Director of “Monsters, Inc.” Explains How the Movie’s Heartwarming Ending Almost Didn’t Happen

Sometimes movies take a lot of input.

Pete Docter — who directed 2001’s Monsters, Inc. as well as many other beloved Pixar films — opened up on the March 11 episode of the Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast about his creative process and the many changes some of his best-known projects went through as they went from idea to finished movie.

Podcast guest host Claire Corrigan Lichty (Kelly’s daughter) asked Docter, 56, what idea he fought the hardest for. The Oscar winner remembered the arguments he had when it came to writing the end of Monsters, Inc. 

“We screened Monsters, Inc. for an audience, and, one of the questions that they asked was, ‘How'd you feel about the ending?’ And, you know, kind of a third of the people raised their hand and said they liked it,” he said. They asked the rest of the audience why they didn’t like it. “And they're like, we wanna see Sulley get back together with Boo at the very end.”

In the movie, Sulley (voiced by John Goodman) helps save the day with his friend Mike Wazowski (voiced by Billy Crystal). They uncover the evil plot at the center of the scare factory where they work, and they shepherd the little girl Boo (voiced by Mary Gibbs) back into her human world.

But the Child Detection Agency has Boo’s door shredded, keeping the pair apart seemingly forever. Sulley revolutionizes the factory, learning they can harvest laughs instead of fear, but at the film’s conclusion, he’s still sad to be separated from Boo. In the original cut, the movie ends there.

In the new ending, Mike reassembles the pieces of Boo’s door. Sulley opens it. Boo calls out to him and he smiles; the film ends there, with the image on his face. “I just knew in my head that if I did a scene where he runs in and he sees Boo, that it would never be as cool as it is in your own head,” Docter said. He had to “fight” for that ending — where the viewer doesn’t see Boo again — “quite a bit.” “I was trying to leave them wanting more,” he said.

Related: No, Pixar Will Not Be Making Live Action Movies of Their Classic Films

Monsters Inc. received a nomination for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature (but lost to Shrek). Docter would ultimately win the award three times, for 2009’s Up, 2015’s Inside Out and 2020’s Soul. He has been Pixar’s chief creative officer since 2018.

On the podcast, Docter also reflected on other ways Monsters Inc. changed during production. The original idea, he said, was about monsters who lived in people’s closets as their jobs. “They clocked in and clocked out and ate donuts and talked about union dues and stuff like that,” he said.

And Sulley, he said, “scared kids as entertainment for other monsters. So it was all a theater show.” The character — who was initially named Barrymore — was a “stuffy actor who thought very highly of himself until he got stuck with a kid.”

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Similarly, Docter noted that Up was originally about two rivals living in a floating city and that when he originally worked on 2008’s WALL-E, the story was set on a trash planet, not Earth, and there wasn’t a robot love story.

“We've had a lot of stuff that at the time, you're like, ‘No, we can't cut that. It's so brilliant and so funny,’ ” he said. “On Monsters, I learned pretty quickly the only way to survive in this business is to be pretty ready to throw it out.” 

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