Alternate ending

The fate of Douglas Quaid is left very ambiguous by the end of 'Total Recall', but the movie originally had a much more concrete conclusion for the character.

In earlier drafts, the three-fingered Martian handprint seen towards the end of the film was meant to be Douglas' handprint, and the character was supposed to be a human that was killed by the implant-machine who was then later revived through a synthetic replica.

However, director Paul Verhoeven wanted to let the audience come to their own conclusions about the character, and so opted to end the flick more open-ended regarding whether everything that had happened was just dreamed up by Douglas.