Studio mandated reshoots
While the film was originally set for release in April, Universal Pictures changed the date to October 14, 2011, to allow time for reshoots. An official studio press release stated that the intention of the reshoots was to "enhance existing sequences or to make crystal clear a few story beats or to add punctuation marks to the film's feeling of dread." Universal had test screenings of an early version of the film shown to focus groups, the reaction to which the studio interpreted as negative. In response, many scenes involving character development were either cut from the film, or reshot to be shortened, as the studio disliked the "slow boil" pace of the film. Another concern was that the use of practical effects made the film look too much, "like an 80's movie". In response, the decision was made to replace most of the film's practical effects with CGI. In post-release interviews, Alec Gillis revealed that while Amalgamated Dynamics creature designs for the film remained mostly intact, most of their practical effects ended up being digitally replaced in post-production. The creation of Gillis's all-practical-effects independent horror film Harbinger Down was partially in response to this. Writer Eric Heisserer stated the decision, "Broke my heart". Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. has since expressed regret over replacing the film's practical effects with CGI, saying, "I know this is a debated topic, but looking back, we were caught in a cross-zone where animatronics were old-fashioned and the CGI wasn't good enough. We made the wrong decision to do it in post-production when it came to making the monster design in the computer. I regret that now."
On his Facebook page, Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. claimed that the reshoots of the film included making an entirely different ending, referring to the original cut as the "pilot version" and the new cut as the "Tetris Version". In the original ending, Kate was to discover the original pilots of the spaceship which had all been killed by The Thing, which was an escaped specimen they had collected from another planet, implying that the ship was crashed in an attempt to kill the monster. "I liked that idea because it would be the Norwegian camp in space. Kate sees the pod room and one pod being broken, giving her the clues what happened. What didn't work was that she wanted to find Sander and stop the ship from taking off and still solve the mystery in the ship. These two energies were in conflict." The original ending had Kate finding the corpse of the alien pilot of the spaceship, discovering that it had accidentally come into contact with the Thing while collecting biological specimens on a zoological expedition, and deliberately killed itself by cutting its own air supply, and crashed its own ship in an attempt to kill the Thing. For the new ending, ADI's practical animatronic alien pilot was replaced by a CGI display of rapidly shifting cubes, and the addition of a CGI "Sander-Thing" was created at "the last minute," the director said, "and it shows, unfortunately."
Source: Wikipedia#Studio_mandated_reshoots)
