Happy ending

Roger Ebert comments in his review of Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow: "Billions of people may have died, but at least the major characters have survived.

Los Angeles is leveled by multiple tornadoes, New York is buried under ice and snow, the United Kingdom is flash-frozen, and much of the Northern Hemisphere is wiped out for good measure.

"[1] In Spielberg's Schindler's List, the Jewish Holocaust is a grim unchangeable background; viewers know that six million Jews would be murdered by the Nazis, and nothing can change that.

Still, the specific Jews who in the film have a name and a face are saved by the courageous Schindler, and their survival in the midst of all the horrors does provide the audience with a satisfying happy ending.

In later times, Jews (and non-Jewish opponents of anti-Semitism) strongly objected to that ending, regarding it as depicting a victory for injustice and oppression and as pandering to the audience's prejudices.

In Busenello's version Iarbas, King of the Getuli, shows up in the nick of time to save Dido from herself, and she ends up happily marrying him.

Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, as originally presented in 1895, ends tragically with the lovers Odette and Siegfried dying together, vowing fidelity unto death to each other.

However, under the Soviet regime, in 1950 Konstantin Sergeyev, who staged a new Swan Lake for the Mariinsky Ballet (then the Kirov), replaced the tragic ending with a happy one, letting the lovers survive and live happily ever after.

"[3] George Bernard Shaw had to wage an uphill struggle against audiences, as well as some critics, persistently demanding that his Pygmalion end happily with the marriage of Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.

In 1938, Shaw sent Gabriel Pascal, who produced that year's film version, a concluding sequence which he felt offered a fair compromise: a tender farewell scene between Higgins and Eliza, followed by one showing Freddy and Eliza happy in their greengrocery-flower shop; this would have been a happy end from the point of view of Freddy, who in other versions is left trapped in hopeless unrequited love for her.

However, Pascal did not use Shaw's proposed ending, opting for a slightly ambiguous final scene in which Eliza returns to Higgins' home, leaving open how their relationship would develop further.

While investigating the book's mystery, Holmes' faithful companion Dr. Watson falls in love with the client, Mary Morstan, and by the ending she consents to marry him.

In fact, as Heinlein explained to his readers, he found himself unable to write in full the first part - which would have been "too depressing", ending as it had to with the villain's total victory.

Rather, Heinlein contented himself with a brief summary describing Scudder's rise, prefacing the novella If This Goes On— which ends happily with the overthrow of the theocracy and the restoration of a democratic regime.

The book's eponymous protagonist, an interplanetary adventuring teenage girl, flees the scene of an impending nuclear blast in the swamps of Venus, only to remember that an extraterrestrial baby was left behind.

In a letter to Lurton Blassingame, his literary agent, Heinlein complained that it would be like "revising Romeo and Juliet to let the young lovers live happily ever after."

While remaining young due to traveling at relativistic speeds, he feels a growing alienation as human society is changing and becoming increasingly strange and incomprehensible to him.

Later in the book, he finds that while he was fighting in space, humanity has begun to clone itself, resulting in a new, collective species calling itself simply Man.

Luckily for the protagonist, Man has established several colonies of old-style, heterosexual humans, just in case the evolutionary change proves to be a mistake.

In one of these colonies, the protagonist is happily reunited with his long-lost beloved and they embark upon monogamous marriage and on having children through sexual reproduction and female pregnancy – an incredibly archaic and old-fashioned way of life for most of that time's humanity, but very satisfying for that couple.

However, at the end of the final part, The High Lord, Akkarin sacrifices himself, giving all his power to Sonea and dying so that she could defeat their enemies, the evil Ichani.

"[10] In numerous cases, Hollywood studios adapting literary works into film added a happy ending which did not appear in the original.