The opening days of The Empire Strikes Back way back in 1980, standing in the long lines outside The Avco cinema in Los Angeles. Guys coming out of the earlier showing and walking along the full length of the line announcing the Luke & Darth Vader plot twist. Then running away fast...
(Hopefully if there is a God, those guys will have died horrible painful deaths in the subsequent years)

Luckily that didn't happen to me, but I knew at least a couple of folks that it did who didn't cover their ears quick enough. All we knew from the newspaper reviews was there was a big surprise plot twist in the film.

Remember that was pre-internet. All we SF fans had were mostly magazines like Starlog and mailed fanzines.
So it was rare to have really major film spoilers back then

You have a family??? Way to ruin it for me. :(

But is it really "spoiled" though? In most cases of the usage of the term "spoiler," it's used to refer to plot developments that people aren't supposed to know going in. In the case of true stories, the endings are known. If Sean Penn wanted to make a film with an unknown ending, he should've made a fictional film. Instead he made a film based on a story that he knew at least some of the people going to it would know about.

It's like how I didn't know anything about Timothy Treadwell before the film Grizzly Man was made, and most of the reviews mentioned the outcome of his story as well.

Also, have you seen the movie? That "spoiler" could very well be presented right at the beginning of the film, much as it is in the book. Hell, the book puts that "spoiler" on its jacket, so it's clearly not a plot development the author felt had to be kept secret.

I think most reviews of the new film Control mention the outcome of that film as well. It's real, it happened, and it's not a "spoiler" to re-itereate what's already known. Just because you didn't know of it doesn't make it a spoiler.

We don't go to see true stories for surprises, otherwise Titanic would've been a massive bomb. We go to see a filmic treatment of a real-life story that intrigues us, and hopefully provides new depth and insights to the story that people might not have thought of before.

Can't speak to the book cover, but if the author (and his book editor) put the spoiler there, it's totally within his rights to do so. After all it's his book, and his income and effort.

However AFAIK Sean Penn & co. don't have it on the posters or the Into The Wild trailer (if so, I apologize). Therefore the NYTimes & AO Scott (no matter how self-important they believe themselves to be) don't have the right to reveal it to the 99.9% of their readers who are unaware of the story .

When I saw the Others the end was spoiled because a few weeks earlier I watched an episode of some horror anthology series (I don't recall the name but it was hosted by Henry Rollins) that had the exact same premis

It wasn't ruined for me, but one time (when I'm sure I was pretty high) I let it slip to my friend that in <b>Fight Club</b>.

I was spoiled for The Sixth Sense when a father explained the entire plot for his family in a fast food joint loud enough for the entire place to hear.

:johnwoo:

The Usual Suspects.

I fell asleep a half hour in. And - I kid you not - I woke up for the last minute and a half. Waking up at that moment was a total coincidence. I knew that it had a mind-bending twist. So I knew exactly what was happening. I was pretty bummed out.

I rewatched it, and do really like it. But I guess I missed out on that 'first time' experience of being like, 'whoa'.

I read the spoiler for The Village a few years back. Didn't catch the movie till it was on cable. Rather lame.

Other than that, I usually don't read about movies, or just see them opening weekend. So I haven't had too many bad experiences there.

Can anyone really call "The Village" a movie? Yuck. That overblown exercise in narcissism should never have been released, or even made.

I think most recently someone ruined Hostel Two for me, when they said that the climax was that the lead actress chops off her torturers' penis and testicles. Enough said. Why would anyone want to watch that?

And you decided: why not ruining it for others?

Fuck. I just rented Hostel 2 to watch for the first time with my family tonight. :(

When I was a kid, I was reading a Peanuts comic strip. Linus was watching Citizen Kane, and Lucy spoiled the ending for him. For me as well.

I knew the twist in The Crying Game from reading it in EW, but I did it on purpose because they gave plenty of warning and I wanted to know. My wife didn't know about it so it was a lot of fun watching her reaction when we saw the movie.

Damnit. There was one on there that is now spoiled for me. I figured I'd have seen them all. That one flick is sitting on my shelf unwatched right now. :lol:

Cool shirt though.

WHOA! Me, too!!

Fucking Charles Schulz raped my childhood!!!

Mission Impossible.

It was spoiled from me when they said that Hunt succeeded. Doesn't sound like an "impossible" mission to me.

Groucho, I really believed you the first time with The Others :)

So what... just bumps now?

I still feel kind of bad about this but I spoiled The Sixth Sense for my sister by complete accident. Back when it came out I really had no interest in seeing it but she was going to see it one day and I said something about how it's supposed to be great and the only thing I really knew was that there was a huge twist at the end. So I just flippantly said Oops! I didn't mean to and I wasn't really thinking but needless to say she wasn't very happy when she got home.

Also, The Usual Suspects was spoiled for me by a Jay-Z video in which he basically re-enacted the entire last scene.

:rolleyes: Lady in the Water would be more apt for that crap you just spewed.

My best friend spoils things all the time. He doesn't mean to he just doesn't think.

The first movie he spoiled for me was Scream. He blurtred out who the killer was.

He's also ruined a 600 page novel for me before I even had read a page.

I made it to the Sixth Sense without being spoiled.

I spoiled the ending to teh Blair Witch Project to some moron lady on line at Blockbuster once. I dont know if anyone remembers the BW spoof commercials that were airing around that time (i think they were for some comedy show) but this lady just kept going on and on how wrong it was for these people to make fun of those "poor kids and their tragic deaths."

She was being serious too and really loud about expressing her opinions. I turned around and told her the truth of the movie and she looked absolutely crushed and you could hear the majority of the line snickering and laughing.

Amateur.

The Ghostbusters cartoon spoiled Citizen Kane. I knew it as soon as I saw the childhood scene.



The movie a few merrits to make it worth watching.

There's still an undisguised spoiler in this thread. Ugh.

OK, now some spoiler space because there is an issue with this forum that I've brought up twice and it's been ignored. When you get the email that the thread had been updated, it includes a quote from the thread, which doesn't have the formatting, so spoilers are undisguised.

























I normally don't really care about spoilers. Short of a mystery, just knowing some element of the plot isn't usually enough to ruin a movie and I think some people take it too seriously. I do remember seeing ET when I was a kid and someone in another row saying which pissed me off. The whole movie I'm waiting for it and it took away my enjoyment of it.

I was watching The President's Analyst on Turner Classic a few years back and Robert Osbourne ruined the ending in his introduction. It was an ending I would have found enjoyable because I worked for the revealed villain at the time. it turned out to be the only really good gag in the film.

Right now I'm watching "May" for the Horror Challenge (such that it is) on my DVR and the stupid description is one line and it's the ending of the freaking movie!!

Not a movie, but I spoiled a Harry Potter book for my wife. She was so excited to get the book in the first day it was released (5th or 6th book, I don't remember). I grabbed it from her before she had a chance to look at it, opened it to the back, grabbed the first character name I saw on the page (which happened to be Dumbledore) and said



I felt really bad when she read the book and it was true.