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alt title(s): Non Spoiler
There! You'll never be surprised again.
"It was his sled. It was his sled from when he was a kid. There, I saved you three long, boobless hours."
Kong ? You don't want me to spoil Kong, a seventy-year-old movie? There's a statute of limitations on this shit, man. Everyone knows he climbs to the top of the Empire State Building. What did you think happened next? . . . Have you seen The Passion yet? Here's a spoiler for you: Jesus dies!
This trope is for a Twist Ending that used to be guarded carefully as a Spoiler. However, thanks to Popcultural Osmosis, everyone within the target demographic knows the ending already, even those who haven't even seen the original film or TV show, and it's probably never going to surprise anyone again. In many cases, the twist becomes the central fact known even to those only noddingly familiar with the work, and other adaptations take it as read from the beginning.
Naturally, any movie or series that is based on a historical event gets this by default. For example: "The Spartans all die" in 300, or "The ship sinks" for Titanic. It's a Foregone Conclusion.
Named after the best-known example, from Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane.
Spoilers ahead, of course. Or not. After all, that is the point of this trope... but there's a good chance that some Troper added a twist which really doesn't belong here, so read at your own risk. If a work is not too well known, but is only really recognized for its spoiled ending, then it's All There Is To Know About The Crying Game.
Also, before adding a new example to this page, take a jaunt on over to the discussion page and see if it's been removed before. If it seems glaringly obvious to you and it's not here already, it's likely that someone else has already added it before and we reached consensus that it doesn't belong. Many borderline examples have been added in the past and eventually found wanting, so make sure you're not treading familiar ground. Just because it's known to all the fans of a particular work or series doesn't mean it belongs here; the standards are somewhat higher than that. New works and works with relatively narrow audiences, in particular, need to withstand fairly intense scrutiny to avoid getting nuked here (no matter how well-known it seems to you).
Examples:
Anime
- Sailor Moon (first season): Usagi is the moon princess everyone's been looking for. This, along with other plot points, is ruined in the English dub by being revealed to the viewers in the first episode in a scene that didn't appear until much later originally.
- Also, Tuxedo Mask is Mamoru in disguise.
- Yu-Gi-Oh: The card game Duel Monsters is based on ancient Egyptian "shadow games". This isn't revealed until the beginning of Battle City in the original version, but the American adaptation gives you this fact in the second episode. (It's mysteriously still treated as a surprise when it happens then.)
- Speed Racer: Unknown to Speed, Racer X is Speed's older brother Rex who ran away from home. The constant mentioning of it by the narrator wouldn't be so bad, if he didn't seem to treat it as such a frickin' revelation every single time. The fact that "Racer X" is also pronounced identically to "Racer Rex" just makes it worse. The 2008 Live Action Adaptation movie handles this in a much better manner, but saying more would be a Spoiler.
Comic Books
- Spider-Man: Gwen Stacy is killed during a battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin. It was, in fact, hyped with Tonight Someone Dies, but in the days when fans would be likely to assume a trick.
- Jean Gray dies. And is reborn. And dies again. And so on. Perhaps her code name (Phoenix, a mythological creature that is constantly in a cycle of death and rebirth) added to the spoiling?
Film
- Citizen Kane: Rosebud was his sled. Although he provided the trope name in the formerly above quote, Peter Griffin was not the first to spoil it — that ship sailed for good when Charles Schulz, with uncharacteristic thoughtlessness, gave it away in a 70s Peanuts strip
 .
- I was spoiled by Don Rosa in the final chapter of The Life & Times of Scrooge Mc Duck (or rather, the author's introduction to it), although I didn't realise it until later (I was too young to get the reference at the time).
- Many of us who grew up in the 1980s had this ruined for us by an episode of The Real Ghostbusters cartoon, where the ghost was that of Charles Foster Kane and he was convinced to stop haunting at the end when he was given the sled back! [[ Seriously.]]
- The Empire Strikes Back: Luke is the son of Darth Vader.
- The third season The Simpsons episode "I Married Marge" has a flashback where the young Homer spoils this for a long line of moviegoers by coming out of the cinema and exclaiming loudly "I can't believe that Darth Vader turns out to be Luke's father!" Cue groans, and the line grumpily dispersing.
- Return of the Jedi: Leia is Luke's sister.
- Revenge of the Sith: Anakin becomes Darth Vader. No duh.
- Since many people also came to see the movie since it was the one where we find out how the Empire exactly came about, and how Anakin became Vader, I suppose one could call this a foregone conclusion
- The Crying Game: Dil isn't the usual sort of woman.
- Psycho: Norman Bates's murderous mother is actually Norman's other personality. The murder itself, killing off the hitherto most important character halfway through the movie, was originally meant to be a surprise, too.
- Soylent Green is made out of people.
- Although in the book it's soybeans and lentils. (Soylent Red adds coloring to make it look more like meat.)
- The Planet Of The Apes is really a post-apocalyptic Earth.
- The final reveal of this one is frequently blown in the advertisement or dvd-cover...
- I guess in this way humans really aren't smarter than apes.
- In Old Yeller, the kid has to Shoot The Dog. Literally.
- The Third Man: Orson Welles' character isn't dead.
- The Sixth Sense: Bruce Willis, however, was dead the whole time.
- Also, "I see dead people" was supposed to be a twist, explaining what the heck was going on for the first half of the movie, but it was featured in the trailers.
- The Wizard Of Oz is, in both the film and the book, just an American con man. Also, in the movie (and only the movie), it was All Just A Dream, "a wonderful dream."
- Casablanca: Rick lets Ilsa go to be with her husband, who needs her to inspire his fight against the Nazis, and then he and Louis go to Brazzaville, fight more Nazis, and have a beautiful friendship.
- This might have been less of a twist to contemporary audiences, as there would be no way to get a wife abandoning her husband past the censors of the time.
- The Disney Animated Canon has plenty, in part because it frequently draws from older sources. A few of the more famous include:
- Shrek: Fiona becomes an ogre at night. Made obvious by the two sequels.
- King Kong: He climbs to the top of the Empire State Building and gets machine-gunned by aeroplanes until he falls down. But it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.
- This comprehensive list of Twist Endings from The New York Times.
- Titanic: Besides the obvious, it's become well known that Rose had the jewel the whole time (to the point that the final scene was parodied in an insurance ad).
- Also mentioned in the music video for "Ooops, I Did It Again," by Britney Spears. Or so I heard...
- Even first-time viewers of Alien these days are not surprised by the chestbursting scene.
- Terminator 2: Arnold's the good guy in this one. Most people don't even know that was supposed to be a surprise, as the marketing totally ruined it.
- Terminator itself. For the first forty minutes, you're not supposed to trust Reese. Of course, by now you probably know that Reese is there to save Sarah.
- Its A Wonderful Life: George is saved by donations from all the people he's helped over the years.
- Tyler Durden is the Narrator's split personality. Thank you, Rosie O'Donnell.
- The Usual Suspects: Verbal Kint is really Keyser Soze.
- The Fly. In the original version the fact that the teleporter combined the Mad Scientist with a fly is supposed to be a huge surprise.
- The Wicker Man. They burn the policeman. In a big wicker man.
- The Brood. The Enfante Terrible killers are the physical manifestations of Nola's misdirected anger. This information is right there on the DVD case, and it comes as a bit of a surprise that it was even intended as a Twist Ending at all.
- Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Spock dies (until the sequel).
- Subverted and played straight: The news that Spock's death was planned leaked fairly early on in development, so the first scene (the famous Kobiyashi Maru scene) was edited so that most of the characters (including Spock) 'died'. After the sim ends, Mc Coy even asks Spock: "Aren't you dead?" This was to preserve the twist; first-time moviegoers would assume the spoilers referred to this scene, and would then be surprised when Spock died For Real This Time. Today no one notices any of this.
- As mentioned in the above quote, in Passionofthe Christ Jesus dies.
Folktales
Literature
- The Strange Case Of Doctor Jekyll And Mr Hyde: The two title characters are the same man. This was a Twist Ending in the original novel, but it's so well known today, all of the adaptations make it part of the plot from the beginning. Because of this, some people are unaware that it ever was a twist.
- The Scarlet Pimpernel is Sir Percy Blakeney. Once again, in the original book, the reader doesn't discover this fact until Percy's wife does, but this has become another case where the twist is so well-known that most TV and film adaptations reveal it at the very beginning.
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: "Snape kills Dumbledore" quickly became an internet meme within days of the book's release.
- Dracula is a vampire, and the reason Lucy is sick is that he's sucking her blood at night. Another "wait, that was a twist?" example.
- Alice In Wonderland: It was All Just A Dream.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There: Again, it was All Just A Dream. But just to mess with our heads, we're left with the question "Was it Alice's dream, or the Red King's dream?"
- The Da Vinci Code: The heroine's family have been in the Priory of Sion for generations, and the Holy Grail (i.e. the tomb of Mary Magdalene) was hidden in the Louvre the whole time.
- Anna Karenina: Anna commits suicide by jumping under a train. When Vladimir Nabokov taught this novel, he was particularly fond of the trope; he intentionally gave away the ending to his students before they started reading the book, so they would not focus solely on the plot.
- In a class discussion of irony and foreshadowing in literature, This Troper said, "Anna Karenina met Alexy Vronsky at a train station, and she killed herself by jumping under a train!" The teacher facepalmed and responded, "Thank you for that. Nobody really wanted to find that out for themselves, after all."
- Treasure Island: The ship's cook, Long John Silver, turns out to be a pirate. Of course, these days the name Long John Silver is almost as strongly associated with piracy as Black Beard.
- Star Wars: Vision of the Future: Luke and Mara get married. Even Mara's Wikipedia page gives this away.
- In Len Deighton's Bernard Samson sequence, the twist at the end of the first novel, Berlin Game, is essentially given away the back cover of every subsequent novel in the sequence "Bernard Samson is a bit distraught that his wife is a traitor'.
- Parodied in More Information Than You Require, when Hodgman discusses W.R. Hearst, and reveals that "Rosebud" was Hearst's nickname for Theodore Roosevelt.
- War Of The Worlds: The aliens are ultimately brought down by a (to humans) harmless bacterium.
- The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy: The answer to the "Great Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" is 42.
- The Bible: Jesus comes back to life.
- Gone With The Wind: Rhett leaves Scarlett. That's the entire point of "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn!"
Live Action TV
Theatre
- The endings to many of Shakespeare's plays are well known. Most don't have an actual Twist Ending, but Macbeth comes pretty close.
- The ending of Titus Andronicus fits the "twist" ending well. This was the inspiration for the South Park episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die".
- King Lear had a twist ending, at least at the time it was released. Theatre-goers of that time would have been extremely familiar with the story of King Lear, which, until Shakespeare, always ended with Lear being restored to his throne and ruling well until dying of old age.
- Exception: The ending of the long-running play The Mousetrap is the most infamous open secret in theater history - the audience is sworn to secrecy at the conclusion of each performance, and the terms of the original contract prevent the story from being published or filmed until after the show has closed. Everyone who has seen the play has done a fairly good job over the years of keeping mum, and the text of the play has never been published in the UK. (There is, however, an urban legend regarding a cab driver who dropped a number of playgoers off at the theater in question, was stiffed on the tip, and shouted as he drove away, "We won't give it away did it, you cheap gits!"). Indeed, when the play The Real Inspector Hound openly plagiarized The Mousetrap, its producers refused to sue on the basis that doing so would publicly reveal the ending.
- Waiting for Godot: Godot never shows up.
- In Oedipus at Colonus, the titular reveals that his children were the product of incest. For modern audiences this is how the myth is assumed to go, but it is presumed that an earlier version of the myth would have some or none of the children born of incest, instead the product of a polygamous marriage.
- Similarly, Euripedes' version of Medea. In all versions of the Medea myth, her children die but most versions have it happen by accident or bring the children back alive at the end of the story (usually because of mistaken identity). Ancient Greek audiences would have been shocked at Euripedes' ending, where Medea is the willful murderess of her own sons we know today.
- To a lesser extent, Aeschylus' Agamemnon - in the conventional myth, the titular character is murdered by Aegisthus, with Clytemnestra as his accomplice. Clytemnestra being the sole murderer would have been a surprise to a Greek audience (though it's obvious fairly early on).
- Three Sisters: They never get to Moscow.
- JM Synge's Riders to the Sea: Bartley drowns. Everyone knows this from Maurya's famous monologue:
They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me.... I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening.
Video Games
Real Life
- You die.
- Speak for yourself, coffin-stuffer...
- And pay taxes.
- But not in that order, right?
- Sometimes not.
- Way to ruin the surprise, you four.
- Elvis is dead. Maybe.
- The Soviet Union falls, along with the British Empire.
- Ass. I had ten quid on those Russkies.
- The troper below me uses "ass" as an interjection.
- ...So I'm not the only person who uses "ass" as an interjection?
- One translation of The Castle of Cagliostro available as a transcript on the internet has Lupin III (disguised as Zenigata) use "ass" as an interjection while pretending the real Zenigata was Lupin himself in disguise.
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