10 Greatest Cut To Black Movie Endings EVER

Darren Aronofsky sure loves his bleak endings, but with The Wrestler he also delivered a poetic, affecting finale which invited much debate among viewers.

The drama ends with wrestler Randy "The Ram" Robinson (an Oscar-nominated Mickey Rourke) heading into the ring to fight The Ayatollah (Ernest Miller) against the advisement of doctors due to his heart condition.

During the match, Randy begins to suffer chest pain and his opponent instructs him to wrap the match up quickly as a result. But Randy, a man who lives only for his fans, instead climbs the top rope to execute his flying Ram Jam finishing move.

Randy stands atop the turnbuckle, tearfully preparing to leap off as the crowd cheers for him, but once he makes the jump, Aronofsky suddenly cuts to black, leaving the outcome uncertain.

It's obviously a fair assumption that Randy may have died in the ring following the jump - and that's certainly Rourke's own reading of the scene - but it's absolutely not conclusive in any way.

And that's the beauty of it - you can consider it a tragic ending, that Randy would rather kill himself than never wrestle again, or slightly more hopefully, that he's simply choosing to live life on his own terms until, inevitably, nature takes its course.