The following contains spoilers for the ending of Free Guy.
Free Guy is getting a lot of positive buzz both from fans and critics. Everybody seems to like the new video game inspired film. It's a movie with a ton of humor but also a surprising amount of heart. Ryan Reynolds' Guy may not be "real" even within the context of the movie, but he's a character that everybody, the other characters in the film and the audience, comes to care about. How Guy's story would ultimately end was important, so much so that the ending of Free Guy was once very different, but changed thanks to...Patrick Swayze?
Free Guy's writer Matt Lieberman recently told Collider that in the original ending, Guy actually got the girl. Guy and Millie (Jodie Comer) stay together, as far as an AI and a gamer can, anyway. However, Ryan Reynolds and director Shawn Levy both felt that the movie needed a "Ghost moment," referring to the 1990 Patrick Swayze drama. In that movie the two lovers have a moment of final goodbye that allows them both to move forward, and that's what Free Guy eventually got as well. According to Lieberman...
Yes, it did change. In the original script, he ends up with Millie. They maintain their relationship into whatever the sequel will be. But Ryan and Shawn felt that it needed that Ghost moment. Nobody could really rationalize a person having an extended stay as bit and bytes. We thought, “What’s the Ghost moment?” It was definitely tweaked from the first iteration of the movie. How does Guy end up, after saying goodbye to Millie? How do you wanna leave Guy? We knew that audiences would just wanna know that he’s gonna be okay and that he’s happy, and I think they nailed it.
In the version of Free Guy in theaters Guy and Millie (Jodie Comer) both realize that they're relationship could never work, and both are happy to move forward. While it would have been perfectly normal to see our hero "get the girl" in the end, the fact that the hero is a video game character and the girl is not would have potentially made things a little weird. As Matt Lieberman said, seeing a person have an "extended stay" in a digital world in order be with their NPC boyfriend is something that might not ultimately end up feeling quite as romantic as it seems.
In the end, the audience ultimately wants to just see these two characters happy, and that's what they get. Guy reunites with his best friend and they go off into the sunset together. And Millie realizes that there's a real life person who has feelings for her, and that she feels the same way.
It's a good place for all the characters to wrap up their story, assuming, of course, that this actually wraps it up. The word is that Disney is already talking sequel to Free Guy and thus maybe we will see where things go from here. Maybe Guy will fall in love after all.
