I'm not sure, and there are spoilers to come.
HERE COME SPOILERS, ASSUMING I REMEMBER CORRECTLY.
In the novel, we assume that Breen's "suicide" was real; that is, we, like Sally and everyone else, believe that Breen is dead. Breen succeeds in his plan to murder Sally on opening night and then there's the reveal that he murdered the pickup.
But most of this action takes place "off screen," i.e., it's reported, not shown. If I recall correctly, Breen's death is revealed via a police report and the murder of Sally is recounted in a quoted newspaper story.
This kind if misdirection works fine in a novel and might even possibly be adaptable to a film. The problem is that the climactic event, i.e., Breen's deadly confrontation with Sally would have to be played off stage and then "reported," and that's not a satisfying conclusion to a thriller.
If the plot played out as in the novel (but depicted instead of reported) we would the problem of suddenly seeing Breen alive, and we would need some explanation of how he survived. That would be some very tough exposition to wedge into the climactic scene. Worse, if Breen succeeded in killing Sally, there would be no twist; that is, what we were led to believe was about to happen actually would happen.
The last act of the movie, with Sally's vigilante speech and her killing Breen in self-defense, is terribly weak, but other than having her rescued a the last minute by Hector Elizondo or James Garner, how else could the movie end? In the context of the movie's treatment of the story, killing off Sally would have been both anticlimactic and unsatisfying.
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