I think the whole story was started down that path and I think Clooney played the character as a goner, and that Reitman had second thoughts in post.”īut Jason Reitman disagrees! In a conference call with with Peter Sciretta and Kris Tapley, he explained: But the threads of this lost ending are woven through the film, and I do think it was there at the start.

Hollywood Elsewhere reader Matthew Morettini yesterday pointed out that, for the movie, such a reveal might’ve better explained Bingham’s obsession with accumulating 10 million frequent-flier miles and his doomed, out-of-character attempt to connect with Alex (Vera Farmiga), which betrayed his whole “What’s in Your Backpack?” philosophy: “I’m not arguing that movie needed the twist it works brilliantly without it. None of this happens in the movie, but there’s a slight nod to it with that early line about cancer - “Would you like the can, sir?” - which was not in the novel, and in that scene in which George Clooney coldly explains to Anna Kendrick (whose entire character Reitman invented for the film), “We all die alone.” Here’s the book’s ending: In the final pages, we learn for the first time that main character Ryan Bingham has been suffering from blackout seizures, will donate his frequent-flier miles to children’s hospitals, and is headed to the Mayo Clinic for a checkup he’s worried could yield bad news. By the way, Reitman denied all of this last night, but it’s still interesting.

( Warning: This post contains heavy spoilers for both versions of Air.) He wonders if certain parts of the film aren’t vestiges of an earlier version whose finale hewed closer to Kirn’s and might’ve been more affecting. Yesterday, a reader of Jeffrey Wells’s blog posited a theory that Up in the Air director Jason Reitman had once intended to keep the original ending of Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, on which his movie is based.

Up in the Air by Walter Kirn