10 Movie Villain ‘Twists’ We Saw Coming A Mile Off

5. Palpatine - The Star Wars Prequels

Now it'd be easy to assume this was never meant to be a twist at all - the lovely Senator Palpatine and scheming Darth Sidious are both played by Ian McDiarmid, the same actor who portrayed the evil Emperor in Return Of The Jedi after all - but there's lots of simple tricks Lucas play in his prequel trilogy to suggest he's trying to pull the rug from under non-die-hards.

First there's Sidious' costume, covering his face so his identity is hidden. Add to it that those little teases (Mace asks "but which was destroyed, the master or the apprentice?", then the camera pans across to Palpatine; Sidious doesn't appear in the end credits) are less winks aimed at fans, more little clues dropped for the rest of the audience it seems ol' George really wanted to shock you. Why else would all the marketing (action figures, publicity interviews, movie guide books) treat the Sith Lord and Galactic leader as two separate characters?

But even if you didn't know the original trilogy to the extent of knowing everyone's name, it was pretty obvious: Palpatine is either being ridiculously righteous or manipulating Anakin, the stereotypical makings of a hidden villain.

It was so cut and dry some fans couldn't accept it as being so simple; the notion of clones (Palpatine clones were a thing in the Expanded Universe books) or brothers were genuine theories bandied around before Revenge Of The Sith came out.