21 Movies That Waste No Time Ending
“The story is over once the conflict ends” is common writing advice, but some filmmakers take it so close to heart that it won’t be found until their inevitable bypass operations. Even the classic five-act story structure tells us we need some resolution at the end, but there’s just too much of a hurry to get us to that mid-credits scene that teases the sequel and keeps the whole machine running.
Redditor slimmyboy007 is particularly annoyed by this. “I feel like I have seen so many films where the bad guy has just been killed, the group all picks themselves up and get in frame together looking disheveled, one of them makes a funny remark … cut to credits,” they recently told r/Movies. “I don’t get the logic. Surely as a director you’d want to believe you have endeared us to these characters enough that we don’t walk out the second the conflict is over and perhaps the audience would like to see how it affected the characters just for a couple minutes.”
From there, they asked for more examples of “movies that end literally a second after the conflict is over,” and Reddit pointed out the roots of the phenomenon, movies that did it well or badly and a few movies that don’t even get that far.
Braveheart
Chinatown
RoboCop
An American Werewolf in London
There Will Be Blood
Whiplash
Street Fighter
Heat
Karate Kid
Memento
Death Proof
Black Swan
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Speed
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
Michael Clayton
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Unbreakable
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Total Recall
Blood Debts
