I Think Companion’s Big Final Kill Is Awesome, And The Director Explains How It Majorly Changed During Production

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Companion. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, proceed at your own risk! If you need to be convinced to see the film, read my four-star spoiler-free CinemaBlend review.

Arriving in theaters this past weekend, Companion is an all-around awesome big screen experience. It’s funny, violent, and consistently surprising – up to and including its final kill, which is a cherry-on-top moment. The film does a terrific job setting up the electric wine bottle opener, featuring it in a couple scenes, and then you get a tremendous payoff as Sophie Thatcher’s Iris uses it on the head of Jack Quaid’s Josh. It’s such a great idea that I felt compelled to ask writer/director Drew Hancock about it during an interview earlier this month, and I was surprised to learn that the device originally had a wholly different place in the plot.

Promising to protect spoilers until after the film was released, I asked the filmmaker about the electric wine bottle opener last month during the Companion press day in Los Angeles, and he told me that the fancy kitchen gadget initially became a murder weapon much earlier in the movie. Rather than being a part of the struggle in the big finale, it was originally included to be part of the twist in the first act. Said Hancock,

It makes sense. The electric wine bottle opener is first featured in Companion as the collected characters have their first dinner together at the lake house, so it was primed to be included in the violent sequence that takes place the morning after. Instead, the scene in the finished film has Rupert Friend’s Sergei bringing a bottle of vodka with him for his rendezvous with Iris, and Iris uses both that bottle and the knife Josh plants in her pocket to fend off Sergei/kill him when he attempts to rape her.

So why did Drew Hancock decide to divert from this plan? The basic answer is that it was just too good an idea to use so early in the film. In addition to not being able to think of something better/more novel to conclude the struggle between Iris and Josh, the writer/director recognized that it functioned as a symbol of domesticity that made it perfectly ironic to use as a weapon. He continued,

The Companion filmmaker didn’t mention it, but I also like how the changed events with Sergei reflect on Josh. It’s bad enough that Josh and Megan Suri’s Kat set the man up to be murdered by overriding safeties in Iris’ programming, but the fact that the Jack Quaid character also secretly slips the knife into her pocket is an extra touch of malice that the movie doesn’t have if Sergei brings the electric wine bottle opener to the scene himself. It’s a smart change for multiple reasons.

I can tell you from personal experience that both the opening twist and the final battle are sequences that you only enjoy more when seeing the film multiple times, and I wholly recommend it. Having earned critical acclaim, Companion is now playing in theaters everywhere (having placed second at the domestic box office this past weekend), and it’s a movie that we here at CinemaBlend will likely be discussing a lot in the months ahead, as while it’s only February, there is a very strong chance it gets remembered as one of the best horror films of 2025.