Contact (1997): Deleted Scene That Revealed the Aliens’ True Purpose

Contact 1997 is one of the most intelligent science-fiction films ever made, a story where humanity’s first message from the stars becomes a test of science, faith and trust. But the version you saw in theaters was almost a completely different movie. Did you know the original ending had angelic aliens descending from the sky in front of the entire world? Or that in an earlier draft, the wormhole swallows the entire planet and drags it to the center of the galaxy. Today, we’re uncovering 12 hidden truths about Contact 1997, including how this story accidentally created the wormhole theory that inspired Christopher Nolan's Interstellar. In the finished film, Ellie Arroway is chosen to travel through the alien machine and experiences what seems to be a journey across the universe, where she encounters an intelligence that takes the form of her father. When she returns, however, everyone on Earth believes her capsule simply dropped through the machine in seconds, leaving her unable to prove that the journey ever happened. But that was an ending that almost never existed. In 1993, Warner Brothers was trying to adapt Carl Sagan's 1985 novel Contact and approached Robert Zemeckis to direct it. The studio believed his record of combining emotional storytelling and complex visual effects in Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit made him a strong choice. He read an early draft of the screenplay and loved nearly all of it. The problem was the final page and a half. In that version, after Ellie Arroway takes her journey through the machine, the sky opens and the angelic-looking aliens physically descend from above, revealing themselves to the entire world in a spectacular light display. They do it to publicly confirm that Ellie's journey really happened, giving everyone undeniable proof of extraterrestrial life. Everyone sees them. Everyone knows. And that ruins the whole point, because if the aliens turn up on the evening news, there is nothing left to doubt and nothing left to believe. Zemeckis said it just wasn't going to work, and he walked away from the movie. Then Forrest Gump won him the Oscar for Best Director, and Warner Brothers came back with an offer he couldn't refuse: complete artistic control and final cut, meaning the finished version would be his and the studio could not override it. He took the job, deleted the light show, and gave us the ambiguous ending people still argue about today. Every one of those arguments exists because a director refused a page and a half. For a film about reaching another civilization, Contact spends almost all of its time down here, on how badly we need to be told we are not alone. That is why it has aged better than nearly every alien movie of its era. So here is my question for you: if a real signal arrived tomorrow, should we answer it, or should we stay silent? I would genuinely like to know where you stand, and if you made it this far, you already know the drill. Like, subscribe, and I will see you in the next one.