Great Movies That Should Have Ended Earlier

Frank Herbert once said there is no real ending. It’s just where you stop the story. This is perhaps ironic given the author famously wrote six Dune novels without ever coming to a final satisfying conclusion to his millennia-spanning saga. But then knowing when and how to stop has always remained an elusive challenge for storytellers, even when they’re working at the height of their craft.

The history of cinema is littered with many great films that seemed to breeze right past the most obvious grace note in favor of underlining, expanding, or even subverting a theme or idea integral to the story. Whatever the motive, these choices sometimes can leave us wishing their films had concluded minutes earlier. Here are some films that we particularly wish ended when the story was already over.

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Let’s get the most controversial example out of the way right at the top: yes, Return of the King didn’t need quite so many endings. There is of course ample reason for the choices made by director Peter Jackson and his co-screenwriters Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. When concluding a vast and sprawling epic like the Lord of the Rings—which in its shortest iteration still runs over nine hours—time and patience must be taken to savor the victory and sacrifice of the film’s heroes. Additionally, the screenwriters understandably wanted to honor the ending chosen by the novels’ author, J.R.R. Tolkien.

However, the script writers already showed a practical understanding of cinematic storytelling when they cut the Scouring of the Shire—an additional subplot and detour into war and loss after the One Ring is destroyed and Aragorn is crowned king. Such pragmatism should’ve been applied in, at the very least, excising the final scene taken straight from the book. It’s the one where Samwise Gamgee (Sean Astin) tells his wife and children “I’m home.” It is indeed popular among some fans to argue the film should’ve ended in the previous semi-ending scene when Elijah Wood’s Frodo sails with tears in his eyes toward the Undying Lands.

We think that would have been stronger since the final Sam denouement is ultimately superfluous. Viewers already can see Sam was at “home” in the Shire, and Frodo was not. However, we might suggest one other more sacrilegious endpoint that would have been fairly satisfying if you can divorce yourself from knowledge of the books. While the film needed to see Frodo, Sam, and all the hobbits return to the Shire—it could never just end with the king and queen of Gondor kneeling before the halflings—all of their sense of isolation and being fundamentally changed from the innocent youth they knew was elegantly articulated in a sequence invented for the screen. Frodo and Sam, Merry and Pippin (Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd), sit in a Shire tavern looking at all the oblivious smiles around them. Their neighbors have no idea how ugly this world can get, or what our heroes went through. They’re soldiers who returned from a war, grateful to have saved their way of life but unable to ever participate in it properly again. The wordless acknowledgement that passes between the four before a toast? A beautiful place for a story about fellowship and camaraderie to conclude. – David Crow

Minority Report

Steven Spielberg is one of if not the most gifted filmmakers of his generation. His innate understanding of filmic language and scene blocking is surpassed by none. Still, he is a storyteller who sometimes struggles with ending on a note with even a whiff of ambiguity or challenge for his audience. And when attempting to make a full-on noir film, which Minority Report is in spite of all its sci-fi trappings, that can become a disadvantage.

By nature, noir is cynical, downbeat, and happy to live in the unhappy shadows cast by society and humanity’s contradictions. Minority Report reflects this in its very setup where authoritarian police officers arrest people for crimes they haven’t committed. Thus the bitter irony of Tom Cruise’s fate in the story: his character realizes he is a tool for a flawed and monstrous system, but one he cannot change. Cruise’s John Anderton finding long sought closure over the death of his son, not to mention evidence that the “Pre-Crime” system he helped implement is unreliable, but being unable to fix anything is pure noir. It would have been a hell of an ending to see John frozen in a living hell among the other brain dead “killers” in Pre-Crime headquarters—silenced from ever telling the truth. That’s Chinatown, Jake.

So seeing him saved from that chilly destiny by his estranged wife and bringing down the corrupt system with some Hollywood hokum afterward rings doubly false for a genre defined by a deep and healthy skepticism. – DC

Lincoln

While on the subject of Spielberg, another one of his 21st century films that could have benefited from shaving a mere few minutes off its runtime is Lincoln—a movie we also would argue is underrated. The sophistication and intelligence with which Spielberg transforms his political biography into a case study for how our messy democracy can still be used to do big things deserves more credit than it gets. Yet for a film focused on using the passage of the 13th Amendment as a microcosm of Lincoln’s life, continuing on into Lincoln’s assassination feels like a bridge too far.

Spielberg seems aware of this since he and screenwriter Tony Kushner make the curious choice not to show John Wilkes Booth shooting the president in the head, but rather how his youngest son learned about his father’s murder. The film then carries on to a dramatization of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton saying, “Now he belongs to the ages” after Lincoln finally expires the next morning. Alas, it’s gilding the lily by reciting a historical horror known all too well by anyone who sees the movie. A more graceful ending was seen moments earlier, too, when Lincoln left the White House for the fateful play. “I have to go, but I wish I could say,” Daniel Day-Lewis says with a pang of poignancy that only Spielberg can earn without it feeling saccharine. He then walks off the stage of this mortal coil, with his attendants and heirs watching his profile vanish into shadow. The largeness of the man, and the incomplete legacy he left behind, was communicated beautifully right there. – DC

Source Code

Of all the strange genre riffs on Groundhog Day’s “time loop” conceit, Duncan Jones’ Source Code might be the most bittersweet and overlooked. Designed as a surprisingly layered sci-fi metaphor about mortality and the roads not taken, the film follows Jake Gyllenhaal as a veteran we eventually learn (spoiler alert) is essentially already dead. He was devastatingly wounded while serving his government, and now that same military that sent him into battle is exploiting the vegetative state of his body in order to put his consciousness in the mind of someone who is truly dead, after a terrorist attack on a train earlier that morning.

It’s a convoluted and highly implausible premise, but Source Code makes it real and hurt whenever Gyllenhaal’s Colter Stevens looks in the face of Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) and recognizes a woman whose fate seems to have been sealed before they met. She just doesn’t know it yet, as he watches her and so many other strangers on a morning commuter train die time and again in fire and terror. Hence the achingly powerful moment of Stevens’ final lap around the time loop. Having figured out and thwarted who the terrorist is (ostensibly so the authorities can arrest him in the future), he gets everyone on the train to share a tender moment of community and humanity. One passenger who’s a standup comedian, at Cole’s urging, tells jokes that brightens everyone’s day while Cole asks Christina “what would you do if you knew you only had seconds to live?” “I’d make them count she says” before they kiss in a freeze frame that captures a brief tender moment of happiness for those who the rest of the world will remember only for how they died in horror and violence. It’s so unexpectedly moving that the film continuing on to (inexplicably) suggest Cole will live on in a stranger’s body in a new alternate timeline seems entirely unnecessary. – DC

Pride & Prejudice (2005)

At the risk of offending aficionados of BBC Jane Austen adaptations, director Joe Wright’s 2005 adaptation of Pride & Prejudice remains the best screen version of that story. While it may lack every scene created by Austen’s pen (or for that matter Colin Firth in a high collar), it is the best at capturing her wit, playfulness, and satirical edge. With a cast that includes Keira Knightley, Rosamund Pike, Carey Mulligan, Jena Malone, and perhaps most importantly Donald Sutherland and Brenda Blethyn as Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, the central family of the story is a genuine delight here. Sutherland and screenwriters Deborah Moggach and Emma Thompson extract an especially surprising warmth out of Mr. Bennet and his relationship with our heroine Lizzy (Knightley).

So the real ending of the movie—after the admittedly swoon-inducing epic romance of Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfayden) asking for Elizabeth’s hand in marriage again at dawn on a foggy English moor—is Elizabeth being able to at last admit her feelings and desires to herself and to her father, who in the film understands her better than anyone else in that family. It’s a sweet, quietly triumphant moment that marks Elizabeth’s internal victory after immortalizing her romantic one in a swath of morning light… So the choice to continue onward to a scene that sounds nothing like Jane Austen, but a whole lot like Emma Thompson at her most saccharine, with Elizabeth and Darcy sharing sweet nothings at Pemberley at dusk, is too sappy by half. It’s lovely to see Elizabeth and Darcy finally free to be themselves in each other’s company, but lines like “call me goddess divine” and “Mrs. Darcy, Mrs. Darcy, Mrs. Darcy,” lose all of Austen’s wry humor and attention for character. – DC

Old

Forget the jokes about a beach that makes you old. Forget M. Night Shyamalan’s unique dialogue (Ken Leung’s character is named Jaren and he’s a nurse, if you didn’t notice). Forget Mid-Size Sedan. Old uses all those elements to tell an emotionally trenchant story about the joys and regrets we pile up in our astonishingly short lives.

Old hits its emotional peak when feuding couple Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps) succumb to their aging at the end of their day on the beach and let go of the things that kept them apart. Shyamalan almost gets away with scenes of the couple’s now-grown children discovering the source of the beach’s powers, but then he goes even further to a thudding reveal that a shady pharmaceutical company has been sending people to the beach to study its effects. Gone is the emotional strength of the movie, replaced by dull exposition that highlights the worst of Shyamalan’s tendencies. – Joe George

Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman felt like a true breath of fresh air when it released in 2017, amidst a glut of dire DC films and increasingly formulaic MCU movies. Director Patty Jenkins utilized Gal Gadot’s unreal (and usually unconvincing) screen presence to make Diana ethereal, combining her with an always charming Chris Pine. The elements came together to produce a superhero movie where villains that cannot be defeated through punches. The evil inside all of humanity.

Until it suddenly isn’t. After a powerful scene in which Pine’s Steve Trevor convinces Diana that World War I can’t be blamed on Ares, the God of War, the movie devolves into a sludgy CG slugfest between Wonder Woman and Ares (David Thewlis in a surprise reveal). In those last moments, Wonder Woman goes from transcending the superhero genre to sinking to its lowest depths. – JG

A League of Their Own

This one’s kind of a cheat, since A League of Their Own should have begun 10 minutes later and ended 15 minutes sooner. Most of A League of Their Own is a delightful comedy about the Rockford Peaches, an all-female major league baseball team devised to fill the gap while the men fought in World War II. Director Penny Marshall gives plenty of space for character-driven comedy moments from a cast that includes Geena Davis, Tom Hanks, and Madonna.

Most of the comedy works because Marshall keeps things light, even when dealing with dramatic moments such as the tension between the sisters played by Davis and Lori Petty or reminders of the sexism that the women face. But the movie is bookended by sappy scenes set in the present, complete with Davis overdubbing an older actress and a sappy Madonna song. The closing (and opening) threaten to sink the breezy comedy by adding a false gravitas. – JG

10 Cloverfield Lane

10 Cloverfield Lane is a bit of a stretch to add to this list, but stick with me. Even though the film is already on the shorter side, and I rarely ever think that short films should be shorter, this film is a rare exception. The first part of this movie is a brilliant, claustrophobic, smartly-paced psychological thriller. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, and John Gallagher Jr. are incredible at keeping tensions high right up until Michelle (Winstead) leaves the bunker. After that point, the last 15-ish minutes devolve into a traditional alien survival movie. Which is fine, I love those movies too, but it’s such a stark tonal shift from the rest of the movie that it makes the film feel a little disjointed.

In retrospect, as a Cloverfield sequel (spinoff?), aliens or some other sci-fi element had to appear, but the movie could have stopped with Michelle coming out of the bunker, realizing that the air is clear, and discovering the invasion, and still had the same—if not more—impactful effect. Part of what makes the original Cloverfield so good, even after all this time, is its devastating open ending. The ending of 10 Cloverfield Lane is still fairly open, but it’s pretty easy to assume what Michelle does next. It’s somehow a lot more hopeful, which is great and all, but I don’t think anyone goes into a Cloverfield movie looking for a hopeful ending. – Brynna Arens

Promising Young Woman

Promising Young Woman continues to be an incredibly divisive movie, and a lot of that has to do with the film’s last 20 minutes. Rape-revenge stories aren’t easy to depict and require a lot of care to do effectively. Promising Young Woman was advertised as one of the few movies that may actually do so—Cassie (Carey Mulligan) finally gets revenge for the friend she lost to suicide after she was assaulted by their classmates. And the film delivers on this premise for the majority of its runtime. Cassie not only calls out the men for their part in the violence Nina suffered, but also their female friends for their complicity.

However, when Cassie finally sets out to get justice against the man who assaulted Nina, she ends up dead herself and yet another victim of the patriarchal violence she’s been crusading so passionately against. It’s a devastating ending that has left a bad taste for many people and keeps the film from reaching its full potential. Sure, Cassie had a contingency plan that led to the arrest of Al (Chris Lowell) for her murder, but he’s a rich white man. How many consequences is he actually going to face for what he did? And the fact that Cassie had to die for him to even face consequences isn’t exactly reassuring to any victims of sexual violence that watch this movie. Promising Young Woman would have been a better movie had it ended with Cassie arriving at the bachelor party to enact her revenge. Even if we didn’t get to see Al and the others get their comeuppance, it still would have been a more hopeful and satisfying ending than what we got. – BA