10 Movie Twists That Completely Ruined the Ending

Sometimes, a twist can come along in film and television and blow an audience away. The Sixth Sense, The Empire Strikes Back, and Chinatown are good examples of movies where the final twist really works. Often times, certain directors became known for their use of twists, like M. Night Shyamalan or David Fincher. It is an effective storytelling tool, and when it works well, audiences are too invested to analyze at first. But for every Brian De Palma or Alfred Hitchcock, dozens of other directors and screenwriters just can’t help themselves. They feel like they’re on a grand path, but when the movie’s twist comes… they just can’t seem to stop crashing into disaster.

Even the best directors sometimes deliver a stinker or confusing mess with their new films. It’s not like any director wants to make a bad movie and you still want them to take those big creative swings going forward. It just doesn’t mean all those swings will result in hits.

Scroll down to take in ten movie twists that I think ruined the ending or just couldn’t stick the landing. There might be a few here that actually twisted before the movie even started and a few others dancing with controversy.

Glass

The idea of Glass and the arc between M. Night Shyamalan’s superhero trilogy that began with Unbreakable then followed with Split appeared to be a great idea with a lot of potential. It seemed perfect timing to bring back Samuel L. Jackson as Mr. Glass and deliver a cap to a pair of strong movies, arguably some of Shyamalan’s best.

Jackson, Willis and James McAvoy are still great in their respective roles. It was also great to see the other returning cast members from the earlier films. But the twist that the hospital and Sarah Paulson’s doctor are all part of a secret organization suppressing the news of superheroes from the world feels like an afterthought. Plus, Willis is drowned in a puddle shortly after and things just get grim.

Planet of the Apes (2001)

When it was released in 2001, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake left a lot of people cold. First, it couldn’t outrun the shadow of the original film and its greatness. Second, it changed the movie’s ending to reflect a closer version of the original novel’s ending. This would prove to be its lasting legacy, for better or for worse.

In the film’s climax, Mark Wahlberg’s Leo uses an undamaged pod to return home to Earth from the planet Ashlar. But once he returns to Earth and lands in Washington DC, he finds that the evil General Thade has somehow beat him home and apes are swarming him at the former Lincoln Memorial, now made in Thade’s image. This is similar to Pierre Boulle’s original story, where a doctor returns home from an ape planet to a Paris that is full of them. It’s fine to be accurate to the source material, but it’s hard to comprehend ever trying a new twist in the film series that practically made them popular. It never got a sequel so that’s where it ends.

Stream Planet of the Apes on Hulu.

High Tension

The twist in High Tension, also known as Switchblade Romance, doesn’t truly detract from other noteworthy traits of this French slasher horror film. It is gory, hard to watch, and carries some thrills. It follows a pair of best friends spending a weekend at a parent’s houses when they are brutalized by a serial killer. Best friend Marie spends the movie chasing the killer and trying to rescue best friend Alex after she’s abducted in the slaughter. It’s a violent journey that quickly takes a turn that breaks the movie.

It is later revealed that Marie is the true killer, and there is no psychotic man terrorizing Alex at all. No, it was all the deranged and murderous Marie, who committed all the film’s killings to win over her friend. It seems like a fun twist on the surface, perfect for a good slasher film, but you quickly realize that Marie’s actions undermine the entire film. It’s not the complete ruination, but it gets it close by crashing your suspension of disbelief.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

I believe Rise of Skywalker was ruined by its twist before the movie even hit theaters. The response to The Last Jedi and the resulting decisions for The Rise of Skywalker were clearly somewhat disastrous before making a blip at the box office. But the twist we’ll focus on for this entry is the return of Emperor Palpatine, and the decision to explain it via a tie-in with Fortnite.

While it was always a possibility that Palpatine would be behind the First Order and Supreme Leader Snoke. But to spoil it in a trailer, reveal the plot motivation via a video game, and then mention it in passing in the opening crawl? That’s just bad. Nevermind the whole Rey is his granddaughter situation, explain how they all managed to build Starkiller Base AND an armada of Star Destroyers without being noticed.

Stream Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker on Disney+.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

Speaking of bad, remember X-Men Origins: Wolverine? It had some promise, especially with the awesome historical intro montage with Logan and Sabretooth fighting in wars starting with the Civil War and ending in Vietnam. But this quickly faded by its climax and the introduction of Deadpool to movie audiences.

The Merc With a Mouth was muted literally. Deadpool in the film had his mouth sewn shut, and was given swords instead of claws to go with a potpourri of mutant powers. He has the teleportation of Nightcrawler, the healing factor of Wolverine, the optic blasts of Cyclops, and the deadly charm of Ryan Reynolds behind the eyes. This wrong wouldn’t be corrected until the release of Deadpool in 2016 and Deadpool 2‘s post-credit sequence where Reynolds kills his former movie self.

Stream X-Men Origins: Wolverine on Disney+.

Spectre

What do you do when you finally get all the rights to your favorite James Bond toys and villains? Ruin it by injecting family matters into the mix. That’s what happened in Spectre after EON Productions finally settled with the estate of Kevin McClory. They brought back the titular evil organization, dropped the acronym, and then mixed up Ernst Stavro Blofeld’s origins.

Instead of the inspiration for Dr. Evil, we get Franz Oberhauser, played by Christoph Waltz. He’s great in the role, but can’t avoid cringe when it’s revealed he’s also Bond’s adoptive brother. And Bond is one of the motivations behind founding Spectre, as a way to target his former step-sibling. The last bit is the sore spot, and a bit short-sighted, not to mention reminiscent of Austin Powers in Goldmember.

Stream Spectre on Prime Video.

Us

Jordan Peele’s follow-up to Get Out was a fun ride when it landed in theaters. The threat of the doppelgangers in Us, the startling nature of their actions, and the feeling of dread are well intact in this movie. But once it tries too hard to explain the presence of evil clones, the waters are muddied a bit much. Too much exposition can’t be good for anybody.

It’s a classic example of a movie giving too much information. There’s no need to explain why people were cloned, why the government was behind it, and their reason for taking to the surface. It’s all laid out in plain detail for some reason, removing the mystery from the terror. The movie would’ve stuck the landing if it didn’t try to butter it up the chain and just let the mystery be.

Trap

The second and most recent of M. Night Shyamalan’s features doesn’t have his traditional ending twist, instead opting to keep its twists out in the open. Then what was supposed to be a cat-and-mouse thriller between a cornered murderer and the police turns into an episode of Burn Notice combined with a music video for the director’s daughter.

A lot of the movie is spent focusing on the Lady Raven concert, which is central to the movie, and Raven, played by Saleka Shyamalan, gets a lot of the focus as the story proceeds and involves her. It all undermines the “trap” that was laid for Hartnett’s character, while also undermining the setup of a seasoned killer using his wits to escape a no-win situation. It also exhausts its presence almost immediately.

Stream Trap on Netflix or Max.

Moonfall

I want to preface this entry by saying Moonfall is a fun movie. It isn’t misled about its place in the world, and it understands the assignment. There’s a Moon; it falls into the Earth, and things go boom. The problem here is how the twist reveals that the Moon is hollow and home to a Dyson sphere. This was left and created by the last of the advanced ancestors of humanity before they were killed by an A.I. nano swarm.

Earth’s Moon is revealed as a sort of ark that led to the seeding and development of the Earth. Worse yet, it has been taken over by the A.I. swarm. This is all fine, but at the end of the day, it is a movie using very real conspiracy theories to explain why a malcontent A.I. has taken over the moon. It was dumb when the Moon was just colliding with Earth, but this kinda fits in with the tone of the movie.

Alien: Covenant

This could be controversial, but the notion that David is the sole reason the Xenomorphs exist feels silly. Michael Fassbender’s android character is a standout for this movie and its predecessor, Prometheus. But some of his actions between the films and the implications they make for the greater Alien universe ruin the experience.

Not only does he apparently kill all of the Engineers, though this has been disputed, but he is the creator of the iconic Xenomorphs, using the black ooze and the resulting environment it creates after the slaughter to engineer the killing machines. Not only this, but the film also introduces two major plot revelations as part of a pair online promotional prequels. Here we learn James Franco’s backstory, explaining his swift end to start the movie, but also learn the fate of Elizabeth Shaw. The Prometheus heroine gets a raw deal amid the trip with David to the Engineer home world. She’s used as an experiment that leads to the Xenomorphs, giving her a miserable ending and putting more tarnish on the negative parts of Prometheus.

Stream Alien: Covenant on Hulu.

Do you have a movie twist you’d add to the list? Think we’re wrong? Share your opinion in the comments!

2025-03-17 00:24