10 Incredibly Subtle Ways Movies Gave Away Their Endings

2. Private Ryan Lives - Saving Private Ryan

Given that it was based (partly) on a true story, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Saving Private Ryan was going to end with at least a slightly happy ending, but it still tried its best to hide whether Private Ryan would, in fact, be saved all the way up to the end.

Even the first scene - of an old veteran visiting graves at a cemetery in Normandy alongside his family - tries to suggest that the old man is in fact Tom Hanks' Captain Miller with a cheeky edit between their faces as the old man remembers D Day. But it turns out not to be the case and the old boy is in fact Ryan himself, who emerges unscathed while most of the squad assigned to save him are killed.

But if you look closely, there's a major hint that it was Ryan all along, with the film happily spoiling its main narrative question in literally the first scene. Had you known what the pin for the 101st Airborne looked like, you'd have known that was Ryan the second his company is mentioned, because the old man has it on his lapel. Had he been anyone else in the film, he'd have been wearing an Army Ranger pin.