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.
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.
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I Am Legend
Warner Bros.
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.
The ending we got in the 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.
The Sixth Sense
Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
The Sixth Sense is a unique example of a bad ending. On first watch, the ending is actually excellent. Moviegoers in 1999 were universally left stunned by the film’s now iconic ending, and the impact of the movie’s twist both launched and shaped director M. Night Shyamalan’s spoiler-heavy career. So why is it on this list?
It just doesn’t hold up very well over time, and becomes utterly illogical in hindsight. Audiences are asked to believe that Bruce Willis’ character, Malcolm Crowe, has gone most of a year, presumably attempting to live his life as usual, without noticing that not a single other person in the world is interacting with him or even perceiving him at all. Picking through movies for plot holes isn’t a great way to get the most from the experience, but when an ending’s entire impact is built on a detail that can’t hold up to any real scrutiny, it’s hard to consider it anything other than a failure.
Babylon
Paramount Pictures
Damien Chazelle’s bombastic phantasia 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 as they see Indiana Jones run from a boulder for the 1,000th time.
The Perfect Storm
More than one movie’s ending has been ruined by an aversion to end Hollywood films with anything but happiness. The 2000 George Clooney and Mark Walhberg 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 quite while they were ahead.
Wonder Woman
Any number of superhero movies could take this slot. The Marvel movies famously struggle with making their objectively correct villains inexplicably violent in order to justify an explosive climax, for example. Others suffer because no film can actually provide a real “ending” in an ongoing film series that works more like a very slowly unfolding season of very long TV episodes.
Wonder Woman, though, shoots itself in the foot by building its entire plot around the promise of Wonder Woman’s victory over Ares, the god of war, bringing an end to all war forever. Such a victory could never align with either reality beyond the movie or the cinematic universe of the film itself, of course, forcing the movie to spend several minutes stumbling toward an explanation of why nothing that has happened earlier in the plot actually matters.
The Wizard of Oz
Metro-Goldwyn Mayer
Hear us out — 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; if everything was a dream, then it was all a waste of time, and nothing really mattered, which is really not a happy ending at all.
