Let's chill out about spoilers

💡 If you follow TV series or movie sagas, you've bound to have heard or read the word “spoiler” quite a lot: a word that effectively refers to how revealing an element of a movie —often a final twist— can spoil the surprise.

And the least we can say is that in recent years, it has become a very serious subject that is best not to mess with.

So obviously, I understand that you might regret not having that nice little surprise effect when seeing with a well-executed twist at the end.

I too, if I'm being honest, prefer not to know how a movie ends before I see it...

But haven't we ended up taking this a little too seriously?

Example: a few years ago, on Reddit, this happened to me.

✷ They're often referred to as “the best band you've never heard of.” Do yourself a favor and give them a listen.

✷✷ An excellent song from the excellent album Deadwing, released in 2005. Do yourself a favor and give it a listen (again).

⚠️ What had I done! I quickly received this comment:

I'm not someone who likes to upset people, so I deleted my message.

But, I mean... haven't we gone a little too far?

Couldn't we chill out a little about spoilers?

💡 Recently, people dug up a bunch of reviews of The Empire Strikes Back from when the movie was released... reviews that openly discussed the revelation that Vader was Luke's father.

No way that would happen today!

Yet I'm willing to bet that people who read those reviews had this reaction:

▶️ I'm quite confident in my bet because I myself was spoiled for Return of the Jedi by my own father.

When I was eight and I just came home from the cinema in 1997 where I had seen The Empire Strikes Back for the first time (for its re-release), we had this conversation:

And you know what?

I don't remember being annoyed or disappointed that someone spoiled the surprise for me.

I remember being amazed, interested, and eager to see what happened next.

It seems indeed that studios have figured out how to manipulate our feelings to create and maintain these obsessions, which mainly serve their profits...

▶️ A work that has no other interest than its final twist… is it really interesting?

✷ Come to think of it, we could also talk about the explosion of cliffhangers, which sometimes turns into an obsession (and which notably gave us that ridiculous ending to Star Wars 7).

▶️ It's also with this cult of secrecy and absolute fear of spoilers that we end up with stupid situations like Westworld, whose writers admitted to rewriting season 2 when they realized that people had guessed the plot on Reddit.

Fortunately, Westworld did not stray into increasingly disappointing seasons after a fabulous first season.

(Spoiler alert —lol—: yes, it did.)

💡 In general, I feel like a lot of blockbusters have increasingly twisted and convoluted plots, with improbable plot twists every 10 minutes, just in the hope of capitalizing on this culture of spoiler taboo to compensate for a certain lack of imagination.

By the way, is it necessary for all blockbusters to have at least one unexpected plot twist?

A linear story with no surprises, if it's well done, is nice, right?

Just imagine if the 1977 Star Wars came out today.

💡 Anyway, to conclude, I suggest we all relax about spoilers, take a deep breath, and go read some random spoilers on the website Spoil Me, which has loads of them.