When it comes to movie twists, they can make or break a film, and when they fail to land, it results in a disappointing movie overall. This was proven with M. Night Shyamalan, whose overuse of movie twists derailed his career for over a decade. However, when done right, such as in Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, it results in a masterpiece.

That said, too many filmmakers fall into the same trap that Shyamalan found himself in for so many years: relying on a twist to deliver a huge moment that would change their entire film. When these twists land with a thud, there is nowhere to go but to disappoint viewers, and that ultimately hurts the story as a whole.

Serenity (2019)

Serenity was a movie that wasn’t heavily promoted, and it suffered from the start due to sharing a name with a cult favorite sci-fi film by Joss Whedon. However, director Steven Knight likely wanted his huge twist ending to sell the movie as a cult classic after the fact. The problem is that the twist felt unfair and missed the mark.

The Serenity twist ending revealed that Matthew McConaughey’s fisherman, Baker, had been ᴅᴇᴀᴅ for many years. The entire story about Baker, his wife, and the murder of her abusive husband, was nothing more than a video game that Baker’s son created using coding in his room.

This was the old “it was all a dream” ending that never works in movies or literature, but in this case, it was updated for a new generation of video gamers. The twist, in which Baker, in the game, believes he is real until he learns he is a video game character, didn’t help, and the entire ending felt like a cheat for the audience.

Remember Me (2010)

The ending of Remember Me angered fans to no end when the movie was released. However, it is essential to know that the twist ending served a purpose, as the movie was never about a broken love story. It was about the twist that didn’t work and caused the film to become a mᴀssive disappointment.

The advertising and setup for Remember Me portrayed it as a broken love story between a man (Robert Pattinson) and a woman (Emile de Ravin) who seemed mismatched, but in the end, they found a way to make it work. The fact that it ended with the man dying in the Twin Towers on 9/11 came out of nowhere.

In the end, Remember Me is a movie about how the 9/11 tragedy affected everyone, and it destroyed the lives of people who never saw it coming. The movie was intended to evoke the same emotions in viewers. Instead, the twist left them angry at the film and its filmmaker, missing the intended message completely.

Hide And Seek (2005)

Hide and Seek is a horror movie that relied heavily on its twist ending, but it ultimately felt like another major cheat, disappointing viewers altogether. That is especially discouraging, given the involvement of some great actors, including Robert De Niro, Dakota Fanning, and Famke Janssen.

De Niro plays David, a father who moves with his daughter after his wife died by apparent suicide. However, once they get to their new house, murders start to occur, all made more frightening by daughter Emily (Fanning) having an imaginary friend named Charlie, who might be responsible in some way.

The twist here is that the imaginary friend is David, and Emily has just been going along with her father’s dissociative idenтιтy disorder. This twist ending just failed to hit the landing, and even worse, a further twist in Hide and Seek hinted that Emily might also have DID, and the tragedy would continue.

Halloween II (1981)

The story behind Michael Myers and Laurie Strode’s familial ties is a funny one. John Carpenter had sold the first Halloween for television, and the network wanted more time added to the original film’s running time. Carpenter said he wasn’t sure what to add, so he started drinking.

While drunk, Carpenter added a scene where Laurie learns that Michael Myers is her brother. The director also stated that he hated this change and had never wanted to continue Michael Myers’ story after the second movie. For people who only saw the theatrical version of the first movie, this was a second movie twist.

This was also something that was changed when David Gordon Green started his trilogy in 2018, picking up after the events from the first movie and eliminating the flat brotherly twist from his version of the story.

The Village (2004)

M. Night Shyamalan has several twists in his movies that never seemed to work with audiences, with The Happening as the most notorious of them all. However, there was another twist that was supposed to be a mᴀssive deal, changing everything people knew about the movie, which happened in The Village.

For most of its running time, audiences believed The Village was a historical tale of a 19th-century village that lived in fear of creatures that inhabited the surrounding woods. Most people in the village had never ventured beyond their lands for fear of the creatures. However, that was not the truth.

In reality, it is modern-day, and a group of people isolated themselves in the village decades ago, away from the violence of society, and the wealthiest among them funded a wildlife reserve to keep them hidden and safe. It was a brilliant idea, but the execution fell short, and the entire twist ultimately failed to deliver.

The Life Of David Gale (2003)

The Life of David Gale had a twist that not only disappointed audiences but also actively angered many viewers after they watched the film. This might have been the purpose of the twist, but the viewers were angrier with the filmmakers than with the message the story attempted to deliver.

Kevin Spacey stars as David Gale, a former professor who sits on death row in Texas. His lawyer secures a deal for him to tell his story to a news network, which he does. When the reporter learns that Gale was framed for the murder, she rushes to stop the execution, but arrives too late.

However, the twist ending showed an “off the record” video revealing that Gale was there when Harraway died by suicide, and he planted his own fingerprints at the scene, framing himself. This was the couple’s way to show that an innocent man could be put to death for a crime he never committed.

Shutter Island (2010)

Shutter Island is a Martin Scorsese film based on a Dennis Lehane novel, and the entire story culminates in a twist ending that was intended to be both shocking and tragic. The story begins with two law enforcement officers en route to a prison hospital on an island to investigate the disappearance of a patient.

However, the twist ending reveals that there was no missing patient. Not only that, but one of the two detectives is a murderer who has blocked out his entire crime, where he murdered his wife after she drowned their children. The man blames himself for the kids’ murder since he didn’t get his wife help with her depression.

The entire movie is well-sH๏τ and atmospheric, and the scenes where Teddy realizes he is the missing patient and killed his wife were horrifying. However, the whole twist falls apart under close examination, and it fails to have the impact that Scorsese might have hoped for when he made the film.

Planet Of The Apes (2001)

The original Planet of the Apes movie had one of the most iconic twist endings in history, when Charlton Heston’s George Taylor discovered what remained of the Statue of Liberty. When Tim Burton decided to remake the movie in 2001, he wanted to add something that could be just as iconic.

Burton failed in that endeavor miserably. The remake had many of the same beats, with Mark Wahlberg playing the astronaut who ends up on a world inhabited by intelligent apes, where humans are kept enslaved. However, the twist here allowed him to escape from the planet and return home in his space pod.

However, when he lands, he discovers that the Earth he has landed on is still not in his own world. The Lincoln Memorial has been replaced with a monument commemorating General Thade (Tom Roth’s ape military commander). What was supposed to be a big reveal ended up as a joke and a meme.

Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker (2019)

One of the biggest failures of Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was taking the interesting direction that The Last Jedi attempted, showing that anyone could be a Jedi, and then falling back on the old story that only the elite could be a Jedi. This was demonstrated when Rey was revealed to be more than just an average girl.

The movie decided that if she had Jedi powers, she had to be part of an elite family, like the Skywalkers before her. In this case, she was revealed to be the granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine. It was bad enough that the first twist showed he was still alive. The twist that he and Rey were related missed the mark horribly.

Rey becoming Palpatine’s granddaughter explained her mastery of the Force, and it effectively erased the entire idea that this franchise could move beyond the original trilogy, forcing it to remain shoehorned into ideas that have since grown old.

Spectre (2015)

Spectre had one of the most out-of-left-field twists that doesn’t make any sense in the grand scheme of things. Blofeld has been one of James Bond’s most iconic villains for decades. Blofeld wants to take over the world, and James Bond wants to save it. That is their only real connection.

However, the James Bond movies wanted to change and update things with Daniel Craig at the helm, and one area where they dropped the ball was Blofeld. Christoph Waltz was great in the role, but Spectre took things one step too far when it was revealed that Blofeld was Bond’s half-brother (sort of).

Having Blofeld as the mystery villain worked from a storytelling standpoint, since he is iconic. However, the brother twist did not affect the story at all. Bond completely disregarded it, and by the end of the movie, it wouldn’t have mattered either way, rendering the movie twist senseless and forced in.