movies with 'happy endings' that are really fucked up when you think on them

The AI ending is really fucked up taken at face value!

Like, deliberately, in a good way

Yeah

Some people don’t like but…

To me it’s a dreadlock holiday situation

Bigger Than Life (1956): James Mason must either give up the drug that saved his life, or find a way to live with said drug's side effects (which nearly destroyed his family).

Possibly does not count, because director Ray has to have known this was a terrible set of options.

In Scrooged the ghost of a homeless person who froze to death cheers because his death facilitated a yuppie experiencing an almost completely incoherent revelation about the meaning of Christmas

about as happy as you can expect from a Michael O'Donoghue script

Dune (1984)

from Wikipedia: Paul demonstrates his newfound powers and fulfills the Fremen prophecy by causing rain to fall on Arrakis.

however there's a tiny problem with that: it kills the sandworms, ending spice production because the sandworms are integral to that, ends practical interstellar travel, and effectively causes the collapse of human civilisation

re ET, AI, Dune, I wonder who would win in a three-way shootout of movies with ostensibly happy but fucked up endings between Spielberg, Kubrick, and Lynch?

Nicole Kidman telling Tom Cruise, "Git yer boots on cowboy, it's humpy pumpy time!" feels like a top contender...

the parents in Time Bandits sucked, so them getting vaporized and Kevin being free to do whatever he feels like IS a happy ending, we loved it as kids

From the images from pop culture that frightened you as a child thread:

oh man, Time Bandits seconded. just when i thought that the kid who was like, EXACTLY MY AGE AND SEEMED TO SHARE MY SENSIBILITES would find some relief at the end, he's left alone...completely alone probably forever and ever! that creeped me out to no end.
― andrew m. (andrewmorgan), Thursday, March 9, 2006

Yeah. Just that part where the parents touch the evil thing and disappear freaked me out enough about Time Bandits.
― Pleasant Plains /// (Pleasant Plains ///), Thursday, March 9, 2006

Yeah, also with Time Bandits. the face coming at the camera, etc. But the kid losing his parents at the end made me never watch the flick ever again.
― kingfish da notorious teletabby (kingfish 2.0), Thursday, March 9, 2006

That's an explicit bad ending, no? Unless you view his parents as representing conformity and then now he is FREE, but I don't think that's how the movie plays it.

I often think of Gilliam now as a relic that should be stowed away, and lord knows his personal behaviour does him no favours, but this is still such a perfect movie.

iirc "now he is FREE" as happy ending was Gilliam's intention and many see it that way (see f. hazel's post just above).

Hmmm, my memory is of the child actor looking very lost and scared as the camera pans out, in terms of ahem ahem filmic language I remember it feeling anything but happy.

I'm sure viewer's relations to their parents are a factor here too.

I guess Papillon was supposed to be an optimistic ending, but still involved a worn-down Steve McQueen jumping off a cliff floating on a bag of coconuts