10 More Infuriating Movie Cliffhangers You Didn't Realise Had Answers
Freeze frames, ambiguous endings, and secret King Kong prequels.
When an audience invests in a movie, they aren't just doing so for a good beginning and middle. If anything, a good beginning and middle can be rendered completely redundant by a sub-par ending. Simply put, it has to stick the landing.
While this can come with wrapping everything up in a nice, neat bow, leaving no threads dangling, there's also the other end of the spectrum - a full-scale cliffhanger that leaves no closure whatsoever. Why come up with a conclusive ending when you can leave it open and let the audience decide for themselves, right?
Cliffhangers can be both frustrating and awe-inspiring in equal measure, though it's not always planned that way. Teasing a sequel that will never ultimately come can end in questions being left that may not ever get answered. Or, thanks to tie-in comic books, insight from directors and actors, and even reading the movie's full script, closure can sometimes be found.
WhatCulture has previously explored Infuriating Movie Cliff-Hangers You Didn't Realise Had Answers, but there are so many more than just ten. Just because these films didn't answer big questions by the time the credits rolled, whether that was the intention or not, doesn't mean those same answer can't be found elsewhere.
10. Rama Really Is Done - The Raid 2
Typically filmmakers like to keep their sequel ideas pretty close to their chest, even if it looks like it won't get made, just in case. Director Gareth Evans has not taken that approach, however, and has given a full breakdown of what The Raid 3 would have looked like.
The franchise has become infamous for its choreography and high-intensity martial arts fight sequences, and after following Iko Uwais' Rama for two movies, the final scene of the sequel showed the protagonist face-to-face with an army by himself. He simply said that he was done, and that was the end of the film.
As Evans told Empire Magazine, the threequel would not have actually followed Rama at all. When he said he was done, he wasn't simply giving in and letting the Japanese mobsters kill him - he would have walked away unscathed and gone back to his family. Even though the final shot of The Raid 2 seemingly set up what would have been yet another epic fight scene, there would have been no violence to come.
Instead, Rama returned home to his wife and children, while the third installment in the franchise would have followed a separate war globetrotting to the Indonesian jungle. It seems as if Evans only divulged such specific details because he is so certain that his interest in making The Raid 3 is at an absolute zero.