The Reveal / Live-Action Films

Movies/series with their own pages:

• Saw

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Individual examples:

• 13 Sins: For the last challenge, Elliot finds out his brother Michael is the second contestant and their father played the game years before, killing their mother in order to pass his 13th challenge. Elliot takes this about as well as you'd expect.
• Two in 2:37:
  • Marcus raped his sister Melody.
  • The one who committed suicide was Kelly, who up to this point had not been a viewpoint character.
• Abandoned Mine: All the scary, supernatural stuff the group's been encountering in the Jarvis Mine is actually all an elaborate prank that Brad set up to play on his friends on Halloween Night. He even got a few of his victims in on the act over the course of the night.
• A Classic Horror Story: Fabrizio, who was with the group of carpoolers from the beginning, is actually a high-ranking member of the mafia. He brings people to the woods and crashes their vehicles so he can make them get killed in Folk Horror-styled Snuff Films.
• Aftermath (2021): Otto, Erin's former lover, has been living in the walls of Kevin's and Natalie's new home. He's also the one who was turning down the thermostat and moving things around the house, and is the one who killed Odi with Nerium. He's also become infatuated with Natalie, and planned to kill Kevin so that he can have her all to himself.
• In the final shot of Andhadhun, it is revealed that Akash is able to see again, putting his account of the events into question.
• Antebellum: This film doesn't take place in the pre-Civil War South, but in 21st-century America. The "plantation" is actually a white-supremacist theme park called Antebellum, which gives white people the chance to live out their racist fantasies with kidnapped African-Americans as its "slaves".
• Apparitional: Mr. Gaffney is revealed at the end of the movie to have been the doctor at Freeland State Penitentiary who tortured and maimed the patients in his experiments. He hired the "Ghost Sightings" crew because he thought they were exorcists who could remove the ghosts from the prison for him.
• Avalon High: The Disney Channel movie based off of the original book changes matters around. The night that King Arthur returns, it turns out that Will's evil stepbrother Marco isn't Mordred; he had just been putting up a Jerkass Façade to try protecting him. The real Mordred is the history teacher Mr. Moore. And moments after that, we find out that contrary to what everyone thought, Will isn't King Arthur's reincarnation. Allie is.
• In A Beautiful Mind, the Reveal is that John Nash has schizophrenia and has been imagining all the spy work he was been doing for the government — along with several of the other characters.
• Bethany: Dr. Brown does some digging into hospital records, and learns the truth about Claire's old imaginary friend, Bethany. Bethany was actually Clare's twin sister, who was born with birth defects. As a result, Claire's mom basically hid Bethany away from the world, sewing a mask to her face and making her live in the walls of the house. Bethany's only contact with the outside world (besides being fed from a pet dish) was Claire, who didn't know about her, thinking Bethany was her imaginary friend.
• Close to the end of Big Game, the big reveal is that Hazar is not a terrorist, but a CIA operative and it's Herbert and the vice president who have masterminded the whole attack. Notably, the characters never find out.
• In The Big Lebowski, there was never any kidnapping or ransom money at all. Bunny left to visit friends without telling anyone, and Lebowski gave Walter and The Dude a suitcase full of worthless junk, fully intending for them to screw up the "negotiations" so that he could use the fake kidnapping to cover up an embezzlement scheme (he wanted to get his hands on the money in his family's charity, since he never actually made any money of his own, and only inherited his mansion from his wealthy wife). The various other characters in the film either had nothing to do with the fake kidnapping threat, or were just trying to profit from the resultant confusion for their own ends.
• Billy Club (2013): Alison takes off Billy's mask and finds Bobby's face beneath it. We then learn via Flashbacks that Bobby Spooner was actually a pizza delivery guy that Billy killed earlier. After killing him, Billy took Bobby's ID and assumed his identity to find the rest of the team.
• Black Wake: Dr. Moreira finds out that the homeless guy that Detective Micaels got the book from is actually her son, and that she was abducted by an Eldritch Abomination years ago and made to be its Messiah. The government asked her to help investigate the murders because they new she had some sort of connection.
• The Body (2012): Álex is responsible for the death of Jaime's wife who is also Carla's mother. Carla schemed to make Álex kill Mayka and then Jaime took it on him to gaslight and poison Álex.
• Breaking the Girls: Sara and Nina are actually half-sisters.
• The Burning: Upon confronting Cropsy, flashbacks reveal that Todd was one of the campers responsible for the prank that disfigured him.
• Calvary: Jack the butcher is the parishioner who shows up on the beach to kill Father James, as stated in the opening scene. An interesting version of this trope because for the character it's The Unreveal: James knew all along who it was and wasn't really interested in turning him in or stopping it.
• Chinatown. Katherine Cross is Evelyn Mulawray's sister. And her daughter.
• Citizen Kane: "Rosebud" was Kane's sled.
• Collateral: Vincent's final target is Annie, the federal prosecutor Max had befriended earlier that night.
• Cruella:
  • It wasn't Estella's fault that the Dalmatians attacked her mother and pushed her off a cliff. They weren't really chasing after her, but were called by the Baroness with a dog whistle to attack Catherine and make her murder look like an accident.
  • It turns out that Estella's necklace contains a key to a chest containing her birth certificate. It turns out the Baroness is her biological mother; she wanted nothing to do with the baby and tasked her valet John with disposing of her, but he wouldn't go through with it and instead gave her to Catherine, then one of mansion's maids, to raise as her own.
• Crush: AJ confesses that she's King Pun, the tagger who Paige is searching for.
• Cruz Diablo:
  • Nostromus, the man living in the palace's walls, is hinted throughout the movie to be Cruz Diablo, though in some scenes he shares the room with the man. At the end of the movie it's revealed that both Nostromus and Chacho, his son, share the collective identity of Cruz Diablo.
  • Marta threatens to reveal Diego de la Barrera is not the actual Count of Luna and that Marcela is not his daughter. Later she also reveals the Marquess Pedro de Florida and Commander Rocafuerte helped him along.
• All of the movies in The Dark Knight Trilogy have one, in some form or another:
  • Batman Begins: Henri Ducard was the leader of the League of Shadows all along; "Ra's al Ghul" is just a title passed down by leaders of the League. He's also The Man Behind the Man to Dr. Crane and the Falcone family, and he's planning to use Crane's fear gas to drive Gotham into anarchy.
  • The Dark Knight: Officers Wuertz and Ramirez are crooked cops in The Joker's employ. They were the ones responsible for Harvey and Rachel's capture.
  • The Dark Knight Rises: "Miranda Tate" is actually Ra's al-Ghul's daughter Talia, the new leader of the League of Shadows. She was the one who escaped from the Middle Eastern prison as a child, not Bane.
• In Desktop Desperadoes, Alex, the antagonist obsesses over kidnapping Pointer and utilising his abilities for nefarious criminal purposes but it's later revealed he was in fact Pointer 95, Pointer's obsolete sibling who was also intent on transferring Pointer's data from his body into his with no regard for Pointer's life. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc1tr1cwiZs
• Dominick and Eugene: Nicky's Childhood Brain Damage wasn't caused by an accident. His father was violently beating him.
• Don't Listen: After visiting someone who apparently knows about the house Daniel was renovating, Ruth comes in and tells him and her father that the house was a courthouse 300 years ago. In that time, during The Spanish Inquisition, lots of women were tried there and executed as witches. The anger of one of them remained after her death, and has haunted the house ever since.
• One of the funniest ones ever comes from Down with Love, when Renee Zellweger's character explains her Gambit Pileup in a breathless three-minute single-take monologue which, when it's all finished, leaves Ewan McGregor with a truly priceless expression of bemused confusion on his face.
• Evidence: After an entire movie's worth of looking through and analyzing footage recovered from the scene of a mass murder to try and identify the killer, the investigators realize the footage they've been watching was edited and planted by the killer specifically to throw them off and waste their time while they got away. And also there were actually two killers taking turns in the same outfit, and also those two killers were the "survivors" of the massacre, one of whom the cops had just let go.
• In Ex Machina, Nathan recruited Caleb for his psych profile, not his computer skills. The actual Turing Test is to see whether Ava can manipulate him into helping her escape.
• The Family: Willa faked the DNA test which showed Ben is Adam.
• Fast & Furious 6 has one in its stinger as Han's death scene from Tokyo Drift, which takes place after this one, is shown again, but what's different is that you find out his death wasn't an accident, it was the beginning of a revenge plan against Dom's crew by Owen Shaw's older brother, Deckard, who's played by Jason Statham
  Deckard Shaw (Calling Dom): You don't know me, but you're about to.
• Fight Club: Tyler Durden turns out to have been the narrator's split personality all along.
• Fish Story has several, owing to its Anachronic Order: The missing minute of the song is the lead singer breaking down and asking if this will ever be heard by anyone. The Word Salad Lyrics are the result of a poor translation job on an English-language novel. The record store employee is the son of Gekirin's manager. The college student failed to save the girl, but bought her the opportunity to save them both. The champion of justice was their son, who takes back the ship from the terrorist cult. The student on board the ship is a mathematical genius who calculates the trajectory of the missiles to blow up the comet.
• Fish Tank: Mia breaks into Conor’s home while no one is there. While looking through his camera, she finds video footage that proves Conor is not the single man he was passing himself off as, but a married man with a family.
• Ghosts of War: The events of the movie are happening inside a computer simulation. The soldiers aren't fighting in World War II, but in the Middle East against ISIS. They were supposed to have been helping protect an allied Middle Eastern family known as the Helwigs, but when ISIS showed up, the soldiers hid in the wall and did nothing but watch the family be tortured to death for helping the Americans. A grieving survivor tried to blow them up in a suicide bombing, but only severely wounded them. In her final moments, she cursed the soldiers to be haunted for the deaths they refused to prevent by being attacked inside the simulation by the ghosts of the Helwig family.
• G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra:
  • "The time has come for the Cobra to rise. You will call me... ''Commander."'
  • "It's good to be back everyone!" Then he sits back down at the President's desk and whistles Zartan's "Jolly Good Fellow"..
  • The Doctor has a lot of these.
• Grandmother's House: David's grandfather is revealed at the end of the movie to actually be his biological father by way of the woman in the blue dress, his mother.
• Midway through Gravity, a character who had quite obviously very much died earlier in the movie, mysteriously comes back — something you don't expect from what had been until then fairly realistic fiction. Dr. Stone has a long and important conversation with the character, who refuses to say how he came back. Because he never did — she's imagining the whole conversation, you only learn after the conversation is over.
• Lesser example in The Grey. Ottway states early in the film to the memory of a woman, "you left me." A picture of them in her room shows her in a wedding dress. Ottway occasionally flashes back to her, always in a white bed. Ottway also seems to know what the body experiences during death. This all lines up toward the end of the film, when the camera pans in the flashback, showing the IV drip that Ottway's late wife is connected to.
• The Guest House: Amy slept with Rachel's dad before the two met. Rachel's disgusted and breaks up with her.
• Three in The Guilty:
  • Iben and Michael's infant son Oliver was killed.
  • Iben, not Michael, killed Oliver.
  • Asger killed a young man in the line of duty and then lied and said it was in self-defence.
• Hayride 2: Ol' Pitchfork, or rather, R.W. Rayborn, is actually Steven's great uncle. Morgan, his father, ran off with Rayborn's daughter, Steven's mother, because Rayborn was an Abusive Parent.
• In the French film He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not (which stars Audrey Tautou), the first half is a whimsical unrequited love story, getting a bit creepy, and then as the Love Interest is being taken away to prison, the film rewinds and you see it from his point of view — he's met this strange woman once or twice in passing and doesn't know who all the love notes are coming from. It turns out she's mentally ill with "erotomania," and is ultimately institutionalised.
• Hostile: At the end of the film, the Reaper is on top of Juliette, and reaching for her face. When it puts its hand on her, it runs the tips of its fingers along her face just like Jack's mom used to do for him. This reveals to her that the Reaper she's been keeping at bay all night is Jack.
• How To Blow Up A Pipeline: Xochitl and Theo planned to take the fall all along, covering for everyone else with help from Rowan.
• Identity: None of the people at the motel are real. They are only the figments of Malcolm Rivers' imagination, each of them a separate personality of his mind. And the personality that's been killing off all of the others? Actually the seemingly-cute nine-year-old kid, who we'd assumed had been killed earlier in the film.
• In the film The Illusionist (2006), it's where it turns out that Sophie was alive all along, that Eisenheim successfully fooled the Police Inspector, causing the Prince to kill himself, and that he got away with all of this scot-free. And Eisenheim's the protagonist.
• Two in succession in Impostor. Dr. Olham's innocence is proven when Hathaway reveals that his wife has been replaced with the real biorobot sent to assassinate the chancellor. Shortly afterwards they discover the real Olham's body, as it turns out that both the Olhams had been killed and replaced with copies.
• Island of the Fishmen: Claude and Amanda go into Amanda's father's laboratory, and find Jose in a large water tank, half-transformed into a fishman. Turns out, all the fish people on the island are the native humans transformed into humanoid fish creatures as part of Amanda's father's goal to create a new dominant species for Earth after humans go extinct.
• Not every Reveal has to be serious. In the 1982 comedy Jimmy the Kid, some low-grade crooks use a crime novel about a kidnapping to plan a genuine abduction for ransom. The chosen target, a kid genius, leads them on until he can slip away with the ransom money. At the end, he reveals why he's so successful at manipulating his abductors: because he wrote the book they based their crime on.
• Again, lack of complete sincerity, in the movie Just One Of the Guys, Terry reveals her true gender to Rick who responds with the line, "Where d'you get off having tits?"
• Kild TV: The crew are all trapped inside the television studio with a killer, who they need to learn the identity of. Thanks to Conrad's unfinished video, it's revealed that Adel is the killer.
• Knives Out: Marta didn't actually give Harlan Thrombey an accidental morphine overdose. The labels on the drugs were switched by his grandson Ransom, in an attempted Batman Gambit to get Marta disqualified from inheriting Harlan's fortune, but Marta was such a skilled nurse that she inadvertedly gave him the correct medication due to instinctively knowing the weight of the vial. Furthermore, if Harlan had simply listened to Marta's insistence on calling an ambulance, he would still be alive.
• In La piel que habito (The Skin I Live In), half way through it's revealed that Vera is actually Vicente, the man who ended up being unfortunate enough to mistake Robert's daughter's insanity for weed buzz and stupid enough to try and have sex with her. As a part of his Roaring Rampage of Revenge he has been turned surgically into a woman.
• The Last Witch Hunter has several:
  • Chloe is a Dream Walker, with skills commonly considered to be of Dark Magic.
  • Kaulder will live only as long as Witch Queen's heart continues beating - meaning that she isn't truly dead.
  • Kaulder's immortality isn't the Queen's curse, but her way of "storing" the immortality until she needs it for resurrection.
  • 37th Dolan is a witch spy within Axe and Cross.
• Laura has a twist middle. She's actually alive.
• In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Gandalf the Grey is believed to be dead, having died in the previous film, and his death being recapped at the beginning of this film. Director Peter Jackson utilized various film techniques (distorted voice, blinding light covering his face) to hide that the mysterious White Wizard was actually Gandalf brought back, alive and well, as Gandalf the White. Although Jackson presents this in the film as a surprise, even tricking the audience to believe it may be the evil wizard Saruman, the reveal is completely ruined by all of the trailers and TV spots for the film, which included this pivotal moment to advertise the film. And the fact that the movie was a film adaptation of a book that had been out for fifty years by that point.
• Lycan: Isabella, along with her adopted mother, are serial killers.
• Several films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe have them, many of which (though not all) help build up the series' Myth Arc.
  • Iron Man: Coulson's organization knows that Tony Stark is Iron Man, and they want to recruit him for a special team. And Coulson's boss? His name is Nick Fury.
  • The Avengers: The Other's boss — and the true leader of the Chitauri army — is Thanos.
  • Iron Man 3: "The Mandarin" is actually an actor named Trevor Slattery, hired to distract the American people from the real mastermind behind his attacks: Aldrich Killian.
  • Thor: The Dark World: The Tesseract and the Aether are two of the six "Infinity Stones", a powerful set of artifacts sought by Thanos.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier: S.H.I.E.L.D. was infiltrated by H.Y.D.R.A. soon after World War II, and it's been secretly ruled by them ever since. Also, the Winter Soldier is Steve's brainwashed old friend Bucky Barnes...though that's only a surprise if you didn't read the comics.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy: Peter Quill is half-alien on his father's side, and Yondu's Ravagers were hired to abduct him by his real father.
  • Avengers: Age of Ultron: H.Y.D.R.A. wants Loki's scepter because it was powered by an Infinity Stone all along.
  • Captain America: Civil War: Bucky was the one who murdered Howard and Maria Stark on H.Y.D.R.A.'s orders.
• Masquerade (2021): The plot is about two home invasions, with the second an act of revenge carried out by the victim of the first.
• The Matrix:
  • One of the creepiest reveals ever is when Morpheus explains the true nature of the Matrix itself. Namely, the fact that it is just a simulation meant to give everybody ignorant bliss and distract them from the nature of the real world: dark and decaying, with their bodies harvested by the machines for energy...
  • There's more in the sequels, pulling the bleak world even bleaker with a dose of You Can't Fight Fate. Neo isn't the only "One", not because it's not predetermined, but exactly the opposite: there's already five before him, and their, and now his, job is to reboot the Matrix whenever it's about to crash, picking certain people to survive and repopulate, or choose to do nothing and allow the machine to crash, killing the entire human race. This is done to give humanity a false sense of hope, because their world will always reset every now and then, including the supposedly safe zone Zion, which has similarly been rebuilt five times. Of course Neo Takes a Third Option and does succeed.
• When the central protagonist in Memento finally does...Remember Sammy Jankis.
• Mission: Impossible Film Series:
  • There are not one but two major reveals in Mission: Impossible (1996)— that Phelps is alive after being presumed KIA on a mission, and later that he and Claire are working together against Ethan.
  • Mission: Impossible III starts with a very tense scene in which Ethan Hunt's wife is tied to a chair, whilst Big Bad Philip Seymour Hoffman threatens to kill her. At the end of the movie it's revealed that it was a woman who worked for the bad guy. She is wearing a mask of Ethan Hunt's wife's face. Also Musgrave is the one in Davian's employ. His attempts to frame Director Brassel were intended to throw off suspicion of himself.
  • Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol — Intelligence analyst William Brandt isn't just a mere analyst; he's also a highly-trained field agent who was once tasked with guarding Ethan's wife, whom he supposedly failed to protect, which is why he is very reluctant to take up field missions again. At the end of the film, it's revealed that she's alive and well; Ethan has been hiding her from his enemies for quite a while.
  • Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation — The Syndicate is actually a proposed MI6 black operation that was rejected by the British PM, but that the head of MI6 authorized anyway. Also, the director of the CIA is not a total Inspector Javert.
• Miss Sloane:
  • It turns out Sloane isn't the only person involved in political corruption speaking in the committee room.
  • Also, the piece of paper Schmidt gave Sloane reveals she was working for free the whole time.
  • Finally, Jane's been a Fake Defector; she's been working for Sloane the entire time.
• Some of the films by M. Night Shyamalan love this trope:
  • The Sixth Sense: Malcolm was a ghost this whole time.
  • Unbreakable: Elijah was the one who caused the train accident that David was in, and claims to be the "villain" to David's "hero."
  • Signs: The aliens are afraid of water, which is like acid to them, which explains why the daughter kept leaving glasses of water all over the house.
  • The Village (2004): The whole film was actually set in modern times and the elders created the village to escape all the hardships of the modern world. Oh, and the monsters in the woods? They were just the elders in costumes as a way to keep the other villagers from ever escaping and finding out the truth.
  • The Visit: The kids "grandparents" are actually escaped mental patients who killed the real grandparents and stole their identities.
  • Old: The island resort is actually a conspiracy by a pharmaceutical company to use unwitting people as guinea pigs to study the lifelong effects of their drugs. The Rapid Aging is their way of getting to the "lifelong" part much faster.
• There are two big ones in Monsoon Wedding:
  • Aditi has been having an affair with a married man. She finally tells her groom to be before the wedding and he thanks her for her honesty. This reveal is part of what triggers them to open up and fall in love.
  • Ria's uncle has been sexually abusing her and then moves on to her younger cousin. When she finally confronts him in front of his brother it triggers drama resulting ultimately in Lalit banning his brother from his house to protect his family.
• In Moon, neither of the two men claiming to be Sam Bell is the real deal — they're just two clones out of countless hundreds of them that are kept stockpiled at the mining station with implanted memories so that they can be used as slave labor. Each clone is designed with a three-year lifespan (hence, Sam's three-year contract with the mining company) and each one is killed at the end of his tenure so that the next clone can be awoken. Also, that creepy HAL-esque robot with the smiley face and Kevin Spacey's voice? It's totally not evil.
• My Little Sister: The full home movie reveals that Igor's sister retaliated for a prank pulled on her by him and their father by tricking the father into splashing acid in his face. In response, Igor freed his mother (who's the crazy woman in white wandering about the woods) and killed his sister.
• Mystery of the Wax Museum: After Igor gets up from his wheelchair and grabs Charlotte while ranting about his Marie Antoinette, she starts hitting his face, which crumbles away to reveal that it was a rather convincing wax mask and that he was the disfigured bodysnatcher seen throughout the film all along.
• "Take a chill pill" in Mystery Team.
• The Negotiation: Why does Tae-gu only want to negotiate with Chae-youn? His sister, Hyun-ju, was in cahoots with him when she died in Chae-youn's arms, and he wants Chae-youn to realize that there was much more to her death.
• Nightbooks: Natacha isn't the original witch; she's a former victim ("unicorn girl") who escaped, realized she'd been abandoned by her family during her time in captivity, returned to the apartment, trapped the original witch in a deep sleep and began stealing her power.
• Night of the Dribbler: At the end, we find out that the Dribbler is Stan's dad. He's been removing other members of the basketball team so Stan can have a better chance of joining. He's doing it because he's a former member of the team, and it would look bad for him if his son wasn't allowed to join.
• Now You See Me:
  • This being a movie about magic tricks, there are several Reveals, mainly pertaining to said magic tricks but including the tricks of Wilder's "death" and Rhodes's fake identity.
  • The reveal that the Four Horsemen's heists are not about money. They ended up with zero money from the heists since they gave away all their money. The real intention behind these heists is to get revenge on the people who wronged Dylan's father.
• Now You See Me 2:
  • Walter Mabry is actually the son of the first film's Big Bad, Arthur Tressler, and his whole plan is an orchestrated revenge scheme on his father's behalf.
  • Thaddeus Bradley isn't actually a villain, but a senior member of the Eye, and the former partner of Rhodes's father Lionel Shrike (Bradley would use his debunker show to actually drum up publicity for Shrike's act), who, after Shrike's death, spent the years secretly assisting Rhodes in his revenge plot.
• Oblivion (2013) : The war with the Scavs never happened. Rather, the Tet kidnapped the real Jack and Victoria, cloned them a billion times and used them to Kill All Humans and Take Over the World to use as a fuel source for itself.
• Paranormal Asylum: Evelyn is Mary Mallon's half-sister, and has been using Mary's ghost to lure men to her so she can consume their youth to stay young. Also, Mary's father used to molest her until she had her stroke, since her being unable to move took the joy out of it for him.
• The big reveal that Captain Barbossa has returned to life at the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. More so, in that even the actors didn't know it would be Barbossa. They assumed Anamaria would be coming down the stairs, and their expressions of surprise are real ones.
• Pitchfork: The killer is Ben Holister, the son of Hunter's family's psychotic neighbours.
• One of the most famous is from Planet of the Apes (1968), in which the eponymous planet turns out to be an Earth devastated by nuclear war. And George Taylor, The Hero of the film, only finds this out upon seeing the ruins of the Statue of Liberty.
• Prometheus provides a retroactive reveal for Alien: The Space-Jockey from Alien was an Engineer. Given that Engineers look nearly human, the reason for the Space-Jockey's strange elephant-like features was because it was merely his space helmet. Also, the Space-Jockey's ship was a warship carrying Bioweapon Beasts that escaped and killed their creator.
• Psychos: Norma is the daughter of a child molester, who made her play dress-up for sex roleplaying, and filmed the sessions. Also, Norma's two friends, Sasha and JJ, are Imaginary Faux Friends born of her father's abuse, and have been verbally abusing her into committing very atrocious acts against her father.
• The Quiet:
  • Nina comes home one day to hear Dot playing the piano until one of the strings breaks and Dot exclaims "Shit!," revealing that she can talk.
  • Dot also soon discovers Nina is being raped by her dad.
• Redwood Massacre Annihilation: Two.
  • Max has been bringing people to the Redwood killer so he can watch the killer murder them.
  • The underground base is a former experimental hospital where research on people like the Redwood killer was carried out.
• Replicas: William's boss, Jones, knew all along that William and Ed stole the technology from Bionyne to clone William's family. He allowed it to happen because he knew it would lead to the breakthrough that Bionyne was in need of. After William is successful, Jones attempts to have the Fosters assassinated and William's research stolen.
• Reservoir Dogs: The rat is Mr Orange.
• In Robot Holocaust, Valeria turns out to be a robot. Jorn is eaten by The Dark One, who's apparently a triffid-like thing, giving the appearance of Jorn becoming an avocado-man.
• The Rocketeer: Neville Sinclair is in fact a Nazi agent working to steal the McGuffin jetpack.
• The Room (2003): Johnny, Denny, Peter, and Mark congregate at Johnny's apartment wearing tuxedos to play catch with a football. Mark is the last to arrive, and when he does, the camera zooms in tightly on his face accompanied by dramatic music on the soundtrack to reveal he has shaved his beard.
• Every single Scream contains a scene where the masked Ghostface killer reveals his/her true identity and motives. It usually changes the way you see the entire movie.
• Parodied in A Shot in the Dark, where it's revealed that all but one supporting character introduced in the film is either a murderer or a blackmailer. In addition, the killer of those four bystanders was Dreyfus, who was attempting to kill Clouseau, having been driven to insanity by Clouseau's incompetence. He tries to car-bomb Clouseau in the climax, but the Ballons and their staff inadvertently take it instead... Of course, due to a certain franchise policy, it wouldn't have killed Clouseau either anyway.
• The hidden setup of So I Married an Axe Murderer. Harriet isn't Mrs. X, her sister Rose is. Harriet has trouble maintaining serious relationships because Rose is a Clingy Jealous Girl who murders all of Harriet's lovers so she can have her to herself.
• Soylent Green: The main ingredient of the eponymous food.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home: After the hearing in San Francisco, Captain Kirk and his command crew are soon taken up to space dock in a travel pod that's taking them to their new ship. None of them know anything about the new ship, not even her name. Sulu believes they're going to be taking over the USS Excelsior and the pod does seem to be heading that way. But they continue going right past the Excelsior, revealing their destination - the USS Enterprise-A.
  • Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country:
    • After getting toyed with His Name Is... when Kirk gets beamed away from Rura Penthe only to catch the surviving conspirator on board the Enterprise, the identities of the masterminds of the conspiracy is revealed through a mind meld.
    • In the climax, Kirk saves the Federation president from a Klingon assassin, and Scotty kills the assassin before he can shoot anyone else. In the theatrical cut, the remaining conspirators are rounded up with no further comment on the assassin, while in the director's cut, the assassin is revealed to be Colonel West in disguise, making the whole point of Klingons having Alien Blood earlier in the film relevant, since the blood coming from West's body isn't Klingon blood.
  • Star Trek Into Darkness:
    • "John Harrison" is actually Khan Noonien Singh, of Space Seed and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan fame.
    • Admiral Marcus sent the Enterprise to be destroyed, as a pretext to start a war with the Klingons.
  • Star Trek Beyond: Krall is hero of The Federation Balthazar Edison, the human captain of the USS Franklin, who is Not Quite Dead.
• Star Wars:
  • The all-time most famous is "No, I am your father" from The Empire Strikes Back, as well as the revelation that Leia is his sister in the next movie. Vader's status as Luke's father was actually a reveal to near everyone, even those involved in the production, considering only a very select few knew about it up until near the film's release. Even David Prowse, the actor within the suit, did not know the truth. The line he spoke while filming, believing it would be the final line, was "Obi-Wan killed your father." That would have been pretty screwy, too and in fact, is in a way also Metaphorically True. A sign of the pre-Internet times the movie was released in: "Luke, I Am Your Father" was actually revealed first in the novelization of the movie... which was released over a month prior to the movie itself.
  • Another major yet minor reveal in The Empire Strikes Back is the fact that Vader is merely The Dragon to The Emperor, as up until that point, Vader had been built up as the Big Bad of the Star Wars trilogy. It's a different story in-universe though, as the Emperor is widely known across the galaxy, and Vader is merely one of his enforcers. It was hinted beforehand, since Vader mentions the Emperor, as does Tarkin, who he takes orders from at the time, showing Vader's not the top dog.
  • After all the speculation and hype The Last Jedi reveals that Rey's parents are complete nobodies. A pair of junk traders from Jakku that sold their daughter for drinking money, and have been dead for some time.
  • This reveal is then completely undone by the next film, The Rise of Skywalker, where it's revealed that, in fact, Rey's father IS somebody: the son of Emperor Palpatine, making Rey a Palpatine herself.
• Summerland (2020): Frank is Vera's son (on a side note, he's also part black as a result, though this wasn't very obvious since he passes for completely white, simply having curly hair), as Alice, Vera's former lover, learns to her shock. She'd been taking care of Frank without knowing (which it turns out Vera set up, believing in her abilities to keep her son safe).
• Tell No One: the entire plot comes about because Margot murdered Phillipe in self-defense, and her father, knowing the Big Bad would come after her and her family, not only covered it up, but faked her death.
• Tequila Sunrise: Escalante, a Mexican cop, and Carlos, the drug dealer everyone's chasing, are one and the same.
• The Terminal: Two-thirds of the way through the film, Viktor finally reveals the contents of the old Planters' Peanut can he carries with him constantly, about which there has been much speculation by the other characters, to Amelia at dinner. It's a copy of the famous photograph "A Great Day in Harlem", showing 57 prominent jazz musicians of the time, along with the autographs of 56 of those musicians that Viktor's father collected before he died. Viktor has come to New York to get the autograph of Benny Golson, the last one.
• Similar to another mentioned entry, the advertising killed this trope for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. If one watches it back-to-back with the original you notice that, cleverly, it is left completely ambiguous why the T-800 has returned until the point where he rescues John Connor in the hallway.
• In Tootsie, the big reveal for the fictional soap is when the main character - who had been masquerading as a woman to land a part on a soap opera - takes off his wig and many of his feminine touches and reveals himself to be a man during a live taping.
• The Usual Suspects: Keyzer Soze is Verbal Kint.
• A Wakefield Project: Chloe is Nathan Cross' ex-girlfriend and would-be seventh victim. In fact, it was her infidelity that motivated him to commit the crimes that he did in life.
• Werewolves Within: Cecily is a werewolf who came to Beaverfield in hopes of finding the perfect hunting grounds. She's tried it before in other towns, but it would always end up in the papers. She's counting on the people of Beaverfield being too distrustful of each other to really look into it and figure out she's a killer.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit has a disturbing one as the callous Judge Doom whose glasses often lighted up to cover his stare is revealed to be the Toon who killed Eddie's brother, complete with an insanely high pitched voice and cartoonish eyes that could be best described as coming straight from a mentally disturbed animator or Hell itself. Eddie was likely not the only one who was terrified of this scene.
• The Whole Truth (2021): The Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl that Putt and Pim have been seeing in the next house through the hole in the wall is their dead older sister, Pinya. They and their parents used to live with their grandparents years ago when Pim was a baby, Putt was still in his mother's womb, and their father, Krit, was alive. One day, when everyone put Pinya and Krit were out, Pinya asked Krit to play hide and seek with her. He agreed to, and she hid in the room under the stairs. Unfortunately, Krit's alcoholism made him forget all about the game and take a nap on the couch. Later, Wan saw the door under the stairs unlocked, and locked it, trapping her inside. She then apparently died from consuming the rat poison Wan stored there, and Krit killed himself by taking Phong's gun and shot himself in the head.
• Winterskin: Agnes' story of skinless men lurking in the woods is entirely made up to deter Billy from leaving the house. What's more, she's a Serial Killer who's M.O. is skinning her victims and listening to them scream. The only skinless man seen in the movie was Billy's father.
• Wishcraft: Mr. Turner, the school history teacher, is the killer.
• Wonder Woman (2017) has two for the prices of one.
  • Ares has been posing as Sir Patrick Morgan, not General Erich Ludendorf.
  • Also, Wonder Woman herself is the godkiller weapon created by Zeus to destroy Ares.
• The Zombie Apocalypse in Apartment 14F: The conflict of the film starts when Raymond, Joey, and Bradly witness what looks like hordes of zombies attacking people two floors below them. Later on, Joey takes a closer look at the footage, and sees a guy holding a boom mic in the background, revealing that it was all a shooting for a zombie movie.

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