10 Movie Endings The Audience Guessed Immediately

9. Avatar

Because including Titanic on this list would be a little too cheeky, we've instead picked another James Cameron box office smash - Avatar.

The marketing for Cameron's sci-fi epic made little attempt to disguise its narrative influences, most of all Kevin Costner's 1990 Oscar-winning classic Dances with Wolves, a similar "white saviour" narrative where a white American "goes native" with an exotic tribe and leads them in a fight to protect their land.

It wasn't remotely surprising to see all the movie's major beats play out as expected - Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) becomes increasingly tight with the Na'vi, falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), fends off the western capitalist juggernaut trying to destroy the indigenous population's home, and then decides to stay with them.

Did anyone not see all of this coming? And you know what? That's totally fine. Cameron wasn't trying to surprise his audience here - he wanted to deliver the basic goods in a unique way, and that's exactly why Avatar ended up holding the #1 box office spot worldwide for almost a decade.

It is a technically astonishing film with a simple story easily understood across cultures and generations, and less about the A-to-Z journey but more about how Cameron takes us there.

That's not to excuse Avatar's corny writing in any way, but that this is a case where a predictable outcome didn't really affect the bottom line much at all.