An ending can make or break a movie. Classic movies from Casablanca to the original Planet of the Apes have left audiences walking out of theaters with smiles on their faces thanks to iconic endings. But for every Chinatown, there’s a film with a painfully underwhelming ending, or worse, spoils everything that’s come before.
Updated June 15, 2023: If you are curious about endings that ruined wonderful movies, then you'll be happy to know this article has been updated with additional content.
There’s a sort of cruel logic to this. Movies are bought and sold on the strength of their premise, but by their nature, premises only offer a beginning. Weaving the plot through to a satisfying conclusion can be a challenge, then, and not every film sticks the landing. Worse, because of a cognitive bias known as the “peak-end rule,” the way an experience like watching a movie ends has an outsized influence on how we remember the entire thing, meaning a bad ending can retroactively ruin an otherwise quality movie. Below, we take a look at some of the worst offenders. These are strong movies whose endings end up hurting them in the long run.
I Am Legend
A case against happiness, Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend is a sci-fi classic thanks in large part to the brilliance of its ending. Robert Neville, played by Will Smith in the I Am Legend film, realizes alongside the audience that, far from being humanity’s potential savior, he’s actually been hunting, torturing, and killing intelligent, compassionate, and long-suffering people, mistakenly believing them to be mindless zombies. To them, he is the real monster.
The ending in the finished film, however, finds Neville sacrificing himself to kill some more of those same people. This is especially disappointing in light of the fact that an alternate ending truer to the novel, which would have been much more haunting and intelligent, was filmed and senselessly abandoned. With news of I Am Legend 2, it appears the sequel will instead follow the original alternate ending.
Babylon
Damien Chazelle’s bombastic epic about early Hollywood, Babylon, takes audiences on a madcap ride through seemingly every aspect of the movie industry. After hours of wealth and fame, meteoric rises and heartbreaking collapses, sex, betrayal, and elephants stampeding through drug-fueled jazz orgies, though, the film makes an astoundingly bad decision.
Babylon decides that the best way to wrap things up is with a saccharine montage of the best moments from better movies, complete with a Nicole Kidman-crying-in-the-theater-type character aping the emotions that audiences are presumably meant to be experiencing. The funniest aspect of the montage is showing 2009's Avatar when the second Avatar: The Way of Water was playing in theaters at the same time as Babylon and just crushing it at the box office.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
One of Steven Spielberg's most iconic films, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, shows the first major encounter with aliens on a global scale seen through the eyes of an everyday blue-collar man named Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss). Roy becomes obsessed with the aliens, so much so that he ends up pushing his family away. At the end of the movie, Roy meets the aliens and joins them on their ship, and goes off with them back into space. Roy essentially leaves his family and will likely never see him again.
This is an ending Spielberg himself is no longer satisfied with. Having become a father himself, he said he would not Roy go off with the aliens and instead would stay on Earth with his family. It is interesting how in 1977, as a man without children, Spielberg clearly saw the wonders of traveling the cosmos, whereas as an adult, he could not fathom giving up his family.
The Perfect Storm
More than one movie’s ending has been ruined by an aversion to ending Hollywood films with anything but happiness. The 2000 George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg adventure, The Perfect Storm, actually has a great ending, as the titular storm overwhelms our heroes’ small fishing boat.
The humanity of the characters in the face of the overwhelming power, beauty, and terror of the sea speaks to something elemental in human nature, providing the perfect climax to everything that has come before. Then, in the crushingly bad final minutes, Mark Walhberg floats casually in the waves for a few minutes while sending psychic messages to his wife. They just couldn't quit while they were ahead.
The Wizard of Oz
The Wizard of Oz is obviously a classic, but it helped create the cardinal sin of endings: It was all a dream. The Wizard of Oz probably isn’t the worst offender, but it is the most well-known. Revealing that a movie has all been a dream, fantasy, or otherwise unreal, despite completely negating everything that has come before and allowing filmmakers to wrap up a story without actually having to bring it to a real conclusion, remains remarkably popular.
It’s a favorite of not only screenwriters with writer’s block but audiences themselves, who constantly devise fan theories in which movies that don't engage in the trope, like Ghostbusters, Grease, or Groundhog Day, have it imposed on them. It’s simply the easiest thing to do, misunderstanding the nature of fiction in general and undermining the art of storytelling, leaving movies weightless and trivial.
Signs
The science-fiction horror movie Signs, directed by M. Night Shyamalan, is yet another movie with an ending that does not particularly live up to the excellency of the beginning and the climax of the movie. It stars Mel Gibson as Graham Hess, a former priest who lost faith after the death of his beloved wife. Graham and his family experience the strange appearance of aliens who announced their arrival through signs.
Although the dynamic between the priest's family and the aliens brings a lot of unhealed trauma to the surface and helps the family understand their grief, the ending came in like a 'wrecking ball' to undo the movie's potential to be one of a kind and sounded almost ridiculous in comparison with the deep themes that were tackled. The supposedly technologically superior aliens are depicted as highly allergic to water, something they should have thought about before landing on a planet covered in 71% water.
Lucy
This is a perfect example of when a movie tests the imagination but mocks the viewers' intelligence. The audience did play along with the premise that "humans only use 10% of their brains"; after all, the brain is still until now a mysterious territory for the most part. The idea that humans can one day aspire to use all their brain capacity opened up a window of hope for an extraordinary discovery and an ending that would match this grand theory. But what the ending delivered was a disappointing scenario that revealed that the idea was too big and the preparation too small.
After having Lucy use 100% of her brain capacity, she is turned into artificial intelligence. Basically, the beginning of the movie promises that human beings can be a lot more intelligent, and the ending suggests that to achieve that, they will have to turn into something that they are not. It's not hard to see that Lucy's rushed ending made a mockery out of what could have otherwise been a legendary movie.
Nightcrawler
There's a certain kind of frown that appears whenever a sociopath or an evil character ends up winning or escaping justice in movies unless it's a really charming and complex antagonist. Many movies would easily give you such a frown, like I Care Alot, Gone Girl, The Usual Suspect, and Nightcrawler. The latter stars Jake Gyllenhaal who delivers an extraordinary performance playing the role of Lou Bloom, an ex-con who is desperate to reestablish his image in the world. He becomes a news reporter who brings footage of violent scenes and murders to a news agency.
For the sake of his success and his unending ambition to become more, Lou doesn't mind stealing, destroying, and causing the death of even his close associates, like his assistant Rick who ends up dying at the end of the movie. Simply put, the ending did not allow for things to come full circle. There was no character development, no major event that steered the character off track and sent him into the kind of introspection that usually gives characters complexity. The movie is made to be a dark critique of the reality of the media industry, but the ending does ring a little hollow.
Identity
Endings that usually come in the form of plot twists or cliffhangers always usually risk being either absolutely loved or utterly hated. They could be hated mostly because endings are usually expected to give closure, close a cycle, or simply draw a smile on the audience's faces. Identity, however, does not mind running that risk.
The movie tells the story of a group of people brought together into a motel room to survive a devastating storm. The group of people starts being murdered one at a time. As investigations take place, the ending reveals that 9-year-old Timmy is the real killer. Let's not pretend that we are above the idea of psychotic children who have personality disorders, but the problem with the ending was not the plot twist in itself but rather that it did not make sense and felt out of place due to a lack of clues leading to the true killer, not to mention the unlikelihood of a child capable of such atrocities. The ending simply sounds rushed and out of alignment with the rest of the events.
Zack Snyder's Justice League
Zack Snyder's Justice League is a major improvement over the 2017 theatrical cut of the film. The original vision of uniting DC's greatest superhero team finally arrived on HBO Max, and it offered what could have been a satisfying conclusion to the DCEU story that Snyder had begun with Man of Steel. The final montage of the Justice League doing their heroics with Superman opening his shirt would have been a great ending.
Yet the movie keeps going. It features not one but three scenes that are essentially setups for movies that will never happen. While the Deathstroke scene was already shot, its inclusion can be forgiven. Yet the additional Knightmare sequence with Jared Leto's Joker was added into the film and shot during the COVID-19 pandemic and served no purpose other than to get fans rolled up for movies that were never going to happen and further divide the fanbase.
Finally, the addition of the Martian Manhunter is the definition of tacked on and further raises questions of why this powerful alien superbeing didn't answer the call to action when he was clearly needed. Overall, Zack Snyder's Justice League had three additional endings to many that were not needed and make an already long movie even longer.
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