July 9 marks 20 years since the release of Anchorman, Adam McKay’s instant classic comedy about dueling San Diego newscasters Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) and Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate). To mark the anniversary, Ferrell appeared as a guest on Applegate’s podcast, MeSsy, where the two spoke about entirely recrafting the film’s original ending shortly before its release.
Lest we forget, Anchorman centers around the bombastic Burgundy, whose immortal status as the top newscaster in 1970s San Diego is threatened by the arrival of Veronica Corningstone, a plucky broadcaster who shakes up the exclusively male media world.
“It just felt like we were playing with the house’s money. Gosh, they’re letting us make this crazy movie,” Ferrell said of Dreamworks, which financed the film. “Let’s just do all the comedy things we’ve wanted to try that people have said, ‘No, you can’t do that in a comedy.’ We just felt like every day we were breaking the rules and having fun.”
But when it came time to test the movie before its release, it was perhaps too scattershot; preview audiences gave it a withering score of 50 out of 100. Ferrell recalled that Dreamworks, instead of abandoning the bizarre comedy as many studios might, gave them extra money for a week of reshoots.
In that time, Ferrell, McKay, and producer Judd Apatow crafted “an entirely new ending,” morphing an action-heavy subplot into a more comedic sequence involving Ron rescuing Veronica from a pack of bloodthirsty bears while covering a panda birth at the local zoo.
“In the original movie,” Ferrell explained, “Christina’s character is abducted by a vigilante group—they were kind of like a comedic version of Patty Hearst. They’re making a political statement and she’s taken up to the observatory, and we have to go rescue her.”
Ferrell said audiences “didn’t like that storyline. We just lost the audience. When it was the news team and all of us interacting, we’d get them back. And so we had to basically reshoot the ending, and that was that we were there covering the big unveiling of the baby panda at the San Diego Zoo, and Christina has fallen into the bear pit.”
All may have been well for the third act, but Applegate found working with real bears to be far more dangerous than any kidnapping scenario. As she explained, one almost pounced on her during a penultimate take.
“There was, um, what is called in the bear business a ‘bluff charge,” Ferrell admitted.
“Yes, for legal reasons we’re going to call it a ‘bluff charge,’ Applegate said. “We can’t insult the bears.”
Ferrell asserted the bear was far away, to which Applegate responded: “Nope, it was not far away. [I was] like three feet from the bear…I’ve never shaken like that in my life. I remember everyone was pretty freaked out. Maybe they thought I’d sue.”
But Applegate would probably agree the risk was well worth it, as audiences immediately embraced Anchorman upon its release. It went on to gross $90 million worldwide, and was followed by a 2013 sequel, Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues.
Both Anchorman movies are streaming on Paramount+. The original ending appears as a subplot in Wake Up Ron Burgundy, a movie assembled from alternate Anchorman takes, which is available to rent on most major streamers.
