If you've seen any of the year's big movies, you may notice a recurring theme: None of them seem to know how to end.
"Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" is mind-blowing in its storytelling and animation style, but it ends with a massive cliffhanger, like it's setting up next week's episode of a TV series.
The new "Transformers" movie, "Rise of the Beasts," ends by propositioning a crossover between Transformers and another Hasbro property.
And "Fast X" just kind of ends in the middle of an action sequence, and then a stinger scene — the name given to those mid-credits sequences that contain Easter eggs teasing the next installment of a particular series — sets up a totally different story in the "Fast" saga.
It's been this way for a while, ever since the Marvel machine turned moviegoing into an ongoing serial. But movies are movies, and the power of the medium is that they tell tight, contained stories that are wrapped up in two hours.
Well, not anymore, they don't. Movies now feel like commercials for other movies, or products, or franchise installments that may — or in some cases, may not — be coming soon. (Looking at you, "Black Adam.")
Rather than leaving satisfied after absorbing a story for two hours (or, for many contemporary blockbusters, two-and-a-half hours), you're left on an anticipatory note of what's coming next. As an audience member you're a commodity, always being sold to, even after you've bought your ticket.
Cliffhanger endings aren't automatically a bad thing: the end of "Kill Bill Vol. 1" is a wholly satisfying jaw-dropper as well as a masterful set-up to the movie's second part. The difference is those two movies (split from one large movie) were always marketed as two halves as a whole, and were always meant to bookend one another.
Over its decade-and-a-half run atop the movie landscape, Marvel has perfected the stinger scene, giving glimpses of the heroes or baddies that will show up the next time we encounter our spandexed saviors.
Now audiences are trained to sit through the credits of those movies, hoping and waiting for something to pop up midway through the credits, and oftentimes all the way at the end of the credits, like Ferris Bueller did when he told everyone the movie was over, it's time to go home.
It's like in the '90s when your favorite band would toss a hidden track at the end of their album, after 10 or 20 minutes of static silence. Those were always a tantalizing hidden surprise, one last gasp before it was time to leave the album's world, and Nirvana's "Endless, Nameless" always startled when it came on if you let the CD keep running after the close of "Something in the Way."
Part of the repositioning of movies as chapters in an ongoing saga that never ends is the way no one seems to die anymore. Several of the summer's top titles, including "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" and "Transformers: Rise of the Beasts" explicitly show the death of a lead or important character, milking that moment for all its worth, and then the rug is yanked out from underneath the audience with a full-on "just kidding!" moment when that character is brought back, either immediately afterward or several scenes later.
It cheapens the investment audiences have with those characters, and it's a nakedly commercial move: characters are worth a lot more alive than they are dead, so the financial incentive to keep them breathing (or, in the case of the Transformers, functioning) outweighs what may work best for a story, which sometimes involves the death of a character.
Even deaths aren't final, as is the case in a particular 2023 entry in a certain Keanu Reeves action series. The movie tells you one thing, the trade reports that filmmakers are circling a "John Wick 5" tell another. But what about what happens on screen?
What happens on screen matters less than what happens off it, and money is the bottom line. The movies have never been a purely artistic medium — it's called the movie business for a reason — but as the industry relies more heavily on mega franchise fare to keep itself afloat, movies are looking more like TV, engineered to keep you hanging around until the next episode.
But in theaters, that hype for what's coming soon is usually effective: by far the biggest moment in "Black Adam" was when Henry Cavill showed up as Superman in the closing credits, and the audience reacted like the crowd at a heavyweight prize fight.
It was wishful thinking, and it set up a franchise extension that never came to pass. But the idea that something bigger was coming was all anyone needed, and it was more powerful than anything that came before it.
The movies have perfected this art of the tease, which has all but replaced the art of the ending. Now it's just a matter of mastering the part that comes next.
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