Grand Finale / Film

Films — Animation

• Aladdin and the King of Thieves chronologically serves as the ending for the Aladdin franchise at Disney — the entire film builds up Aladdin and Jasmine "finally getting married" throughout the entire adventure. And indeed they do during the ending, finally tying the knot after the first movie, a sequel which set up an animated TV series, and this film. Aladdin would make one more appearance on a crossover episode of the Hercules series, which is set after the events of this film. But the ending song of King of Thieves confirms "that's the end" as sung by the street peddler who introduced the original movie. The way the street peddler waves goodbye to Aladdin and Jasmine indicates that as far as he's concerned, the story is over.
• Toy Story 4 is the finale of the Toy Story franchise. According to Tom Hanks, this will presumably be the final film in the Toy Story franchise, capping off a 24-year tetralogy. The ending appears to confirm this: the seemingly inseparable duo of Woody and Buzz Lightyear peacefully part ways. Although a fifth film was announced.
• Shrek Forever After was initially designed to act as a finale to the Shrek series as a whole, to the point where promotional material outright referred to it as "The Final Chapter". Though it could be said that the third film had a sense of closure to it, Forever After has an ending that's anything but open. Shrek, after going through one of his most dangerous adventures yet and having everything he knows and loves taken from him, comes to accept and embrace his life as it is, realizing the life he had before was meaningless and he prefers his vast group of friends and family. The end credits even show clips and still images from all four movies. The series had a prequel spin-off film afterwards, and a fifth film was announced a few years later but scrapped and replaced with a Continuity Reboot, though Puss in Boots: The Last Wish hint the continuity will still continue possibly.
• How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World is an epic end to the series, with Hiccup saying goodbye to Toothless as he sets out with his mate, the Light Fury, and other dragons into the Hidden World, where they can live safe from humans. In the Distant Finale, Hiccup and Astrid briefly visit the place to let their children fly with Toothless and another dragon.
• Justice League Dark: Apokolips War is this to the DC Animated Movie Universe, with most of the heroes dead or crippled and Earth left near-inhospitable and Flash goes back in time and preventing the entire tragedy from ever happening in the first place, just like what happened in The Flashpoint Paradox, meaning that the resulting reality will be completely different than the one they remember.
• The Casagrandes Movie is this to the The Casagrandes series, as the show proper was cancelled 2 years before the release of this movie, thus making the movie the show's overall finale.

Films — Live-Action

• The Irishman. Given that it had been a long time that Martin Scorsese was not directing a Mafia movie again, adding to the fact that this movie brings together three legendary Mafia film actors (Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino), many see this movie as the grand finale to Scorsese's Mafia movies. Quite simple, The Irishman marks the end of an era and the ultimate deconstruction.
• Star Wars:
  • Chronologically, Return of the Jedi is also the finale of the first six movies and of the original Star Wars trilogy, and it was the last major Star Wars film released until The Phantom Menace in 1999.
  • Revenge of the Sith was originally meant to be both the finale for the Star Wars prequel trilogy and for the entire Star Wars movie saga. That changed when Lucasfilm was sold to Disney and continued the series with The Force Awakens.
  • The Rise of Skywalker is the Sequel Trilogy's coda as well as the current official end of all three trilogies. Whether or not the trilogy format will be retained in the future remains to be seen.
• The Friday the 13th series has had a FEW of these:
  • The title of the fourth entry, Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, makes its intention clear. It ends with Jason being Killed Off for Real by a kid named Tommy Jarvis, who takes him out quite brutally with a machete. The next movie came out LESS THAN A YEAR later, and got around the ending of The Final Chapter by using a copycat killer as the villain instead of the real Jason. Then another year after that, there was Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives, which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin - the real Jason is resurrected as an undead killing machine, by Tommy, no less.
  • Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan was, according to the writer/director, supposed to be this. It infamously ends with Jason being caught in a flood of toxic waste in the NYC sewers and seemingly transforming back into a little boy, though there's some debate over whether this was a hallucination by the main character or some sort of metaphor.
  • The very next film after the above was Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, which got around the end of Part VIII by simply not acknowledging it. It ends when Jason is stabbed by his last living blood relative with a sacred dagger and dragged down into hell by demons... and Freddy Krueger. This was followed in story order by Freddy vs. Jason, where Freddy Krueger revives Jason from hell as part of a plan to get back in the game himself. The sequel in release order was Jason X, a Recycled In Space Affectionate Parody of the series that once again just seemed to ignore the events leading up to it, though it makes a bit more sense in retrospect as a follow-up to Freddy vs. Jason.
• The grand finale of the Dollars Trilogy would be For a Few Dollars More, if one agrees with one paragraph at Wikipedia:
  "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is considered as a prequel by some, since it depicts Eastwood's character gradually acquiring the clothing he wears in the other two films and because it takes place during the American Civil War (1861-1865), whereas the other two films feature comparatively more modern firearms and other props, for example: Lee Van Cleef's character in For a Few Dollars More appears to be a Confederate veteran who has come down in the world, and a graveyard scene in A Fistful of Dollars features a gravestone dated 1873."
  • Once Upon a Time in the West is seen like the grand finale for the Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western films.
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is the Grand Finale of the The Lord of the Rings, and by extension The Hobbit as well.
• The Matrix Revolutions: acts as the Grand Finale of the Matrix trilogy and ties up all the remaining plotlines in the series, ending with peace between Zion and the Machines, the Matrix being rebooted, and Neo finally defeating Smith at the cost of his own life.
• Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the Grand Finale that Star Trek never had. The film had an air of finality to it; the crew and ship were due to be decommissioned, aside from Sulu who now had his own ship. They managed to save the galaxy one last time before retiring. Additionally, the film was produced and released during the 1989-1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the conclusion of which 19 days after the film's release would mark the end of not only the Cold War, but also the country that the Klingon Empire was designed to be an expy of. Consequently, the film essentially acts as a prolonged rumination on the fast-approaching end of the very international climate that birthed one of the series' most central conflicts, and serves to more or less give closure to a series birthed in a soon-to-be-bygone era. The first teaser trailer went out of its way to drive the point home; it was essentially composed of snapshots of the greatest moments of TOS and the previous five films. The movie also bridged TOS and TNG by sowing the seeds of peace between the Federation and the Klingon Empire; this peace was well-established when TNG premiered (though in hindsight it wound up being a bit too idealistic regarding its predictions on America's relationship with The New Russia).
  • Then the studio insisted that the next movie, which was supposed to be The Movie of Star Trek: The Next Generation, crossover with TOS and prominently feature Kirk to "pass the torch"... again. Oh, well.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • X-Men: Apocalypse: Bryan Singer has referred to this film as the culmination of all his work on the franchise, starting with X-Men way back in 2000. He states in the May 2016 issue of Empire:
    "This movie to me is closure. It's in a way, a conclusion to a six-film journey."
  • Logan sees the final time Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart will play their respective roles of Wolverine and Professor Xavier.
  • Dark Phoenix was intended to be the start of another trilogy but, due to the Disney-Fox merger, it ultimately ended up having to be the end for the series. Although The New Mutants was the final film released in the X-Men film series.
• Transformers: Dark of the Moon was intended to be this for the live-action Transformers Film Series and wraps up the story with the Decepticons defeated (seemingly for good this time) and the Autobots accepting Earth as their new home.
• The Dark Knight Rises for The Dark Knight Trilogy.
• The radio and television series Our Miss Brooks concludes with a film where she finally marries Love Interest Phillip Boynton.
• The Godzilla series has so far gone through two major Continuity Reboots, leading to the series being split into three sub-series (the Showa series, the Heisei series, and the Millennium series). As such, each sub-series has its own Grand Finale, often marked by noticeably higher production values.
  • Destroy All Monsters (1968): In the far-off year of 1999, Godzilla and his fellow Kaiju live at peace with humanity in an island enclosure off the coast of Japan, until an invasion by the hostile Kilaak aliens leads to them being harnessed as living weapons and forced to attack Earth's major cities en masse. After winning their freedom, the monsters rebel against the Kilaaks to save humanity, leading to an unprecedented team-up between Godzilla and nine previous monsters as they take on their nemesis King Ghidorah in a final showdown. ^note  Originally meant to be the final film in the series, but it was continued for several more installments after this one, ultimately fizzling out after Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975) and being revived in a continuity reboot ten years later with The Return of Godzilla (1985). Still, it remains the chronological finale of the original Showa series.
  • Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995): The forces of the UNGCC prepare to capture and contain Godzilla once and for all, once it becomes clear that a fatal overdose of radiation will soon kill him in a catastrophic nuclear meltdown—along with most of the population of Earth. Meanwhile, Godzilla and his now fully-grown son are drawn into a climactic battle with the mutated offspring of the Oxygen Destroyer, the experimental weapon that first killed him in 1954. In the final battle, Godzilla Junior dies in battle against Destoroyah, but Godzilla and the Japanese military team up to avenge him. The film ends with the promised death of Godzilla, with Junior arising fully mutated from his remains, prepared to take up his father's mantle as the new Godzilla.
  • Godzilla: Final Wars (2004): The Xilien aliens make their long-awaited return and attempt to subdue the people of Earth by unleashing an army of nearly every one of Godzilla's previous adversaries. As the soldiers of the Earth Defense Force attempt to hold the line to protect humanity, they're forced to free the long-dormant Godzilla from captivity to save them, leading to Godzilla running the gauntlet against every monster in the Xiliens' army before ultimately being persuaded to forgive humanity by his son Minilla.
• Blade: Trinity was intended as the third and final installment of the Blade films.
• Michael Jackson's This Is It was made to give fans a glimpse into what Michael Jackson had planned for his This Is It concert residency in London before he died in 2009, and to give a satisfying ending to his nearly fifty year career.
• Back to the Future Part III was this for the Back to the Future trilogy. All the loose ends are tied up, Marty outgrows his "Nobody calls me chicken" attitude, the DeLorean is destroyed, Doc has fallen in love and now has kids, and Marty and Jennifer have a promising future ahead of them.
• Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, as the title suggests, is the final movie in the Resident Evil film franchise. Alice returns to the Hive in Raccoon City, in order to final destroy the Umbrella Corporation and end the T-Virus plague once and for all. A Continuity Reboot followed, titled Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame combined are the finale to the Infinity Saga that’s run through all MCU movies up to that point, as well as for many of the characters. Thanos decides he’s done relying on minions to get the Infinity Stones and finally goes on the offensive against the heroes, forcing all of them to unite in order to stop Thanos from using the Stones to kill half the universe. People die. A lot of people. It's also one for the original Avengers as by the end of Endgame, Iron Man and Black Widow are dead, Captain America has retired and handed the shield to Falcon and Thor has joined the Guardians of the Galaxy, leaving Valkyrie as the Queen of New Asgard.
• Rambo: Last Blood sees John Rambo go on his final and most blood-soaked mission. That title (Last Blood) is there for a reason.
• Bill & Ted Face the Music is considered the finale of the Bill and Ted franchise where the duo finally made the song that will reunite the world by having everyone around the world play music together saving reality as we know it.
• The Dead Pool was the end of the road for Dirty Harry. Clint Eastwood retired the character stating that his age would make him a parody.
• The Forever Purge is set to be the final chapter of The Purge franchise.
• No Time to Die is the final film featuring Daniel Craig as James Bond. As such, Bond actually dies in the ending.
• Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning is the first part of a two-part conclusion of the Mission: Impossible Film Series (or at least, tentatively, the conclusion for Tom Cruise's Ethan Hunt). The first part was released in 2023, and its yet to be named sequel will be released in 2025. There could be more Mission: Impossible films with Cruise though.
• A Fairly Odd Summer serves as the conclusion to the live-action Fairly Odd films based on The Fairly OddParents!, as it ends with Timmy Turner becoming a fairy as a result of his sacrifice to foil Crocker and Foop's plan and his fairy godparents Cosmo and Wanda being assigned to Marty and Mitzi.
• According to Chad Stahelski, John Wick: Chapter 4 marks the end of John's story as he and Keanu Reeves imagined it. Sure enough, John dies at the end and gets a funeral to send him off.
• The Equalizer 3 is billed as the "final chapter" of the Equalizer trilogy.

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