10 Movies That Are Totally Different By The End
8. Million Dollar Baby
How It Starts
When you start watching Million Dollar Baby, it looks like the most typical Clint Eastwood movie ever made: a well-crafted if familiar drama that sends the masses home happy.
From its very first scenes, we're led to expect a conventional yet robust underdog sports tale in which an amateur boxer, Margaret "Maggie" Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), attempts to reach the ranks of professional with the help of her grizzled old trainer Frankie Dunn (Eastwood).
How It Ends
Yet at the end of the second act, there's a jaw-dropping turn, when Maggie is sucked-punched from behind by an opponent between rounds and hits her head on a corner stool, breaking her neck.
The rest of the film becomes a devastating drama which, rather than have Maggie recover her from injury and return to the ring, segues into a meditation on euthanasia as Frankie wrestles with Maggie's request to help her die.
Ultimately he complies, ending the film on a heart-wrenching - yet brilliantly executed - down-note which couldn't be further from the Rocky-esque underdog yarn most surely expected from the beginning.