The True History Of Movie Spoilers

That Movie Everyone Is Talking About (But Not The Spoilers)

A few decades later, The Crying Game did a fantastic job teasing audiences regarding its big secret in the marketing, with the tagline, "The movie everyone is talking about...but no one is giving away its secrets", and the excitement about what the reveal might be stirred up enough business to make the film a sleeper hit and eventual Best Picture nominee.

If we skip forward a few more decades to the present, spoiler culture is a much bigger deal and more pervasively recognised by the mainstream.

Just this year alone, Avengers: Endgame boasted a memorable "Thanos demands your silence" social media campaign regarding spoilers, and Quentin Tarantino begged critics to keep plot details locked down following the Cannes premiere of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

And though it's clear that spoilers have always been a thing, there's one major invention, one seismic social shift that forever changed how we disseminate media and the details within it...

Global access to the Internet enjoyed a major uptick in the late 1990s, and in addition to the many world-bridging joys it granted everyone, it allowed people far easier access to movies - especially in the last decade with the streaming revolution - and also a platform to talk about - and yes, spoil - them.

The origins of the word "spoiler" can be traced back to a 1971 issue of National Lampoon discussing the subject, though naturally, spoiler culture and etiquette as we know it was first cultivated by early Internet adopters...

continued on the next page...