8 Movie Endings Way Darker Than You Realise

Hillmongers doesn't love a happy ending. As long as it feels earned and appropriate for the story

it's great to see the heroes triumph over the villain, which in turn sends popcorn-gobbling

audiences home with a smile on their faces. But sometimes things aren't quite that simple

and what's framed as a happy ending with jaunty music and a fanfare celebration

is actually anything but. There are even some cases where a sad ending can be made

even darker the more time you spend thinking about it. So with that said, let's get sad

shall we? I'm Ewan, you're watching WhatCulture, and here are movie endings way darker than you

realize. Valentine's Signal Killed Millions Worldwide. Kingsman, The Secret Service. The villain of the first Kingsman movie, Samuel L. Jackson's Richmond Valentine

plans to control the world by giving free sim cards to every human being on Earth

The catch? Well, he can transmit a signal that turns anyone with one of those sim cards murderously violent, all in an attempt to control overpopulation and prevent global warming

And indeed, Valentine activates the signal for a brief period during the movie's third act, with director Matthew Vaughn briefly showing scenes of chaos unfolding around the world as people suddenly start killing each other

Yet after Valentine is killed at film's end, the masses of human carnage which unfolded while the signal was active are oddly glossed over

It's reasonable to assume that millions of people, especially the young, elderly, and physically vulnerable, would have died in droves, severely impacting the population of the next generation in particular

And this is without even considering that numerous world leaders in Ballantyne's employ

had their heads exploded in the climax, likely grading at least a couple of teeny tiny power

vacuums in countries around the world. Colter hijacked a guy's body, Source Code

A surface-level reading of Source Code's ending says that it's a happy one

at least for protagonist, Captain Colter Stevens, played in the film by Jake Gyllenhaal, who we all dearly love

Stevens eventually learns that he was gravely wounded in action and is being kept on life support to test out the experimental

past-reconstructuring Source Code tech. At the end of the film, however, one of the officers overseeing the quote-unquote simulation

Captain Goodwin agrees to terminate his life support after one final trip back into the

source code. While the termination seemingly freezes Coulter in time with his love interest Christina a moment later the scene unfreezes revealing that the source code wasn generating simulations but actually creating parallel universes

And so Coulter is free to live a full life with Christina in this newly created reality

with a fully functioning body no less. Except it's important to remember that anytime Coulter entered the source code

he was inserted into the body of a school teacher named Sean Fentress

effectively hijacking it. And so, though this outcome is a fortuitous one for Coulter

he's basically stolen the body of another human being, a fact we're slightly reminded of in the

ending when Sean's reflection can be seen in front of Coulter. As if Sean's consciousness

being obliterated wasn't bad enough, his family and friends will have to deal with him having no

memory of them whatsoever. Marty's brain struggles to accept his new past, Back to the Future

Back to the Future's ending sees Marty McFly ensure that his parents do indeed get together

in 1955, thereby securing his own existence. However, doing so also ends up changing his

present of 1985. At the start of Robert Zemeckis' film, Marty's father George is cowardly and timid

his mother Lorraine is not doing great, and his siblings have really failed to do anything with

their lives. But at the end, their fates have been changed. George is a successful sci-fi author and

an assertive human being. Lorraine is happy and healthy, and his siblings are doing well for

themselves too. Basically, Marty's entire life up to this point has been fundamentally altered

and while the film keeps it ambiguous precisely how Marty's memories will now work

There are basically two options we have to work with here. 1. Marty either has no memory of his present and has to awkwardly wing it the rest of his life

2. His older memories will slowly fade in over time given that the movie confirms the aspects

of the present will slowly update after the past is changed, like with Marty's photo of his family

Either way, it's going to be a tough period of adjustment. Having no memory of a childhood the

rest of his family vividly remembers or having to experience his memories being gradually reshaped

over time which kind of sounds like a bit of a nightmare the whole movie is walker's dying dream

point blank let's look at story one of ewan's fave movies entry here john borman's point blank

was the director's 1967 masterpiece an ethereal dreamlike descent into the california underworld

with a career best Lee Marvin as our guide. The film was adapted from Richard Stark's

slash Donald Westlake's Parker novels, namely The Hunter. Side note if you enjoy comics

too the late great Darwin Cook adapted Stark Parker novels in the 2010s and they are all gorgeous and well worth checking out But yeah point blank and spoiler alert of course if you have not seen the film

already, and please do go do that if you haven't because it's amazing. The film stars Marvin as

Walker, a wronged professional criminal with a ruthless mean streak who sets out to take revenge

on those who double-crossed him and stole his score. Marvin's character drifts through California

ran through a pop art lens, systematically taking down those who wanted him to stay dead

The film ends with Walker at the same place he was originally left for dead at, Alcatraz Island

fading into the darkness to avoid one final double cross. It's also possible that Walker

could be fading out of existence altogether. Several reads of Point Blank, the most notable

posited by critic David Thompson, have suggested that the film is really Walker's dying fantasy

A series of visions promising revenge before he succumbs to his wounds on Alcatraz in the encounter we see at the beginning of the film

It's also possible to look at Walker as something of a specter. While point-blank supernatural elements aren't explicitly telegraphed

and it's perfectly acceptable to read the film more literally as Walker's actual revenge

Borman himself did say that it's possible for Walker to be seen as a quote, ghost or shadow

Whichever read you have a point blank, it's ending is still devastatingly good

Ewoks eat the stormtroopers. Star Wars Episode 6, Return of the Jedi

Much as Episode 6 of Star Wars ends the original trilogy on a triumphant note

the galaxy-wide celebration is hampered somewhat by the sly implication of human eating

Return of the Jedi introduced fans to the adorable fuzzy Ewoks, who are nevertheless

shown to be carnivorous given that they very nearly end up eating Luke, Han, and Chewbacca

upon first crossing past with them. And while they ultimately all worked together to fight the Empire

and celebrate it in unison at the end, the Ewoks almost certainly didn't afford the same quarter

to the stormtroopers they captured during the battle of Endor. But yeah, given that we can even

see an Ewok drumming on some stormtrooper helmets right at the end of the film, it seems pretty cut

and dried that they spit roasted and ate their defeated foes. Barry is trapped in the Schumacher

verse. The Flash. The Flash delivers one of the most genuinely surprising WTF endings in recent

memory, when Barry Allen seemingly returns to the presence, only to meet up with Bruce Wayne and

discover that he's not played by Ben Affleck, but by George Clooney. Ooh, what a zinger. While on the

face of it, this might seem like a mere goofy, nonsensical gag on which to end the film

a head scratching closing moment to set up a sequel that will never arrive. Good going

in again Warner Bros. It's actually a sort of twisted ironic fate for this incarnation

of the flash Just think about it Barry has effectively been banished to the Schumacher verse of Batman Forever and Batman and Robin I will go on the record multiple times to defend those movies but that is not where Barry belongs His timeline is still balked in short and he must now

presumably annoy yet another incarnation of Batman in a bid to fix what he's broken. Here's hoping

that Arnie's Mr. Freeze iced him in like 5 seconds flat. Kong's corpse becomes an attraction. King

Kong No matter which version of King Kong you watch, they typically end with the death of Kong

at the hands of the military. And while the story seemingly ends there, Joe DeVito's sequel novel

King of Skull Island, released shortly before Peter Jackson's 2005 remake, reveals a bleak postscript addendum to Kong's demise. The novel's most disturbing revelation

Well, after Kong was shot by the military and fell to his death, his gigantic corpse was collected

and became an exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, with patrons paying top dollar to view

his skeleton posed exonically in combat with a dinosaur. There's a tragic irony to this outcome

for Kong that even in death the world wasn't done with him. His remains were commodified

long after he was gone. Gentrification still wins. Batteries not included You have to give the filmmakers behind batteries not included some credit. Back in 1987 they managed

to address the issue of gentrification in a film aimed squarely at kids. The plot centers around an

impoverished New York neighborhood where an apartment building and cafe operated by the

Riley's is under threat of demolition by nasty property developers. With the Riley's and some

of their tenants refusing to move, the developers ramp up their threats, until they are visited by

mechanical creatures resembling flying saucers dubbed the Fix-It's which promptly start repairing

the run down building. All the same, an arson attack causes the building to be destroyed near

the film's end before a fleet of the fixits returns and rebuilds the entire apartment block

to a better state than ever before. This results in the building being spared by the developers

with the final shot taking place years later and showing the block nestled safely between

the developers new fancy high rises. Though the cafe is said to benefit from the influx of new

people to the area, everything we know about gentrification says this won't be a good thing

for the Rileys, their tenants, or really any non-rich person living in the vicinity

The property developments would end up raising the value of the surrounding area enough that it

would almost certainly price the Rileys and their tenants out of the area on a long enough timeline

The Rileys would have to pay more property tax, likely forcing them to raise their tenants' rent

the cost of everything in the area would also skyrocket, ensuring that affordable living quickly

became anything but. As a closing shot, it's a triumphant image of defiance

but one grimly undone by cold, hard reality