Spoiler Alert: Bruce Willis Is Dead and
399 More Endings from Movies, TV, Books, and Life
Rosebud is a sled.
It was Earth all along.
Soylent Green is people.
Snape kills Dumbledore.
No longer is it safe to save a favorite movie, book, or TV show for later enjoyment if you want to avoid having the ending spoiled. Web Watch has mentioned before that we were successfully able to avoid hearing about the ending of THE SIXTH SENSE until we finally saw the film ourselves on DVD. Yes, we knew there was some general plot twist, but we always were able to avoid any in-depth conversation about it until many months after the film had been released.
And that was before Twitter and the #spoiler or #spoileralert hashtags came into play. We’ve gotten into online battles with friends who are active on various social media sites who have become angry about conversations on shows that they haven’t seen yet, but were pissed that they just happened to come across someone else’s comment.
Dude, if you don’t want to know what happened, then stay the hell off of Twitter. How the hell are WE supposed to know what you have or haven’t seen yet?
Which brings us to the latest study from PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science: SPOILER ALERT: STORIES ARE NOT SPOILED BY “SPOILERS”. To which we will add, “duh.”
The study took 12 short stories that had a mystery or twist to them, such as Chekhov’s THE BET or Agatha Christie stories. There were three variations presented to different groups:
- The story as it was
- The story with a preface that contained a spoiler
- The story with the spoiler embedded deep into the story
What the research found is that readers preferred knowing the details ahead of time in stories classified as “ironic twists”. The same was true for mysteries — knowing who the killer was did not, in fact, ruin the enjoyment of getting there for the reader.
Overall, the readers preferred the spoiled versions to those that were untainted.
The study was only for books, not films. So that doesn’t mean that you should drive outside of a movie theater on opening night and yell out the ending to those waiting in line to see the film themselves. But you might want to try yelling out random endings to books at the bookstore to see if that increases book sales or not.