Which Movie Poster Has the Biggest Spoiler?

 

Posters That Spoil the Movie

 

The art of the movie poster seems to be in decline, because now they’re all just collections of floating heads, or familiar imagery from stuff we’ve seen over and over, or simplistic images that don’t do more than let you know the movie exists. I can’t recall the last new movie poster I thought was worthy of hanging on my wall, but I will give credit to the simplistic posters that avoid revealing too much about the film. Let’s examine a collection of movie posters, both good and bad, that reveal a little too much about the film they’re trying to advertise. I think this is a good spot to issue the SPOILER ALERT!

Which movie poster spoils the film worse than any other? A few came to mind right away, but as I delved into the long, storied history of movie posters, I discovered some pretty surprising ones. I’m only going to look at North American advertisements, so international posters where some instructions were maybe lost in translation aren’t going to count. Whether the marketing department or the studio or whoever was responsible intended to spoil any of these films we may never know, but let’s begin with one of the oldest examples, for one of my all-time favourite films: the original King Kong.

 

CONTENDERS

 

King Kong (1933)

I believe one of the reasons everyone just seems to know that King Kong climbs the Empire State Building even if they’ve never seen the movie is because of this poster. Kong himself is an obvious choice to help sell it on the spectacle of seeing a giant ape monster, but why not just show him on Skull Island? You can’t blame any of the subsequent Kong remakes and reboots for spoiling big moments after the original did it first, except we can blame the 1976 remake’s poster for spoiling that Kong doesn’t climb the Empire State Building but rather the World Trade Center. While not every piece of ancient promotional material is like this (one of the original posters shows Kong front and center with only a couple generic buildings in the very distant background), most other posters at least spoil the fact that Kong is taken off Skull Island and brought back to New York before the finale. It’s not a spoiler worth getting upset about anymore, but it’s still one of the earliest and most famous examples of giving away the ending in a poster, and it certainly wasn’t the last.

 

Planet of the Apes (1968)

I’ll give credit where credit is due: as far as I can tell, none of the initial theatrical posters for the original film in the long-running franchise gave the ending away. It was in later posters and on home video covers in particular that the marketing “experts” said to hell with keeping one of the best twist endings in any sci-fi film a secret! Maybe they just figured since it was so well known after a while and subsequent sequels had been released that it was fair game to help advertise it to the home video market. If you were to watch Planet of the Apes for the first time having already seen that cover with Charlton Heston kneeling in front of a partially buried Statue of Liberty, you would probably be pretty frustrated watching it as he repeatedly thinks he’s on a planet other than Earth.

 

Carrie (1976)

Stephen King’s career was launched with the success of his first published novel, Carrie, and the subsequent film adaptation directed by Brian De Palma also stands as the first of many of his stories to get the big screen treatment. The pivotal moment that sets the film’s most horrifying sequence into motion was too good to pass up for the poster, apparently, because it’s hard to find any posters for Carrie that don’t at least show her covered in pig’s blood. It’s the before and after images side by side that really get me; sure, it’s intriguing, but once you sit down to watch the movie, the setup makes it pretty clear that the image you saw on the poster is going to happen and you have to wait quite a while until it does. I think the posters and DVD covers with just her mostly in silhouette and flames behind her are even a little less specific in spoiling the film’s most famous scene, but still reveal too much.

 

The Shining (1980)

There have been so many posters for Stanley Kubrick’s version of Stephen King’s famous third-published novel, especially with re-releases and anniversary editions, but some early versions show Jack Nicholson peeking through the shattered bathroom door at a terrified Shelley Duvall, and while it’s obviously one of the most famous moments from the film (sense a pattern emerging?), at the time it ruined the mystery of who the threat was going to be and to what length he would inflict pain on his family. King famously complained that the casting of Nicholson as Jack Torrance gave away that he would go insane by the end, but this poster only reinforced the spoiler. It even shows the axe right in the center, though he doesn’t even pick up the axe until over an hour in.

 

E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

I guess this one is pretty minor overall, but it was one of my inspirations for exploring this topic in the first place. I had never really thought about how Elliot and friends riding their bikes through the night sky was spoiled by the E.T. poster as a kid, because I had only seen the VHS cover in the video store before watching it for the first time, and it emphasized Elliot reaching out to E.T’s glowing fingertip, with the earth below. As an adult, though, I realized this magical sequence is spoiled not only by the original poster, but by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment logo, which plays before many other films. Does it ruin the whole movie? Not really, but as soon as they get on those bikes and stick E.T. in the basket you know what’s coming next, and the wonder of the effect doesn’t hit the same when you’re already expecting it.

 

Rocky IV (1985)

The first three Rocky movies are great, and the first time I saw them, I didn’t know how they were going to end. While Rocky IV is also pretty good, I was not at all surprised when Rocky beat Ivan Drago at the end of the final match, but that’s because I had seen the poster, in which Rocky is draped with an American flag, looking beat up but victorious. At least out of six Rocky movies and three Creed movies only one of them was spoiled by a poster.

 

Platoon (1986)

I remember being unnerved by the VHS cover of Platoon in the video store when I was a kid, not understanding anything about it, but sensing the film’s violent, gritty nature based on the image of a soldier kneeling and looking up into the sky in despair. When I eventually watched it as an adult, I realized that image wasn’t just some random solider or a promotional image that didn’t appear in the film, it was Willem Dafoe’s character! I also realized he wasn’t going to make it to the end, long before the scene in which he meets his demise: the iconic shot of him kneeling.

 

Free Willy (1993)

This one is actually more egregious than I first realized. Does the image of an orca leaping over a kid taking a heroic stance at a breakwater sell it as an exciting adventure film for the whole family to enjoy? You bet it does. Is this image also from the very end of the movie? You bet it is! The shots in the actual movie of this triumphant moment also look terrible compared to the genuine splendour of the poster. The title suggests the goal is to make sure Willy is set free, but after a point early on, anyone who saw the poster will realize that unless it’s a case of blatant false advertising (which it isn't), Willy will be set free by the end, and sure enough, he is.

 

The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

Who could have predicted I would uncover three Stephen King adaptations spoiled by their posters? I think an argument could be made that the poster for The Shawshank Redemption isn’t really a spoiler for anyone who knows nothing about the story. It’s a moody image of a guy we can presume is the protagonist standing triumphant in the rain, and that’s it. If you do know the story, whether it’s because you read the novella or have seen clips or scenes out of context discussing how the film is one of the greatest of all-time, then you can piece it together that Andy Dufresne will escape from prison before the end and stand triumphantly in the rain with his shirt open. The nature of the prison break and what he actually goes through to get to that moment isn’t spoiled in any way, so I would call this one a minor spoiler, but still, it’s something from very late in the movie that, while striking in its imagery, didn’t need to be the primary way of marketing the film.

 

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)

The spoiler in this one is only obvious once you’ve seen the first installment in the award-winning fantasy trilogy. Gandalf the Grey dies fighting the Balrog in Fellowship of the Ring, and the other members of the fellowship are very sad, but must push on. Wait a minute, why is Gandalf on the poster for the next one, then? And why is he all white? Arguments are made all the time that you can’t spoil stuff once it reaches a certain age, and considering there were forty-eight years between the release of the film and the publication of the source material upon which it was based, yeah, okay, book readers already knew that was coming. Still, they could have left him off the poster and I would have been genuinely surprised and delighted to have seen him return, instead of just waiting for the moment to come and then not being surprised at all with the swell of music and close up on Ian McKellan.

 

Quarantine (2008)

Does anyone remember this found footage remake? I reviewed it over a decade ago and I barely remember anything distinct about it (I do remember how much it copied from the original Spanish film, REC), but I do recall that poster—fairly simple, though effective enough. This is yet another case of the final shot of the movie being used; there really isn’t much to spoil here, but it’s pretty telling when the most marketable shot of the film is the last one, meaning everything preceding it isn’t as impactful or memorable.

 

The Impossible (2012)

This survival film from Spanish director J.A. Bayona was based on true events surrounding the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. I’ve never seen it but have heard it’s great—it got pretty good reviews, Naomi Watts was nominated for an Oscar, and it made money at the box office—and one big reason I didn’t feel like I needed to see it was because of the damn poster. There they are, the family reunited! If your entire premise hinges on whether or not the family will survive the ordeal and reunite, maybe don’t reveal the outcome before people are even in the theatre seats? Some claim it helped make it a less distressing experience to watch, but I think that’s a lame excuse, because it proves the whole thing was, indeed, possible.  

 

Terminator Genisys (2015)

Last and, in this case, certainly least, is the fifth Terminator film which was so bankrupt of interesting new ideas that the marketing team decided to utilize the film’s one and only twist as part of the effort to get fans to see it. No, it’s not the reveal that Arnold Schwarzenegger is back as an aged T-800, which is revealed pretty early in the movie, nor is it the return of the liquid metal T-1000. John Connor, the guy Skynet has been trying to take out since the first movie, is actually a Terminator in this one! It’s a stupid twist, but even stupider is having the big reveal plastered right across the center of the poster (and it was in the trailer, too) so there is absolutely no narrative weight or impact when the twist comes to light in the actual film. I had forgotten about this even happening, actually, but thanks to the poster I was instantly reminded.

 

VERDICT

I could have included even more movie posters here (several Marvel movies, Phone Booth, Lone Survivor [although that one’s spoiled just by the title alone], The Wicker Man) but I think these ones are the most spoiler filled. Which one has the biggest spoilers of all? I’m tempted to say Terminator Genisys, if only the spoiler meant anything. It’s a lame twist in a lame sequel that has since been retconned, so who cares anymore? King Kong is such an old spoiler it also doesn’t seem so significant today. The frontrunners are Carrie, Planet of the Apes, and Free Willy. I’ll give some of these other ones a pass—E.T. for example I can see being a way of intriguing audiences without giving away any key plot points—but of the frontrunners, I will also give Planet of the Apes a pass because it wasn’t the original poster that spoiled the ending, just later marketing material. Who really cares about the ending of Free Willy anymore? It’s so of the 90’s and so less significant compared to most of the other films I’ve covered here that I wouldn’t call it the biggest spoiler poster.

Carrie, for having remained as a 70’s horror classic since its release, has always been marketed on that shot of her drenched in blood. I understand the shock and intrigue of seeing her like that, but c’mon, it’s one of the key moments that I would certainly leave out of my explanation to someone as to why they should see it. A girl with telekinetic powers gets taken to the prom and something terrible happens to her is all you need to say! I think I have to give it to the Carrie poster for being the biggest spoiler for a great film. It’s like if they had put Norman Bates in a wig on the poster for Psycho or the chestburster coming out of John Hurt on the poster for Alien. It’s always been a curious choice to me, but thankfully, I have seen less and less spoiler-filled movie posters in recent years. If only we could start to see some more interesting posters that still refrain from spoiling too much…

 

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