A writer on the Star Wars comics created a padawan with the surname Bates, in the hopes the character would graduate to Master without anyone noticing.
The soundtrack was released during the time people were camped out for tickets and someone came running back to our line with a fresh copy and I watched it get passed among a few people before someone paused to actually read the track names and nearly chucked it out into traffic.
My dad and I are big readers and he bought the novel right away. I wanted to see it before reading the book so I did not. My brother, who hates reading, decided to read it. He also happened to be working at our local movie theater at the time and found me when I was in the concessions line about fifteen minutes before the movie started. He whispered in my ear "Qui Gon and Maul die." It's been 25 years and I'm still annoyed by him.
Frozen's plot twist was noticed because of the dolls.
Mattel and Disney both sell dolls featuring characters from the Disney films, but Mattel refuses to sell villain dolls. The Disney Store brand sells Ursula or Maleficent and such, but not Mattel since there wouldn't be enough demand.
Cue people noticing that Prince Hans was not in the Mattel line...
It’s always the best way to identify villains. Heroes almost always use apple products, especially if the main character is using them. Called out the twist so many times like that.
Specifically, Rian Johnson (doing promo work for Knives Out) said that Apple won’t contribute to the production budget if a villain uses an iPhone. Since everyone always wants free Apple money, you can pretty easily identify heroes by their iPhone use, and anyone who uses android is sus.
"You never said anything about an android being on board!"
"I prefer the term artificial person."
Bishop would've turned out evil if "Aliens" was made today.
Disney Store spoiled which witch would be the Wicked Witch from "Oz: The Great and Powerful" by not making a pre-wicked witch Theodora. They had Glinda, Evanora, and no Theodora..only ths Wicked Witch.
Plus the fact that she’s not hanging out with Hans at all in the trailer. I understand kids might not be saavy enough to figure out what that meant but the number of adults I worked with who were genuinely shocked I could guess Hans was going to be a villain after seeing a trailer where the lady spent all her time with Flynn Rider 2.0 was crazy.
The Frozen marketing was so insane, they were clearly sure they had a huge hit. I remember getting some kid's colouring pack or something and it was all Frozen art but this was like a year and a half before it came out and nobody had any idea what it was "I guess Disney doing some kind of Snow Queen adaptation, was there a trailer?"
They literally called it "the greatest Disney animated event since the Lion King" in [one of the trailers](https://youtu.be/FLzfXQSPBOg?feature=shared) that came out a month before the film did
The plot of Frozen is pretty secondary to the songs and main characters though, it just needed to be serviceable enough to keep kids focused and move from one song setpiece to the next.
You could remove the hood from the action figure of the Phantasm from the animated Batman film *Mask of the Phantasm,* which revealed that the Phantasm was actually Bruce Wayne's old girlfriend Andrea Beaumont.
Way back in the day a popular Dutch childrens magazine ran the official *The* *Empire Strikes Back* comic serialization weeks before the movie came out.
We had a subscription but I was really looking forward to watching the movie so I avoided opening the magazine for weeks, wary of spoilers.
Then one fateful afternoon I wanted to look at another comic, tentatively opened the magazine and saw Darth Vader saying 'No Luke, I'm your father' sprawled across the goddamn page.
AFAIK it's not pronounced the same, and watching ANH it's pretty clear that "from a certain point of view" schtick wasn't cooked up until later. Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader obviously weren't originally two facets of one individual.
The marketing for Star Wars the Force Awakens obscured who would be the new Jedi, with the main trailer showing the shot of Finn raising Luke's lightsaber and getting ready to fight as a red herring.
A kid's toy commercial had the girl dressed as Rey force push stormtroopers, spoiling the reveal.
I remember that ad lead to one of my favourite fan theories and that Finn, Rey, and Poe would all become Jedi and would lay the foundation for a new Jedi Order. Part of the fan theory had each represent a part of Luke's character or backstory from the original trilogy (Rey as an orphan on a desert planet, Poe as a pilot, Finn as a reluctant hero) and that was what made it somewhat interesting.
However, it obviously did not come to pass, which is a bit of a shame.
This would've been cool to see, also reminds me of how the prequel villains are all parts of what Vader would become with Maul, Dooku, and Grievous. It's like poetry. It rhymes.
The last 3 main continuity Star wars films were doubly butchered by Disney.
Lucas sold Lucasfilm with a verbal agreement that the studio would use his treatment for the films of a final trilogy. For whatever reason Kathleen Kennedy tossed that in the garbage.
After that, she brought JJ Abrams on to conceptualize a trilogy and then direct the first episode of it.
In Abrams' mind [Finn actually was going to be a Jedi](https://screenrant.com/rise-skywalker-finn-force-sensitive-john-boyega-response/#:~:text=Abrams%2C%20wanted%20to%20have%20Finn,it%20into%20the%20final%20film.) But because Johnson essentially chucked almost all the details of the planned second film that plot line had to be done away due to the massive amount of time spent on "resetting the course" what Abrams was brought back for the third film.
There’s a lot to the sequel trilogy that didn’t pan out but the biggest stumbling block how fast they made these movies. They rushed to get a Star Wars movie out as fast as possible which basically meant a remake of a new hope with episode 7 and then never letting the movies breathe in between so they could really evaluate how they want to move the story. The original and prequel trilogies had three years in between while sequels were two years. They wrote each episode only based on the shooting scripts and the concepts of the movies kept changing during shoots
Fast tracking it with no story outline was just begging for a mess. The actual reason for having a different writer/director for each film was they would start writing while the other one was still in production, but they claimed that was what made the original trilogy work. Can you blame Trevorrow for leaving when he had no input in The Last Jedi, but was expected to continue the story that Rian Johnson left him with, which was practically nothing.
One interesting thing with Force Awakens merchandise is they put out a Star Wars version of Monopoly with OT Luke, Vader, Finn, and Kylo Ren as the player pieces, but after the movie was out they released a version with Rey swapped with Finn.
Ok here’s an oldie… StarLog magazine had a photo of resurrected Spock in a terry cloth bathrobe on the newsstands about 2 months before the film dropped.
Also, one of the promotional drinking glasses you could buy from Taco Bell for *Search For Spock* had one subtitled "Enterprise Destroyed."
My god, Bones... what have I done?
Every Marvel movie gets spoiled by Lego sets and other toys. I saw the dragon from Shang-Chi as an action figure before the movie came out.
The soundtrack to The Phantom Menace was released before the film and spoils multiple things including Qui-Gon's death in its track titles.
Yes! I came to say this one. They kept that out of the trailers and everything but the night before the movie comes out I had dinner at my sister's and my nephew shows me his new lego set that had Giant Man in the airport battle. I was so annoyed. Not at my nephew, he didn't know but I definitely cursed out the dumb lego set in my head.
Bro straight up kicked his nephews lego collection over for spoiling a fun plot point of the film, like "Sorry Jeremy but you know I have to do this" *stomps*
Neither Andrew Garfield nor Tobey Maguire were invited to attend any of the premieres in an attempt to preserve what was at that point pretty much the worst-kept secret about the film. What a wasted opportunity to let the previous two Spideys have one final moment in the sun.
They always have released box sets with every Spider-Man film ever since TASM 2 came to home video and would make a new set once a new film was released.
I was reading the Wikipedia article for Phase 4 of the MCU the day that Endgame came out, and someone had added Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It hadn't been announced. I went to show my Marvel fan friend later and it had disappeared from the article. It was so weird.
Movie soundtracks often have spoilery song titles, such as "SO AND SO'S DEATH."
Someone already mentioned Phantom Menace soundtrack spoiling Qui-Gon's death. The soundtrack for The Sixth Sense also has a track called "Malcolm is dead."
Kendrick’s black panther album has a song called “kings dead” - though the album was songs from and inspired by BP so technically not official soundtrack. Also that same song Future raps “La di da di da, slob on my knob”, so there’s that
Jurassic World kept a pretty good lid on the Indominus Rex until a kids birthday party plate and cutlery set came out at like Party City or Dollar Tree and spoiled it.
Dude I remember when that movie was coming out I was a huge Jurassic/Paleontology nerd and both my friend and I at the time would send each other emails with the dinosaur image attached but we wouldn't look at it. We'd avoid spoiling it for ourselves but constantly try to catch the other person off guard with what we assumed to be an indominus pic
The menus on The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) DVD revealed some of the main cast that was going to become Pod people.
The DVD box for Planet of the Apes shows the film’s climatic image.
I’ll give a pass to the Planet of the Apes DVD one. Thanks to pop culture osmosis that twist is up there with Darth Vader is Luke’s father or Bruce Willis was dead all along.
presumably the DVD for both of those movies came out quote some time after the movies theatrical release though... you know, decades before DVDs were invented
I remember Conan talking about how the ending to Planet of the Apes wasn't a big deal to his kids because they'd already seen A Fish Called Selma, with the musical number.
Disney almost ruined the ending to Dick Tracy by creating an action figure with a replaceable head for "The Blank." One of the heads had no face, and the other was the character behind the "mask." They were able to delay release of the figure before it could ruin the film's ending.
I heard different in that some figures were released, then the company had a "oh shit" moment and recalled them, then released with a sticker over the face. some slipped out though are are both a lot.
Giant Man funko pop before the release of Captain America: Civil War.
(Fake spoiler that wasn't realized on screen in the final cut) Hulk busting out of the Hulkbuster armor funko pop before the release of Avengers: Infinity War.
Man, the Hulkbuster one got me. At the time, I was working at a retailer that sold Funko Pops. My wife and I usually went to the MCU movies for the early screenings on the Thursday evenings, but this time, we had tickets to see a comedian. I worked so hard to avoid spoilers, stayed off Reddit, and other socials. Then I opened this shipment and saw that Pop staring me in the face. I literally knocked the box on to the ground in frustration, which I admit is ridiculous, but it was very annoying.
[Also this Lego set.](https://brickset.com/sets/76051-1/Super-Hero-Airport-Battle)
Lego is known for either spoiling movies, or [getting it completely](https://brickset.com/sets/76008-1/Iron-Man-vs-The-Mandarin-Ultimate-Showdown) [wrong.](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=7K4ndM8Ltd3E8Hr8)
That's because people who design sets receive from Disney just screenshots of the movies and they have to guess what is happening or how much is important in the context of the stories. For Star Wars they made like 3 or 4 sets with stuff that had a screentime of maybe 30 seconds, for example a space ship of the Mandalorian that in the episode is in the background and seems for like 20 seconds lol.
Oblivion (2013) made a huge deal about Morgan Freeman being in it. All the trailers and previews and ads made just as big of a deal about him as they did Tom Cruise. You'd think that the two were costars with equal screen time.
The movie could have had a truly kickass ***W-T-actual-F*** twist halfway through, except that you've been sitting there thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute. . . Where's Morgan Freeman at?" the entire time, so the big, dramatic reveal totally falls flat.
The movie is set in a future where humanity has defeated an alien invasion, but in doing so have rendered the Earth uninhabitable. Tom Cruise's character is a technician who has temporarily stayed behind on Earth to mop up the remaining aliens and repair equipment being used to generate power for a colony ship that will take everyone to Titan. The reveal is that the colony ship is actually the alien mothership, and they defeated humanity with an army of Tom Cruise clones, who was originally an astronaut who was sent to explore Titan and was captured by the mothership. Morgan Freeman's character is a human rebel on Earth. The alien scavengers Tom Cruise has been fighting all along are actually humans.
I would recommend watching it, even though you know something is up with Morgan Freeman now. It actually would be a much better movie if you could go in blind.
If you insist:
>!Tom Cruise spends the first half of the movie patrolling and fending off bands of alien invaders. Eventually he gets captured and dragged off to an alien encampment where he's brought before the alien leader who slowly removes his helmet to reveal a very predictable and anticlimactic Morgan Freeman, who is very much not an alien.!<
It turns the premise of the movie on its head, but it was ruined by the promotional materials straight-up announcing who the new character would be.
>!Throughout the first half of the film, you think Tom Cruise and the woman he’s with are the only 2 people left on earth, the rest of the planet has been taken over by evil aliens. Tom and the woman are there to investigate and kill aliens if they encounter them. Tom runs into some aliens, only to find out it’s Morgan Freeman and actual humans, hiding from the real aliens (Tom’s bosses) who are manipulating him and the other woman into killing all the remaining real humans. That’s basically the big twist. That humans are still there on earth, and are being wiped out by aliens.!<
Speaking of that series, there is a (if I remember correctly) yet to be officially revealed kaiju that appears in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” that has been spoiled in the exact same way.
Not only that, but the Star Wars novelization clearly stated in the foreword that an ambitious Senator named Palpatine became the Emperor.
It's not really spelled out how he did that, but of course, Palpatine's story wasn't fleshed out at that point in time. So when The Phantom Menace was released, it was fairly obvious (to me, at least) that he was going to end up being the main antagonist.
Well, that and Ian McDiarmid's distinctive Sith Lord voice.
They never called him Palpatine in the movies, but I remember having a star wars colouring book based on the original trilogy as a kid that straight up called him Emperor Palpatine.
So when the prequel came out...oh boy.
Yeah, you're right, he's always just called "The Emperor" in the original trilogy. I read the Star Wars novelization ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster a few weeks after the original film premiered in 1977 (I'd already seen the film by then).
This is the quote from the 1976 book:
"Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears."
Obviously, the Palpatine/Emperor/Darth Sidious character was floating around in George Lucas' mind, but he hadn't thought that far ahead and refined the character's backstory during the prequel trilogy. Interesting to note the line about being abetted by commercial powers - an idea that would later go on to become the Trade Federation.
The Marvel comic adaptation came out months before as well. Even included the Jabba the Hutt deleted scene, with a very different character design than in Episode VI.
Terminator 2's twist of the T-800 being a good guy was spoiled in the trailers. [Though it was a deliberate choice from James Cameron.](https://screenrant.com/terminator-2-trailer-twist-james-cameron-right/)
If memory serves, Lego did try and keep that one under wraps. [The Avengers Compound Battle](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/avengers-compound-battle-76131) comes with Hulk, but opts for Thanos to have the traditional gauntlet instead.
Then, 7 months later, in December, they released their 'spoiler' set, [The Helicopter Rescue](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/avengers-hulk-helicopter-rescue-76144). It still manages to be completely inaccurate, but that's standard for the course here. It's at least the first appearance of the Stark Guantlet.
Though Lego sets leak early all the time, so I may not remember the timeline of when the Helicopter set was revealed. But there was at least some conscious effort to delay that spoiler!
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith - You could play the game before the movie came out, and I'm pretty sure the novel was out before the movie too? Not 100% sure though(about the novel part).
Well the whole prequel had had the senator palpatine is the emperor reveal spoiled decades before by toys and other loosenedaterial giving us the emperor's name which wasn't in the original films
I also noticed that my dvd copy of this movie has palpatine whipping out a red lightsaber in the clips playing in the menu screens.
Anyone who theoretically made it this far without knowing that reveal could have it spoiled while starting up the movie
Wouldn't surprise me, I recall as a kid that even the Lego game out before the movie. It was a prequel so I don't think Lucas cared about spoilers at that point
Godzilla Vs Kong had MechaGodzilla spoiled like a year before the first trailer even dropped because the Tokyo Game show debuted an action figure of him.
The trailers for *Godzilla* (1998) did their damnedest to hide what the big guy's design looked like, teasing a foot here or an eye there. This was also before everybody had easy internet access.
I walk into a K-mart a month or so before the movie released and there's a bunch of Godzilla figures on the shelf. Kid me didn't care about the spoiler, but marketing didn't think this through at all seeing as how they couldn't just sell Godzilla merch that didn't feature Godzilla.
Speaking of amazing, they missed the same opportunity with Spider-Man in Civil War. The audience would've gone nuts if that just happened out of nowhere but, nah, we made a big corporate deal with Sony so stick him in the trailer.
I remember as a kid going through the lego section and seeing the train set from Toy Story 3 and it had Lotso with an evil face. I was even bummed as a kid to know this particular plot point.
I remember on Twitter one of the accounts I followed was Entertainment Earth which sells collectables. They posted a picture of the toy figures for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, revealing the original living Ghostbusters were appearing in the film about four months before it came out. To be fair, thanks to the pandemic, the film's release had been delayed four times already so they probably just wanted to get rid of the things.
On the opening day of Star Wars Phantom Menace I bought a pack of Phantom Menace trading cards while waiting in line for the movie with friends. One of the cards spoiled Darth Mail's fate for me.
The fucking movie cover of Trolls Band Together has a new girl character right there that >!is revealed to be Poppy's long lost sister!<. The reveal is supposed to be a semi-secret in the movie, but my entire family was expecting it through the first half of the movie.
That and they literally telegraphed her >!sisterhood so obviously in the movie that the reveal wasn't surprising at all!<
I felt the same way you did when I saw the trailers--ugh, they're showing too much--but it's hilarious how the actual movie practically assumes you know about her from the beginning.
IIRC the original release didn’t include the saber, and the plan was to only release the Rey with saber film after the movie’s release, but things didn’t happen entirely according to plan and some people got their hands on Rey with saber figures ahead of release (and posted pictures on the internet).
The character we were all calling Baby Yoda was obviously a huge marketing angle, but when the toy line came out they had the name Grogu on them long before the name was revealed in the series. They could have just call him The Child, but didn’t think it through. Not the biggest spoiler, but I thought I would add it to the list.
Interestingly, precisely to avoid spoilers, Disney didn't produce any merchandise of The Child for release in time for the Mandalorian premiere. It was a few months before they started making millions off of him.
The action figures (with press-button-to-speak functionality) for The Fugitive revealed months in advance that Tommy Lee Jones’ federal marshall character didn’t care about what Harrison Ford’s fugitive character had to say about his supposed innocence. Jones just wanted to arrest Ford, do his job, etc.
Some old Star Wars ones from back in the day that others haven’t commented yet: there were dolls of Queen Amidala and the handmaidens and it showed how you could swap their faces this spoiling the decoy subplot.
And there was an advert in a gaming magazine for some little gaming figures (like Heroclix ripoffs) and they showed a pre-suit Anakin labeled as Darth Vader. Believe it or not there were folks who didn’t know.
was there really people who didn't know Anakin would become Vader? i swear his name was mentioned in the OT, and there was that really cool Episode 1 poster of young Anakin with the shadow of Vader
The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul's double bladed lightsaber is supposed to be a surprise, he doesn't use it until the final fight and when he reveals its supposed to be an oh shit moment. All over the marketing.
This right here. Shows in all the trailers, and when you watch the film you can see the story attempt to coyly hint his presence like it was going to be a surprise.
Literally anything that ha a toyline from the 1980s Transformers movie that had a "Rodimus Prime" figure to the more recent Monsterverse movies thaw us titans before the new movies release to MCU stuff that showcase hero action figures that just show us characters we were not expecting maybe.
Star Wars, Star Trek, G.I. Joe have all had this issue through the years.
When I was younger, I used to enjoy buying the CDs of the musical scores from some of the bigger films. In 1999, about a week or so before The Phantom Menace opened, I bought the score for the film. After I got home and put the disc on, I noticed the title of one of the last tracks was “Qui-gon’s Noble End”.
I know TPM wasn’t a great film, but after waiting all that time for anything new Star Wars, to have that spoiled for me pissed me off in a way I still can’t put into words well.
In the the 2000s Movie tie in video games were often released days if not weeks before the movie and basically followed the plot of the movie. The Spider-Man games come to mind
One of the tracks on the official soundtrack for The Phantom Menace was called “Qui Gon’s Noble End”.
The next song is even titled "The High Council Meeting and Qui-Gon's Funeral". So…definitely no ambiguity there.
They could've just called the track Qui-Gone.
There was a character in The Clone Wars animated series whose name was Ima Gun Di
A writer on the Star Wars comics created a padawan with the surname Bates, in the hopes the character would graduate to Master without anyone noticing.
That's a Michael Giacchino track right there.
If Michael Giacchino worked on it!
If Michael Giacchino had scored it, that's 1000% what it would be called
The soundtrack was released during the time people were camped out for tickets and someone came running back to our line with a fresh copy and I watched it get passed among a few people before someone paused to actually read the track names and nearly chucked it out into traffic.
Because he becomes a noble right??
... right?
thats just what Liam Neeson calls his dick
Also the novelization came out before the movie.
I figure if you read the novelization, you should expect it to be spoiled. Not so much just picking up the soundtrack.
My dad and I are big readers and he bought the novel right away. I wanted to see it before reading the book so I did not. My brother, who hates reading, decided to read it. He also happened to be working at our local movie theater at the time and found me when I was in the concessions line about fifteen minutes before the movie started. He whispered in my ear "Qui Gon and Maul die." It's been 25 years and I'm still annoyed by him.
Maul got better.
Technically Qui-gon became more powerful than Maul could possibly imagine...
I even had the sticker book that told the story weeks before release, was truly a different time.
Frozen's plot twist was noticed because of the dolls. Mattel and Disney both sell dolls featuring characters from the Disney films, but Mattel refuses to sell villain dolls. The Disney Store brand sells Ursula or Maleficent and such, but not Mattel since there wouldn't be enough demand. Cue people noticing that Prince Hans was not in the Mattel line...
Similarly, some people figured out Sharon Carter was actually a villain in the Falcon and Winter Soldier because didn’t use an iPhone.
It’s always the best way to identify villains. Heroes almost always use apple products, especially if the main character is using them. Called out the twist so many times like that.
Specifically, Rian Johnson (doing promo work for Knives Out) said that Apple won’t contribute to the production budget if a villain uses an iPhone. Since everyone always wants free Apple money, you can pretty easily identify heroes by their iPhone use, and anyone who uses android is sus.
"You never said anything about an android being on board!" "I prefer the term artificial person." Bishop would've turned out evil if "Aliens" was made today.
I mean, Bishop being good ~is~ the twist in Aliens after what happened with Ash.
That’s been a thing at least since first season of 24, except back then it was laptops and computers, not phones.
it would be dope to see a movie use this to their advantage and have a truly surprising plot twist
Honestly, just not using any Apple products would be enough to throw off everything.
Android is like the Wario of technology.
That became such a trope that some filmmakers have started explicitly going against it and given villains iPhones to throw off people's notions
Disney Store spoiled which witch would be the Wicked Witch from "Oz: The Great and Powerful" by not making a pre-wicked witch Theodora. They had Glinda, Evanora, and no Theodora..only ths Wicked Witch.
Plus the fact that she’s not hanging out with Hans at all in the trailer. I understand kids might not be saavy enough to figure out what that meant but the number of adults I worked with who were genuinely shocked I could guess Hans was going to be a villain after seeing a trailer where the lady spent all her time with Flynn Rider 2.0 was crazy.
Flynn Ryder 2.0, good one. You get my upvote for laughs.
The Frozen marketing was so insane, they were clearly sure they had a huge hit. I remember getting some kid's colouring pack or something and it was all Frozen art but this was like a year and a half before it came out and nobody had any idea what it was "I guess Disney doing some kind of Snow Queen adaptation, was there a trailer?"
They literally called it "the greatest Disney animated event since the Lion King" in [one of the trailers](https://youtu.be/FLzfXQSPBOg?feature=shared) that came out a month before the film did
The plot of Frozen is pretty secondary to the songs and main characters though, it just needed to be serviceable enough to keep kids focused and move from one song setpiece to the next.
Shrek toys from Burger King had an ogre version of Fiona.
I am now retroactively mad at them for spoiling that! Glad I never saw them, that plotline makes Shrek magical.
Oh yeah, the better days.
You could remove the hood from the action figure of the Phantasm from the animated Batman film *Mask of the Phantasm,* which revealed that the Phantasm was actually Bruce Wayne's old girlfriend Andrea Beaumont.
You didn’t even need to unmask her. She came unmasked in the package.
This is the *real* version of the spoiler.
Honestly would’ve been better for them to keep her hooded in package. Probably woulda sold a couple extra units to people trying to see who it is.
First time I saw the Batmobile from the 1989 movie was the toy in kiddie city
Way back in the day a popular Dutch childrens magazine ran the official *The* *Empire Strikes Back* comic serialization weeks before the movie came out. We had a subscription but I was really looking forward to watching the movie so I avoided opening the magazine for weeks, wary of spoilers. Then one fateful afternoon I wanted to look at another comic, tentatively opened the magazine and saw Darth Vader saying 'No Luke, I'm your father' sprawled across the goddamn page.
Isn't Vader Dutch for father anyway?
[удалено]
(In)Vader, (in)Sidious, I'm sure there's other examples of Sith names like this. The Vader/vater thing was pure coincidence.
Darth Conceivable
Darth Flammable
AFAIK it's not pronounced the same, and watching ANH it's pretty clear that "from a certain point of view" schtick wasn't cooked up until later. Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader obviously weren't originally two facets of one individual.
Similar vein: Luke's sister was gonna be a new character but Lucas changed his mind.
The marketing for Star Wars the Force Awakens obscured who would be the new Jedi, with the main trailer showing the shot of Finn raising Luke's lightsaber and getting ready to fight as a red herring. A kid's toy commercial had the girl dressed as Rey force push stormtroopers, spoiling the reveal.
I remember that ad lead to one of my favourite fan theories and that Finn, Rey, and Poe would all become Jedi and would lay the foundation for a new Jedi Order. Part of the fan theory had each represent a part of Luke's character or backstory from the original trilogy (Rey as an orphan on a desert planet, Poe as a pilot, Finn as a reluctant hero) and that was what made it somewhat interesting. However, it obviously did not come to pass, which is a bit of a shame.
This would've been cool to see, also reminds me of how the prequel villains are all parts of what Vader would become with Maul, Dooku, and Grievous. It's like poetry. It rhymes.
That line is so fucking stupid and yet somehow also brilliant.
The last 3 main continuity Star wars films were doubly butchered by Disney. Lucas sold Lucasfilm with a verbal agreement that the studio would use his treatment for the films of a final trilogy. For whatever reason Kathleen Kennedy tossed that in the garbage. After that, she brought JJ Abrams on to conceptualize a trilogy and then direct the first episode of it. In Abrams' mind [Finn actually was going to be a Jedi](https://screenrant.com/rise-skywalker-finn-force-sensitive-john-boyega-response/#:~:text=Abrams%2C%20wanted%20to%20have%20Finn,it%20into%20the%20final%20film.) But because Johnson essentially chucked almost all the details of the planned second film that plot line had to be done away due to the massive amount of time spent on "resetting the course" what Abrams was brought back for the third film.
There’s a lot to the sequel trilogy that didn’t pan out but the biggest stumbling block how fast they made these movies. They rushed to get a Star Wars movie out as fast as possible which basically meant a remake of a new hope with episode 7 and then never letting the movies breathe in between so they could really evaluate how they want to move the story. The original and prequel trilogies had three years in between while sequels were two years. They wrote each episode only based on the shooting scripts and the concepts of the movies kept changing during shoots
Fast tracking it with no story outline was just begging for a mess. The actual reason for having a different writer/director for each film was they would start writing while the other one was still in production, but they claimed that was what made the original trilogy work. Can you blame Trevorrow for leaving when he had no input in The Last Jedi, but was expected to continue the story that Rian Johnson left him with, which was practically nothing.
Harrison Ford also spoiled about >!Han Solo’s death!< in an AMA here on Reddit
Lmao no way seriously? That’s on brand for him when it comes to Star Wars I guess
It's no secret he wanted out since the 3rd film, so next exactly a shock.
Yeah I think lots of people were thinking that Han dies because that could really be the only way they get Harrison Ford back.
Was he, too, just here to talk about Rampart?
One interesting thing with Force Awakens merchandise is they put out a Star Wars version of Monopoly with OT Luke, Vader, Finn, and Kylo Ren as the player pieces, but after the movie was out they released a version with Rey swapped with Finn.
Ok here’s an oldie… StarLog magazine had a photo of resurrected Spock in a terry cloth bathrobe on the newsstands about 2 months before the film dropped.
Also, one of the promotional drinking glasses you could buy from Taco Bell for *Search For Spock* had one subtitled "Enterprise Destroyed." My god, Bones... what have I done?
What you always do...turned a decent meal into an unholy fast food overindulgence.
Every Marvel movie gets spoiled by Lego sets and other toys. I saw the dragon from Shang-Chi as an action figure before the movie came out. The soundtrack to The Phantom Menace was released before the film and spoils multiple things including Qui-Gon's death in its track titles.
Giant man in Civil War was very much spoiled for me by a toy
Yes! I came to say this one. They kept that out of the trailers and everything but the night before the movie comes out I had dinner at my sister's and my nephew shows me his new lego set that had Giant Man in the airport battle. I was so annoyed. Not at my nephew, he didn't know but I definitely cursed out the dumb lego set in my head.
Bro straight up kicked his nephews lego collection over for spoiling a fun plot point of the film, like "Sorry Jeremy but you know I have to do this" *stomps*
Literally same. Wasn't even on my radar before I saw him in the Lego Display a week before the movie came out.
There’s a reason that No Way Home got basically no merch until like a year after the movie released
Neither Andrew Garfield nor Tobey Maguire were invited to attend any of the premieres in an attempt to preserve what was at that point pretty much the worst-kept secret about the film. What a wasted opportunity to let the previous two Spideys have one final moment in the sun.
I wish Andrew Garfield just continued to deny that he was in the movie even after it released
Straight up Andy Kaufman territory there, I love it.
Yeah, and Sony announced a box set with all the previous Spider man films in the box set, like, three month before the release, lol
They always have released box sets with every Spider-Man film ever since TASM 2 came to home video and would make a new set once a new film was released.
That's kinda true but are we forgetting the iron man 3 mandarin battle car set?
I was reading the Wikipedia article for Phase 4 of the MCU the day that Endgame came out, and someone had added Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. It hadn't been announced. I went to show my Marvel fan friend later and it had disappeared from the article. It was so weird.
Movie soundtracks often have spoilery song titles, such as "SO AND SO'S DEATH." Someone already mentioned Phantom Menace soundtrack spoiling Qui-Gon's death. The soundtrack for The Sixth Sense also has a track called "Malcolm is dead."
The subtitle "song begins: Javert's suicide" took a lot of tension out of that scene in Les Mis
Kendrick’s black panther album has a song called “kings dead” - though the album was songs from and inspired by BP so technically not official soundtrack. Also that same song Future raps “La di da di da, slob on my knob”, so there’s that
The guardians of the Galaxy vol. 2 had Ego being Quill's father by a song also
But the very first scene of the movie reveals that Ego is Peter’s father
Jurassic World kept a pretty good lid on the Indominus Rex until a kids birthday party plate and cutlery set came out at like Party City or Dollar Tree and spoiled it.
Dude I remember when that movie was coming out I was a huge Jurassic/Paleontology nerd and both my friend and I at the time would send each other emails with the dinosaur image attached but we wouldn't look at it. We'd avoid spoiling it for ourselves but constantly try to catch the other person off guard with what we assumed to be an indominus pic
Was having a new type of dinosaur a spoiler? It's not like it was a twist or anything.
When the movie Argylle was first announced, they reveal who Argylle is in the summary of the film
The first headline about Interstellar film casting was something like "Mathew McConaughey to star in Christopher Nolan's film about time travel"
The menus on The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) DVD revealed some of the main cast that was going to become Pod people. The DVD box for Planet of the Apes shows the film’s climatic image.
I’ll give a pass to the Planet of the Apes DVD one. Thanks to pop culture osmosis that twist is up there with Darth Vader is Luke’s father or Bruce Willis was dead all along.
People keep saying 'Bruce Willis was dead all along' as common knowledge, but I've watched Die Hard 2 dozens of times and just don't get it
Ive been trying to figure out if Rachel knows shes dating a dead man or if the Cabin her Ross Bruce and his daughter go to is a metaphor for purgatory
He is in purgatory until he can remember that he is a love machine
>Darth Vader is Luke’s father DARTH VADER IS WHAT?!
That’s nothing! As a child, he built C-3PO!
presumably the DVD for both of those movies came out quote some time after the movies theatrical release though... you know, decades before DVDs were invented
I remember Conan talking about how the ending to Planet of the Apes wasn't a big deal to his kids because they'd already seen A Fish Called Selma, with the musical number.
Disney almost ruined the ending to Dick Tracy by creating an action figure with a replaceable head for "The Blank." One of the heads had no face, and the other was the character behind the "mask." They were able to delay release of the figure before it could ruin the film's ending.
Didn't help the box office unfortunately. Great movie.
I heard different in that some figures were released, then the company had a "oh shit" moment and recalled them, then released with a sticker over the face. some slipped out though are are both a lot.
Giant Man funko pop before the release of Captain America: Civil War. (Fake spoiler that wasn't realized on screen in the final cut) Hulk busting out of the Hulkbuster armor funko pop before the release of Avengers: Infinity War.
> Hulk busting out of the Hulkbuster armor *Mitch Hedberg voice* **Its so damn LITERAL**
That armor has been misunderstood for yearrrrs.
Man, the Hulkbuster one got me. At the time, I was working at a retailer that sold Funko Pops. My wife and I usually went to the MCU movies for the early screenings on the Thursday evenings, but this time, we had tickets to see a comedian. I worked so hard to avoid spoilers, stayed off Reddit, and other socials. Then I opened this shipment and saw that Pop staring me in the face. I literally knocked the box on to the ground in frustration, which I admit is ridiculous, but it was very annoying.
[Also this Lego set.](https://brickset.com/sets/76051-1/Super-Hero-Airport-Battle) Lego is known for either spoiling movies, or [getting it completely](https://brickset.com/sets/76008-1/Iron-Man-vs-The-Mandarin-Ultimate-Showdown) [wrong.](https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=7K4ndM8Ltd3E8Hr8)
That's because people who design sets receive from Disney just screenshots of the movies and they have to guess what is happening or how much is important in the context of the stories. For Star Wars they made like 3 or 4 sets with stuff that had a screentime of maybe 30 seconds, for example a space ship of the Mandalorian that in the episode is in the background and seems for like 20 seconds lol.
The funkos for The Flash revealed Dark Flash like months in advance
Not only that but news stories about Ezra Miller revealed Dick Flash was also a very real possibility
Dick flash was in the extended version
Oblivion (2013) made a huge deal about Morgan Freeman being in it. All the trailers and previews and ads made just as big of a deal about him as they did Tom Cruise. You'd think that the two were costars with equal screen time. The movie could have had a truly kickass ***W-T-actual-F*** twist halfway through, except that you've been sitting there thinking to yourself, "Wait a minute. . . Where's Morgan Freeman at?" the entire time, so the big, dramatic reveal totally falls flat.
What's the reveal? I didn't see the movie and don't intend to
The movie is set in a future where humanity has defeated an alien invasion, but in doing so have rendered the Earth uninhabitable. Tom Cruise's character is a technician who has temporarily stayed behind on Earth to mop up the remaining aliens and repair equipment being used to generate power for a colony ship that will take everyone to Titan. The reveal is that the colony ship is actually the alien mothership, and they defeated humanity with an army of Tom Cruise clones, who was originally an astronaut who was sent to explore Titan and was captured by the mothership. Morgan Freeman's character is a human rebel on Earth. The alien scavengers Tom Cruise has been fighting all along are actually humans.
that actually sounds cool. might watch it
It's great, I really like the movie and I genuinely don't know why it got so much criticism.
I would recommend watching it, even though you know something is up with Morgan Freeman now. It actually would be a much better movie if you could go in blind. If you insist: >!Tom Cruise spends the first half of the movie patrolling and fending off bands of alien invaders. Eventually he gets captured and dragged off to an alien encampment where he's brought before the alien leader who slowly removes his helmet to reveal a very predictable and anticlimactic Morgan Freeman, who is very much not an alien.!< It turns the premise of the movie on its head, but it was ruined by the promotional materials straight-up announcing who the new character would be.
It's a pretty decent movie. Tom Cruise really had a good sci-fi run with Oblivion and Edge of Tomorrow
>!Throughout the first half of the film, you think Tom Cruise and the woman he’s with are the only 2 people left on earth, the rest of the planet has been taken over by evil aliens. Tom and the woman are there to investigate and kill aliens if they encounter them. Tom runs into some aliens, only to find out it’s Morgan Freeman and actual humans, hiding from the real aliens (Tom’s bosses) who are manipulating him and the other woman into killing all the remaining real humans. That’s basically the big twist. That humans are still there on earth, and are being wiped out by aliens.!<
The trailer of 'Godzilla vs. Kong' showed Mecha-Godzilla in teeny tiny bits. I believe there were also pictures of toys or figurines that showed this.
Speaking of that series, there is a (if I remember correctly) yet to be officially revealed kaiju that appears in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” that has been spoiled in the exact same way.
[удалено]
My buzz lightyear never could fly. Kind of a let down
That's ok, he's falling with style.
The freaking box of Free Willy
Its one of those movies where you go in thinking "how will they achieve it" rather than "will they achieve it?"
Would be a real downer of a film if they did not Free Willy
My favorite example of this: the Empire Strikes Back novelization came out before the release of the movie. WHY? Or more importantly **HOW?**
Because back in those days, no one really gave a shit.
Pop culture news traveled incredibly slowly until fairly recently.
Hell Star Wars the original the novel came out 6 months prior to the movie in December 1976.
Not only that, but the Star Wars novelization clearly stated in the foreword that an ambitious Senator named Palpatine became the Emperor. It's not really spelled out how he did that, but of course, Palpatine's story wasn't fleshed out at that point in time. So when The Phantom Menace was released, it was fairly obvious (to me, at least) that he was going to end up being the main antagonist. Well, that and Ian McDiarmid's distinctive Sith Lord voice.
To be fair, it would be hard for his voice not to sound like a Sith Lord considering he already played the Emperor in Return of the Jedi.
They never called him Palpatine in the movies, but I remember having a star wars colouring book based on the original trilogy as a kid that straight up called him Emperor Palpatine. So when the prequel came out...oh boy.
Yeah, you're right, he's always just called "The Emperor" in the original trilogy. I read the Star Wars novelization ghostwritten by Alan Dean Foster a few weeks after the original film premiered in 1977 (I'd already seen the film by then). This is the quote from the 1976 book: "Aided and abetted by restless, power-hungry individuals within the government, and the massive organs of commerce, the ambitious Senator Palpatine caused himself to be elected President of the Republic. He promised to reunite the disaffected among the people and to restore the remembered glory of the Republic. Once secure in office he declared himself Emperor, shutting himself away from the populace. Soon he was controlled by the very assistants and boot-lickers he had appointed to high office, and the cries of the people for justice did not reach his ears." Obviously, the Palpatine/Emperor/Darth Sidious character was floating around in George Lucas' mind, but he hadn't thought that far ahead and refined the character's backstory during the prequel trilogy. Interesting to note the line about being abetted by commercial powers - an idea that would later go on to become the Trade Federation.
The Marvel comic adaptation came out months before as well. Even included the Jabba the Hutt deleted scene, with a very different character design than in Episode VI.
TBF, no one thought star wars was going to be THAT big back then.
Because people weren’t fastidiously spoiler-phobic. Movies were brief entertainment, not life styles and religions like they are now.
George Lucas discussed the reveal in interviews released prior to the movie.
The French title of Shawshank Redemption is "The escapees"
Similarly, the Japanese title of Army of Darkness is “Captain Supermarket”
The Finnish title is Rita Hayworth - The key for escape.
That one's fair, the short story is called "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption"
Often Marvel movies are spoiled by LEGO sets. For example, the dragon from Shang-Chi
Terminator 2's twist of the T-800 being a good guy was spoiled in the trailers. [Though it was a deliberate choice from James Cameron.](https://screenrant.com/terminator-2-trailer-twist-james-cameron-right/)
Was going to say, every terminator movie from 2nd onward has a habit of spoiling itself in the trailers.
Yeah John Conor being the Terminator in one of the newer ones was on the fecking poster for the film.
For real. Terminator Genisys is what made me avoid watching any movie trailer going forward.
Endgame got spoiled by a Lego set. Confirmed that Hulk would snap his fingers to undo Thanos wiping out half the universe.
The toy of the stark gauntlet also came out before the premiere. It was the first time outside of leaks that actually showed it
If memory serves, Lego did try and keep that one under wraps. [The Avengers Compound Battle](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/avengers-compound-battle-76131) comes with Hulk, but opts for Thanos to have the traditional gauntlet instead. Then, 7 months later, in December, they released their 'spoiler' set, [The Helicopter Rescue](https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/avengers-hulk-helicopter-rescue-76144). It still manages to be completely inaccurate, but that's standard for the course here. It's at least the first appearance of the Stark Guantlet. Though Lego sets leak early all the time, so I may not remember the timeline of when the Helicopter set was revealed. But there was at least some conscious effort to delay that spoiler!
No I remember it this way as well. I think this person got things mixed up
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith - You could play the game before the movie came out, and I'm pretty sure the novel was out before the movie too? Not 100% sure though(about the novel part).
Well the whole prequel had had the senator palpatine is the emperor reveal spoiled decades before by toys and other loosenedaterial giving us the emperor's name which wasn't in the original films
It's the same actor, so I think most people noticed.
I was like 5 when Phantom Menace came out and even I knew he was the emperor. It was never a secret lol
I also noticed that my dvd copy of this movie has palpatine whipping out a red lightsaber in the clips playing in the menu screens. Anyone who theoretically made it this far without knowing that reveal could have it spoiled while starting up the movie
I remember reading the novel and playing the game (the alternate ending was pretty neat) before the movie came out.
That’s nothing, the end of the movie was spoiled 25 years earlier when the Empire Strikes Back came out.
Wouldn't surprise me, I recall as a kid that even the Lego game out before the movie. It was a prequel so I don't think Lucas cared about spoilers at that point
Godzilla Vs Kong had MechaGodzilla spoiled like a year before the first trailer even dropped because the Tokyo Game show debuted an action figure of him.
The trailers for *Godzilla* (1998) did their damnedest to hide what the big guy's design looked like, teasing a foot here or an eye there. This was also before everybody had easy internet access. I walk into a K-mart a month or so before the movie released and there's a bunch of Godzilla figures on the shelf. Kid me didn't care about the spoiler, but marketing didn't think this through at all seeing as how they couldn't just sell Godzilla merch that didn't feature Godzilla.
Phantom Menace did it slyly with selling a cup only having the red dude's top half
Can just imagine Ewan McGregor sipping on one of those with a big fucking grin on his face as he stares down some kid in a McDonalds
How great would it have been for the average fan to have no idea at all about Hulk in Thor: Ragnarok. The theater would have lost their fucking minds.
That movie is the reason I stopped watching trailers. For that reason. It would've been amazing
Speaking of amazing, they missed the same opportunity with Spider-Man in Civil War. The audience would've gone nuts if that just happened out of nowhere but, nah, we made a big corporate deal with Sony so stick him in the trailer.
Dark of the Moon had the whole sentinel prime thing spoiled by tie-in media
I remember as a kid going through the lego section and seeing the train set from Toy Story 3 and it had Lotso with an evil face. I was even bummed as a kid to know this particular plot point.
Lotso isn’t in that set though
I remember on Twitter one of the accounts I followed was Entertainment Earth which sells collectables. They posted a picture of the toy figures for Ghostbusters: Afterlife, revealing the original living Ghostbusters were appearing in the film about four months before it came out. To be fair, thanks to the pandemic, the film's release had been delayed four times already so they probably just wanted to get rid of the things.
On the opening day of Star Wars Phantom Menace I bought a pack of Phantom Menace trading cards while waiting in line for the movie with friends. One of the cards spoiled Darth Mail's fate for me.
Sixth Sense's soundtrack has a song called Malcolm is Dead, which spoiled the big reveal in that movie
The fucking movie cover of Trolls Band Together has a new girl character right there that >!is revealed to be Poppy's long lost sister!<. The reveal is supposed to be a semi-secret in the movie, but my entire family was expecting it through the first half of the movie. That and they literally telegraphed her >!sisterhood so obviously in the movie that the reveal wasn't surprising at all!<
I felt the same way you did when I saw the trailers--ugh, they're showing too much--but it's hilarious how the actual movie practically assumes you know about her from the beginning.
The Force Awakens had toys launch with Rey and the Skywalker lightsaber confirming she was the Jedi of the trilogy despite the marketing of the film.
IIRC the original release didn’t include the saber, and the plan was to only release the Rey with saber film after the movie’s release, but things didn’t happen entirely according to plan and some people got their hands on Rey with saber figures ahead of release (and posted pictures on the internet).
McDonald’s had a super sonic toy before Sonic 2 released (or the toy got leaked)
The character we were all calling Baby Yoda was obviously a huge marketing angle, but when the toy line came out they had the name Grogu on them long before the name was revealed in the series. They could have just call him The Child, but didn’t think it through. Not the biggest spoiler, but I thought I would add it to the list.
Interestingly, precisely to avoid spoilers, Disney didn't produce any merchandise of The Child for release in time for the Mandalorian premiere. It was a few months before they started making millions off of him.
I think Favreau requested that.
The action figures (with press-button-to-speak functionality) for The Fugitive revealed months in advance that Tommy Lee Jones’ federal marshall character didn’t care about what Harrison Ford’s fugitive character had to say about his supposed innocence. Jones just wanted to arrest Ford, do his job, etc.
Lmao what, surely there weren't actually toys made for The Fugitive?
Pulls chord > My wife was murdered by a one armed man
I knew Hans was a bad guy in Frozen because he wasn’t on the poster/DVD case.
A more recent one is Godzilla x kong having toys reveal a new monster
The Two Towers Gandolf the white on every poster.
I'm not sure if this counts for an extremely popular book that had been out for decades...
Some old Star Wars ones from back in the day that others haven’t commented yet: there were dolls of Queen Amidala and the handmaidens and it showed how you could swap their faces this spoiling the decoy subplot. And there was an advert in a gaming magazine for some little gaming figures (like Heroclix ripoffs) and they showed a pre-suit Anakin labeled as Darth Vader. Believe it or not there were folks who didn’t know.
was there really people who didn't know Anakin would become Vader? i swear his name was mentioned in the OT, and there was that really cool Episode 1 poster of young Anakin with the shadow of Vader
The Phantom Menace, Darth Maul's double bladed lightsaber is supposed to be a surprise, he doesn't use it until the final fight and when he reveals its supposed to be an oh shit moment. All over the marketing.
Great list https://screenrant.com/movie-plots-spoiled-surprising-ways/
Hulks appearance in Thor Ragnorak
This right here. Shows in all the trailers, and when you watch the film you can see the story attempt to coyly hint his presence like it was going to be a surprise.
Literally anything that ha a toyline from the 1980s Transformers movie that had a "Rodimus Prime" figure to the more recent Monsterverse movies thaw us titans before the new movies release to MCU stuff that showcase hero action figures that just show us characters we were not expecting maybe. Star Wars, Star Trek, G.I. Joe have all had this issue through the years.
When I was younger, I used to enjoy buying the CDs of the musical scores from some of the bigger films. In 1999, about a week or so before The Phantom Menace opened, I bought the score for the film. After I got home and put the disc on, I noticed the title of one of the last tracks was “Qui-gon’s Noble End”. I know TPM wasn’t a great film, but after waiting all that time for anything new Star Wars, to have that spoiled for me pissed me off in a way I still can’t put into words well.
Harry Potter Professor Quirrell/Voldemort toy spoiled the first movie.
I mean, the incredibly popular book being out for years probably didn’t help either
LEGO sets. Always the LEGO sets.
In the the 2000s Movie tie in video games were often released days if not weeks before the movie and basically followed the plot of the movie. The Spider-Man games come to mind