12 Wildly Disappointing Cop Outs and MacGuffins in Movies

Whatever we want to be in the briefcase? No Quentin, it’s your story! You tell us!

Look, we know that “MacGuffin” is this weird old Hollywood term, but it’ll be a thing in movies forever! It can be a physical object like the treasure in The Goonies, a person like Doug (the groom) in The Hangover, or even an idea or goal like defending the house in Home Alone. If the characters want something and spring into action for it, you best believe it’s a MacGuffin.

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Coined by Alfred Hitchcock to quickly describe the wants of his characters, it is said that he got the term from an old story about a man’s large, strange-looking package containing a “MacGuffin.” The man explains that it’s used to catch tigers in the Scottish Highlands, and the ol’ Hitchcockerino thought it was a good way of explaining every “package” going forward. ‘Round here we call our packages “the MacGuffin” too. Sorry. And how did tigers get to the Scottish Highlands?!

Anywho… This all seems like a pretty interesting and engaging way to grab our movie-going attention. So messing that up is pretty anticlimactic, and downright “un-movie.” There, we can coin terms too. Just sayin’, if you’re gonna get us all drooly over an object or whatever it happens to be, don’t cop out at the last minute and make it the afterthought. Like these 13 wildly disappointing cop outs and MacGuffins right here.