jackman, to lead thousands of animals across the country, only to face bombing from the Japanese.
The movie will open in the US and Australia this month with the new, happier ending and not, as one critic described it, as "an action-filled tragedy".
