What happens at the end of 50 First Dates? The final scene jumps years past the rest of the film
How 50 First Dates ends, where the final scene takes place, and why it jumps years past everything else in the film — plus the very different ending Drew Barrymore says was originally written before Adam Sandler got involved.
Peter Segal's 2004 romcom spends nearly its whole runtime on the same Hawaiian island, with Adam Sandler's Henry Roth restarting the same courtship of Drew Barrymore's Lucy Whitmore day after day. Then the last scene skips ahead by several years and about 3,000 miles — and quietly answers every question the film has raised.
How the film gets there
Lucy has Goldfield Syndrome — an invented condition modelled on anterograde amnesia — after a car accident: she wakes every morning believing it's still the day before the crash, 13 October 2002, her father's birthday. Her father Marlin and brother Doug restage that day on a loop to spare her the truth; Henry, a marine vet who's spent ten years planning a boat trip to study walruses in Bristol Bay, Alaska, upends the routine by courting her from scratch each morning.
The relationship collapses when Lucy learns Henry has shelved the Alaska expedition for her. She breaks it off and moves into the brain institute. Henry only turns back when Marlin mentions she sings — specifically the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice", which she only ever sang on days they'd met. At the institute, she doesn't recognise him, but shows him a wall of paintings of his face. Some part of him survives the nightly reset.
The final scene, beat by beat
Cut to an unspecified number of years later. Lucy wakes in an unfamiliar bed next to a videotape labelled "Good Morning Lucy". The tape walks her through the accident, her condition — and then footage of her own wedding to Henry. It signs off by telling her to grab a jacket and come up for breakfast. On deck, she finds:
- Henry — who never cancelled Alaska after all; the boat made it to Bristol Bay with Lucy aboard.
- Nicole — their young daughter, old enough to talk, which is the film's only real clock for how much time has passed.
- Marlin — along for the voyage, still part of the daily system.
- The tape itself — proof the morning-briefing routine became permanent married life rather than a stopgap.
Henry never cured Lucy. He built a life that runs perfectly well without a cure — which is the entire joke of the title carrying on forever.
The ending that was nearly used
Barrymore revealed on The Drew Barrymore Show in 2024 that the script — then a drama called 50 First Kisses, set in Seattle — originally ended with the couple apart: Lucy sends Henry away to live his life, he leaves, and the film closes on him walking back into the restaurant to introduce himself all over again.
"It was a drama set in Seattle," Barrymore said — until Sandler signed on and the whole thing relocated to Hawaii and cheered up considerably.
Segal has separately described another discarded ending, telling Entertainment Weekly in 2019 about a version built around a grander memory-jogging gesture. The Alaska coda beat them both.
Which version do other countries use?
The film has been remade at least four times — in Telugu (Sathyabhama, 2007), Malayalam (Ormayundo Ee Mukham, 2014), Mexico (Como si fuera la primera vez, 2019), and Japan in 2018, where the remake was titled 50 First Kisses. The Japanese producers, knowingly or not, ended up using the abandoned original title of the script.
For the record: Goldfield Syndrome doesn't exist, and neither does Ten Second Tom's condition — though Allen Covert's ten-second memory remains the most efficient running gag in the Sandler catalogue.
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