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Walking Spoiler / Live-Action Films

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Walking Spoilers in live-action movies.

Directors

  • Alfred Hitchcock's known as "The Master of Suspense" for a reason. Part of the reason is because of his constant spoiler characters who often give away an important detail.
    • North By Northwest's Eve Kendall serves as a Double Reverse Quadruple Agent. When Roger (and the audience) first meets her, she seems to be merely a smart and coy civilian woman who is not involved in Roger's whole mess and simply helps him out because she's attracted to him. Then we find out that she's actually working for Vandamm and is even his mistress. And then we find out that she's really working for the government and is actually The Mole in Vandamm's entourage. Yeesh! So in a way, she's a double Walking Spoiler.
    • Psycho: Norman Bates' Control Freak Abusive Mom who Norman said lived with him in the gothic house on the hill behind the motel. She turned turns out to have been Dead All Along when its revealed that Norman had poisoned her and her lover ten years prior to the film events. Then Norman preserved her corpse and talks to it as if she's still alive. Norman ended up getting a split personality from his mother that eventually takes over the good half completely.
      • Arguably, Norman himself can also qualify for the trope.
    • Rebecca has the titular Rebecca de Winter, who was also Maxim's first wife. She was very manipulative, and unfaithful to her husband, leading to Maxim leading to him hating her. She told him she was pregnant with another man's child. Maxim would have willingly killed her had she not accidently tripped over some ship's tackle on the floor and struck her head. Then in another twist, it turns out Rebecca lied about her pregnancy, as she was actually suffering from terminal, inoperable, deep-rooted cancer. In short, she goaded Maxim into accidentally killing her as a final revenge, so her death would be labeled as suicide.
    • Vertigo has two of these:
      • "Madeleine Elster" turns out to have been a redhead named Judy Barton who was hired by Gavin Elster to impersonate his late wife and help him kill his real wife without drawing suspicion.
      • Then there's the real Madeleine Elster whom John never actually meets, and whose very existence exposes the film's main plot twist.
  • Not too far behind is Brian De Palma, a huge fan of Hitchcock and his work, with some of his films having obvious allusions to Hitchcock's work, and a few even being considered loose remakes of Hitchcock films.
  • Pedro Almodóvar
    • Bad Education (2004) has Juan and Father Manolo (Senor Manuel Berenguer) who teamed up to kill Ignacio four years proper to the film's events. Juan is this because he was impersonating his older brother, and Father Manolo's real name is Sr. Berenguer,
  • There was a time when M. Night Shyamalan was considered the next Alfred Hitchcock. It's not difficult to see why.
  • Dario Argento
    • The Bird with the Crystal Plumage has Monica Ranieri who turns out to be the serial killer.
    • Deep Red has Carlo's insane mother Martha who killed her husband and various other people. Carlo also qualifies for being Good All Along.
    • Tenebre has two in the form Cristiano Berti and Peter Neal who not only both turn out to be murderers, but Berti gets killed by the hands of Neal who was thought to be the protagonist.
    • In Opera, Inspector Alan Santini was a Serial Killer in a relationship with Betty's mother would be forced to watch as various women got killed by Santini.

Individual Movies

  • The live animals of Alice. Considering how every other character than Alice and her mother are stop-motion puppets, the sudden appearance of animals is bound to catch viewers off guard.
  • At the end of Assassins, the supposed to be long dead Nicolai is revealed as both Robert and Miguel's contractor.
  • The Batman (2022) has one in a minor unnamed character, who first appeared as just one of the many Gothamites with a grudge against the murdered Mayor, for letting his daughter die under the system. Much later, this man is unmasked as one of Riddler's fanatical followers, showing how deeply the madman's influence is on a disillusioned populace. Furthermore his statement of "I'm Vengeance" actually causes Bruce Wayne to realize how Batman should be a symbol of hope for the people, not fear.
  • The Fairy Princess in Beauty and the Beast (2014), the first wife of the Prince. Her entire existence, and how her death and her father, the "God of the Forest", played into the curse upon the Prince and his kingdom, that turned him into the Beast, and locked his subjects into a standstill in time, is revealed gradually to both Belle and the audience through flashbacks/dream-sequences throughout the film, as the Princess herself acts as a Spirit Advisor to Belle, in hopes of breaking her husband's enchantment.
  • Bringing up Phil "Landfill"'s identical twin brother in Beerfest not only spoils the fact that Landfill even has a twin, but that said twin takes Landfill's place after the latter's death via drowning in a vat of beer.
  • Better Watch Out has Luke Lerner. While he initially appears to be a hormone-addled yet otherwise innocent young teenager, it's revealed halfway through that he's actually the film's Big Bad.
  • Blade Runner 2049 has a lesser case with protagonist K, who before release was only an investigator of sorts - the movie details he's a replicant sent to hunt older models. A much bigger one is Rachael from the original movie, whose remains drive the plot (and a replica of hers even appears!).
  • Pretty much everything important about The Cabin in the Woods is a spoiler. Even the trailer has spoilers. Above all else, though, is the film's Greater-Scope Villains, the Ancient Ones, a group of Eldritch Abominations whose existence isn't so much as hinted at until halfway into the film but who turn out to be central to both the film's plot and its satire of the horror genre.
  • Chinatown:
    • Noah Cross is a wealthy businessman from Los Angeles who is not only responsible for buying up the land of various farmers to build suburban homes on newly drained land and seized control of the water supply but he raped his own daughter Evelyn Mulwray. In fact, there is a reason why the film's trope and character sheets spoiler mark nearly every utterance of his name since information about him other than his status as a businessman gives away the entire plot.
    • Another example would be Katherine Mulwray, who has all of one line of dialogue and whose very existence exposes Evelyn’s rape by Noah, making Katherine Evelyn’s daughter AND sister.
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • DC Extended Universe:
  • Barrigan from The Departed is the other mole in State Police, and the one who kills Costigan.
  • Expend4bles: Marsh is a CIA agent who hires the Expendables and later revealed to be the mysterious "Ocelot" and the true Big Bad.
  • Fantastic Beasts
    • Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them has 2:
      • Credence Barebone as the true identity of the Obscurial.
      • Percival Graves, who turns out to be the legendary dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald in disguise.
    • Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald has Credence as one again but this time with two reveals, one pretty concrete and one rather ambiguous in regards to how true it is. The concrete one is that Grindelwald has been manipulating him the entire time into being his weapon against Dumbledore because they can’t fight each other directly. The ambiguous one is that his birth name is “Aurelius Dumbledore” and that his “brother” is trying to kill him. The third film reveals this to have been a half truth, that's his name but he's a nephew not a brother.
  • Friday the 13th:
  • Fury (2014) has a lone Tiger I tank, responsible for killing most of the platoon the titular tank is part of. What makes this notable is that the tank in question is the real deal, not a replica like in Saving Private Ryan.
  • Get Out (2017): The entire Armitage family, who are revealed to be manipulating black people so that the Order of the Coagula, the Cult of which they are members of, steal their bodies to become immortal.
  • Ghostbusters (2016) has Rowan, the main antagonist who is barely featured in the trailers (just knowing he gets turned into the giant Bedsheet Ghost spoils where the plot goes).
  • Ghostbusters: Afterlife has Gozer the Gozerian, returning as the Big Bad to finish what they started in 1984. Their prophesied return in 2021 is the reason why Egon Spengler spent the remainder of his life at a random farm in Oklahoma, as he was setting up a massive trap to stop Gozer's reign of terror for good.
  • Goosebumps (2015) has Hannah Stine, the daughter of R.L. Stine, who turns out to be one of his creations, specifically Hannah Fairchild from The Ghost Next Door.
  • Hulk had David Banner as his changing form which was rarely shown in the trailers.
  • Who Mal is in Inception was hidden in the marketing due to this. She's actually the shadow of the protagonist Cobb's dead wife that haunts his dreams but she was made to seem like a Psycho Party Member. She's the main antagonist of the whole movie.
  • Independence Day: Resurgence has Sphere, another extraterrestrial being other than the Planet Looters mankind faced before and is doing again (and in fact the "harvesters" outright fear Sphere).
  • Dr. Elsa Schneider from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade turned out to be Evil All Along instead of becoming a love interest like Marion and Willie from the previous films.
  • Dr. Mann from Interstellar is not the friendliest person that Cooper and company meet.
  • James Bond:
    • The Living Daylights has Georgi Koskov, as he formed a Big Bad Duumvirate with Brad Whitaker.
    • The Pierce Brosnan films have a number of them.
      • GoldenEye has Alec Trevelyan, Agent 006 and Bond's friend who was killed 9 years prior to the main events of the movie. It's later discovered that he's still alive and is the identity of Janus.
      • The World Is Not Enough gives us Electra King, who was previously kidnapped and held for ransom by the terrorist Renard. However, it's much later revealed that she is in fact the Big Bad and working alongside Renard.
      • Die Another Day gives us two. The first is Gustav Graves, who turned out to have once been the North Korean colonel that James killed at the beginning of the movie, having undergone experimental plastic surgery to change his appearance. The second is Miranda Frost, a fellow MI-6 agent digging up info on Graves, only to be later revealed to be The Dragon to him.
    • Gareth Mallory in Skyfall starts out as an Obstructive Bureaucrat investigating M and MI6, before becoming the new M in the end after Judi Dench's incarnation gets Killed Off for Real.
      • Raoul Silva seems like a typical Big Bad of the Bondverse, but then comes The Reveal later on, hence all the white spaces.
    • The Big Bad of Spectre, Franz Oberhauser, is not only revealed to be Bond's foster brother, but also changed his name to Ernst Stavro Blofeld, SPECTRE's nefarious leader. He chose this route all because his father favored an orphaned Bond over him, causing him to orchestrate all of the tragedies Bond faced since Casino Royale (2006). It's also revealed that he was The Man Behind the Man for Raoul Silva, The Pale King/Mr. White, Dominic Greene, Max Denbigh/C and Le Chiffre, making him the Greater-Scope Villain of the Daniel Craig era.
      • The Reveal that Max Denbigh/C, the head of the newly formed Joint Intelligence Service aka "Nine Eyes", was working for Oberhauser all along, as part of Oberhauser's plot to humiliate Bond further.
    • No Time to Die has Madeleine's daughter Mathilde.
  • Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has Maisie, introduced as the granddaughter of Benjamin Lockwood, but who's actually a clone of his late daughter. Jurassic World Dominion pulls one up on that by actually revealing the backstory of said daughter, a geneticist who became a Truly Single Parent.
  • Arthur in Kingsman: The Secret Service. The Reveal that he is in on Valentine's plan kicks off the entire final act of the film. It's also hard to discuss the sequel Kingsman: The Golden Circle without revealing that Harry Hart/Galahad survived a point blank shot to the head thanks to the Statesmen's more advanced technology (albeit with amnesia) - even if previews made sure to feature him heavily. Likewise, one can't bring up Agent Whiskey without revealing he pulls off his own Face–Heel Turn and tries to sabotage the mission.
  • The Last of Sheila is literally riddled with spoilers, any one of which could completely ruin the mystery. The list includes: Lee is the one who killed Sheila, albeit accidentally and while drunk. The game Clinton devises for the characters is just that, a game, and despite appearances, is not designed to out Sheila's killer at all. Tom knows his wife killed Sheila, changes his card to 'YOU Are a Hit-And-Run Killer' to make her think Clinton intends to unmask her and frame her for Clinton's murder. Tom is Clinton's killer, rather than Lee, even though she believes she killed him, she "killed" a dead body. Tom's second act detective work is all a set up to out his wife as Clinton's murderer and frame her. And Lee's "suicide" is staged. In actuality, Tom drugged her bourbon, carried her to Clinton's tub and slit her wrists himself to make it look like she committed suicide. Philip's appearance in the trailer has him asking where the ice pick is. It's the weapon Tom used to murder Clinton.
  • Malignant has its villain, Gabriel, as his backstory and connection to main character Madison fuel the conflict of the film, and it's quite the twist when it all comes together.
  • The Architect from The Matrix Reloaded is a prime example because he created the Matrix and many different plot twists.
  • Nope has the UFO, eventually nicknamed "Jean Jacket", as a major twist concerns how it is not a transportation for aliens, but an alien itself.
  • Dylan Rhodes in Now You See Me. Knowing pretty much anything about him beyond what you see in the trailers ruins the film's big twist.
  • Esther from Orphan, as that Creepy Child turns out to be even worse than she looks.
  • Theodora from Oz the Great and Powerful has most of her entries marked as spoilers, because she becomes The Wicked Witch of the West later on in the film.
  • Pacific Rim has this with The Precursors, the true Big Bad of the story and The Man Behind the Monsters to the Kaiju. Pacific Rim: Uprising has Newton "Newt" Geiszler, who goes from the quirky scientist from the original movie to a Brainwashed and Crazy Big Bad under control from The Precursors. The monsters he creates also fit (Drones that are actually Jaeger-Kaiju hybrids, a Mega Kaiju built out of three such beasts).
  • Parasite has Geun-se, who reveals both a secret of the house (it has an underground bunker) and a hidden motivation by his wife, the caretaker Moon-gwang.
  • You might think you know everything about Alfred Borden in The Prestige, however the twist ending changes everything you thought you knew about the character.
  • Holly Jones from Prisoners, who is the real perpetrator behind the kidnappings, not Bob or Alex, all in a crusade she and her husband were in to spite god.
  • The Last Engineer of Prometheus. The marketing was based around the origins of the so-called Space Jockey from Alien , but the presence of one alive is still a twist.
  • Ransom: Police detective Jimmy Shaker is hardly seen in the trailer, to avoid revealing that he's the main antagonist, something that's dramatically revealed 10 minutes into the film.
  • Se7en: John Doe, the true Big Bad of the movie, becomes this after he kills Tracy Mills and forces Mills to kill him to become Wrath.
  • Sleepaway Camp has Angela Baker, who turns out to not only be the killer, but actually a boy.
  • Sleepy Hollow (1999) has Mary Archer/Lady Van Tassel, the stepmother of Katrina and an Evil Sorceress who manipulates the Headless Horseman into murdering innocent people against his own will.
  • The live-action Sonic the Hedgehog series seems to be heading for this being a franchise tradition, as both movies so far have had a spoiler character somewhere in The Stinger.
    • Tails is in Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) in a mid-credits scene, searching for Sonic. He is not mentioned anywhere in advertising or in the film beforehand, so mentioning he appears in the film at all is a spoiler in itself.
    • There's Shadow in Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022), who is stated to be a project by Dr. Robotnik that has been around for 50 years. Like Tails, mid-credits scene aside, there's no advertising or scenes in the film that mention he appears in the film, so he's a spoiler.
  • The 2009-2016 Star Trek movies had a few.
    • Star Trek (2009) has Spock Prime (downright credited as "Spoiler Character" in the page linked above), revealing that the reboot is a time travel-induced Alternate Continuity.
    • Star Trek Into Darkness has both antagonists, John Harrison (by virtue of being an alias for Khan Noonien Singh) and Admiral Marcus (on the grounds that that most of what he does is after his secret scheme is revealed).
    • Star Trek Beyond has main villain Krall, which seems just like an Omnicidal Maniac until the third act, where a whole new layer is added by learning he Was Once a Man.
  • Star Wars:
  • The Sting. The Dreaded assassin Salino and the waitress Loretta are one and the same.
  • Margot in Tell No One, because no one - including her husband - knows she's been Faking the Dead, except for her father, who helped fake her death in the first place. Though a few people suspect she's not really dead...
  • Entertainment Weekly credited Matt Smith's character in an early look to Terminator Genisys as "?????"◊. The article mentions him as a close ally of John Connor. Since the movie was released 9 months later, and it's discovered Smith is an avatar of Skynet, it made total sense to hide this. And the ally part? While late trailers and posters reveal there's a robot disguised as John Connor, it wasn't made clear before the movie came out that Unwilling Roboticisation took place.
  • There's Something About Mary has Ted's friend Dom, who is actually Mary's psycho ex-boyfriend Woogie.
  • Harry Lime from The Third Man is also a possible example, because throughout most of the movie he's thought to be dead.
  • Transformers Film Series:
  • The protagonist of Unfriended, Blaire, isn't exactly the Final Girl you're expecting.
  • Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects. The Reveal that he's actually Keyser Soze makes watching the film again feel like an entirely different movie.
  • Upgrade has STEM, the ultra-intelligent computer chip planted in Grey Trace's spine after a brutal assault that killed his wife and left him paralyzed. STEM helps Grey get revenge against the people responsible... until it's found out STEM planned the whole thing to take over Grey's body and live as a human.
  • Us is about doppelgangers referred to as "The Tethered" who emerge to perform a Kill and Replace. And the final scene reveals something about protagonist Adelaide Wilson and her copy, Red: the former is the Tethered, who forced the original to live her life among the mindless "shadows" back when they were children.
  • The Evil All Along Agent Taylor in Vantage Point.
  • Rowan from both The Wicker Man (1973) and its 2006 remake, when her true role as Schmuck Bait is revealed in the final act.
  • Witness for the Prosecution: Leonard Vole and Christine Helm, are two of the lead characters. Leonard started off as yet another falsely accused murder victim, who was accused of murdering a lonely and wealthy widowed lady and state her profit, while Christine seemed like a helpless witness who wasn't very reliable. But as it turns out, Christine had planed her entire act over the case and she knew her husband was indeed an actual murderer and tricked the jury into letting him go. And then she revealed that she had masqueraded as the Cockney woman by repeating her accent to Sir Wilfrid.
  • Wrath of Man: The seemingly-normal (save for his combat skills, which he might have botched intentionally) protagonist, "Patrick 'H' Hill", is actually a ruthless crime boss who has a detective running interference for him as he investigates a private security firm in order to suss out The Mole responsible for the robbery that resulted in the death of his son, who was a bystander. Most of the character's tropes rely on The Reveal, which occurs midway through the movie.
  • X-Men Film Series:
  • The Astronaut from Zathura is revealed near the end of the film to be Walter from an alternate timeline, so he can only be referred as "The Astronaut" if you wish to avoid spoilers.

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