15 of the Most Hated Movie Endings in Cinema History

A bad ending can undo everything a great movie built up to in just ninety seconds, and most times, audiences remember the disappointment way longer than what came before it.

Some of the endings on this list were controversial from the moment they were shown on the big screen. Others became the subject of fan scrutiny as time went on. Some of them are still being debated on message boards to this day. Here are 15 conclusions that left audiences confused or just plain angry.

The Mist is Frank Darabont's adaptation of the Stephen King novella. It’s about a group of people who find themselves trapped inside a grocery store as monstrous creatures dwell on the outside. The protagonist resorts to mercy killings after losing all hope, killing other survivors, even his own son, just as the military shows up and the fog is lifted. In a 2007 interview, King praised Darabont's ending specifically, calling it "terrific" and saying he wished he'd written it himself. Audiences were not as excited about it at the time, to say the least.

The Coen brothers' tense cat-and-mouse thriller builds toward a showdown between hitman Anton Chigurh and the man he's hunting. That confrontation never happens on screen. Moss dies off-screen, Chigurh walks away from his automobile accident, and the final scene shows Sheriff Bell discussing a dream with his wife. It won Best Picture, but the audience was left feeling cheated out of the expected climax.

The trilogy that reshaped action cinema ended with Neo's death and a kind of hollow peace between the people and machines. What that actually meant was unclear to both characters in the movie and viewers at home. Following the two previous movies that had introduced an entire mythology of ideas, to have the struggle for Zion suddenly end with no clear resolution was a disappointment for most fans. Many viewers felt the philosophical weight of the series evaporated in its final minutes.

The Last Jedi split fans down the middle, and this movie was an attempt at course-correcting that somehow managed to displease everybody instead. The return of Palpatine is explained away in a single line without much thought about it, while Rey adopts the Skywalker surname without any reason whatsoever. Major plot threads from the previous movie are quietly dropped. The film had problems throughout, but the ending made them impossible to ignore, and it became one of the most memed endings in modern blockbuster history.

In Burton's version of Planet of the Apes, an astronaut ends up on a planet under the dominion of apes. After a long fight to survive and escape, he eventually makes it back to Earth. Upon landing, he finds himself standing before the Lincoln Memorial, but instead of the statue he knew, there’s a statue of the apes' commander. The director later revealed that he had no idea what the ending meant when writing it, and since he wasn't planning sequels, he didn't consider it his problem.

The found-footage horror movie involving an investigation into demonic possession ends with the screen fading to black with a message sending viewers to a website for further information. Viewers were apparently supposed to go online to find out how the story ended, but the site contained little more than marketing material and went dark within six months anyway, leaving the cliffhanger permanently unresolved. It got to a point where even audience members booed at the theatres when the credits rolled. It’s a perfect example of a cash grab ending if there ever was one.

This movie seemed to be about a 19th-century isolated village which is under siege by supernatural beings lurking in the woods, but by the credits, audiences find that they’ve been duped all along. The movie takes place in contemporary times, and the "village" itself is nothing but an elaborate hideaway created by grieving parents and the supernatural beings are just people in costumes. For a movie that had been building up to a dramatic ending through suspense, the reveal felt to many like the rug being pulled out from under them.

For much of the movie, Nicolas Cage's character works to decipher a series of numbers predicting catastrophes. The final one meant the end of the world. A solar flare ends up destroying Earth, and then out of nowhere, the film pivots to glowing alien beings ferrying children to a new planet to restart civilization. Two hours of grounded disaster thriller, and it ends like a deleted scene from a sci-fi religious epic. That ending confused spectators to say the least.

I Am Legend has two different endings, and the dispute regarding which one should be official has become an additional issue in and of itself. The theatrical version sees Robert Neville sacrifice himself so that the antidote can be delivered to those who are still alive. The alternative ending, which is closer to the source material, ends with Neville understanding that the creatures are not mindless monsters and returning the female specimen to the Darkseekers, who then leave peacefully. Fans of the book felt the theatrical cut sanded down the story's most uncomfortable point, while casual viewers don't really understand the alternative version.

Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is remembered for the early fridge scene, where Indy survives a nuclear blast by hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator. That scene became so notorious it spawned the phrase “nuking the fridge.” It’s also remembered for its terrible ending where the mythical skulls turn out to be from interdimensional beings that fly off in a saucer. That ending capped a film that longtime fans felt had abandoned the franchise's grounded pulp-adventure roots for something that didn't belong in the franchise.

In Shyamalan's eco-horror, plants emit a toxin that drives people to collectively kill themselves. The phenomenon is framed as nature striking back against humanity. That actually sounded like it could have built up to something. It doesn't. The threat fades out as randomly as it appeared, no explanation is given, and the film just ends. The lack of any real resolution made it a laughingstock and marked a low point in Shyamalan's career.

The alien attack movie directed by Steven Spielberg builds up suspense throughout most of the runtime as relentless alien machines destroy cities. However, the aliens just die when everyone least expects them to, undone by the planet's bacteria, and the family reunites in an ending that feels far too neat after two hours of relentless destruction. This adaptation adheres to the H.G. Wells novel, but it just felt flat on the big screen.

The plot of Christopher Nolan's inverted-time spy thriller builds up to the ending, where the hero is revealed to have founded the very agency he spent the movie trying to uncover. Following that requires tracking a timeline that loops back on itself in ways that are truly difficult to understand in real time. To make matters worse, an intricate sound mixing technique muffled much of the dialogue, leaving many audience members more confused than when it started.

The 2013 gritty Superman reboot culminates in a showdown where Superman breaks General Zod's neck. He does so in order to save a family caught in the crossfire. This was the most explicit on-screen kill in the character's cinematic history, and it broke a moral code the franchise had stayed loyal to since the release of the first film in 1978. It divided the audience into two camps, and the backlash was significant enough that Batman v Superman spends much of its runtime dealing with the public distrust of Superman as a direct consequence of his actions.

James Cameron's romantic epic film gets a lot of flak for its ending. The lovers part ways when Jack freezes to death, holding on to a floating door and leaving Rose alive on that same piece of wreckage. Almost 30 years down the line, audiences are still debating whether the couple could have survived if Rose had scooted over to make room. According to the MythBusters, this could only have happened if they tied Rose’s life jacket under the board, an idea neither of the lovers thought of. According to Cameron, the script said Jack dies, and that was that.