10 Movie Endings That Were Profoundly Insulting
10. Glass
After M. Night Shyamalan delivered a major return to form with 2017's terrific thriller Split, fans hoped that he'd cement his comeback with Glass, the capper to his covert superhero movie trilogy (which started with Unbreakable).
All the ingredients seemed to be there: a top-of-his-game James McAvoy, a typically intense Samuel L. Jackson, and a giving-something-of-a-crap Bruce Willis.
But then that ending happened.
Though Shyamalan quite cleverly sets up a generic superhero movie showdown between David Dunn (Willis) and The Horde (McAvoy) only to subvert it by staging their final fight in a parking lot, what follows ensures that two of the movie's three protagonists suffer deeply unsatisfying fates.
Mr. Glass (Jackson) quite appropriately has his bones fatally broken by the Horde, but as for McAvoy's hulking supervillain?
He gets randomly shot by an anonymous sniper working for Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson), and Dunn is unceremoniously drowned in a flooded pothole by another no-name goon.
As it turns out, Staple wasn't merely a psychologist researching people "deluded" into believing they're superheroes, she also works for a secret society that aims to suppress, by any means necessary, the existence of super-powered people.
But in a final stinger, it's revealed that Glass recorded footage of the film's events, and leaves it to his mother (Charlayne Woodard), the Horde's former victim Casey (Anya Taylor-Joy) and Dunn's son Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark) to upload the footage online, revealing the truth about superhumans to the world.
It's an ending rife with baffling choices, namely killing the hero in the lamest and most unsatisfying way possible, and by offing not only Dunn but also the star of the show, McAvoy's Horde, Shyamalan completely obliterated any tantalising prospect of a sequel in the process.
It's almost impressive how far Shyamalan went to ensure fans wouldn't be sent home happy by Glass' ending.
Though he certainly subverted expectations in a number of ways, the writer-director has taught us several times before how surprises for their own sake just won't cut it.
Ultimately, this just felt like a giant slap in the face to anyone who ever begged Shyamalan to make an Unbreakable sequel.