The '22 Jump Street' End Credits Almost Didn't Exist

This post contains spoilers about the end of "22 Jump Street."

The funniest part of "22 Jump Street" comes during the film's closing credits: Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller visualize multiple fake sequels to "22 Jump Street," including versions that take Schmidt and Jenko (Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum) to culinary school, a nursing home and a ninja academy. But as Lord told HuffPost Entertainment, the gag almost didn't even exist.

"The original ending was Ice Cube saying, 'What do you guys want to do for your next mission?'" Lord said. "And the guys go, 'No, man, we're done.' They walk off into the sunset and that's the end."

After early test audiences found that ending "depressing," Lord and Miller came up with a variation on what would eventually wind up in "22 Jump Street."

"We were going to recast [Hill and Tatum] a million times," Miller said. "That was the idea. Then it turned out that the audience was like, 'Oh, no, no, no: We only want to see those guys keep doing it.'" (In the end, only Hill is recast at one point in the credits sequence, replaced by Seth Rogen.)

To create the fake posters for the fake sequels, Miller and Lord turned to Alma Mater, the same company that produced the credits for the directors’ previous films, "21 Jump Street" and "The LEGO Movie."

"They were great," Miller said. "We worked back and forth with them making the thing. I'm glad people enjoy it."

As for which movie poster the directors found most pleasing, they each chose the same one: "2121 Jump Street," which sends Schmidt and Jenko to space.

"We were joking for years that the sequel should be '2021 Jump Street,' and it would be set seven or eight years in the future," Lord said. "But we realized we hadn't really gone far enough."