10 Movies That Gave Away The Spoiler Immediately

Frequenter of most all-time-greatest lists, Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz's Citizen Kane opens on the death of its protagonist, Charles Foster Kane, a media magnate and fictional ringer for US media baron William Randolph Hearst. Kane utters his final word, 'Rosebud' and a snowglobe depicting an idyllic cabin scene rolls from his hand and breaks upon the floor.

What follows is a newsreel obituary telling the story of Kane's life in good, old-timey fashion, with a typically bombastic 1940s voiceover touching on all of his ambitions, successes and failures. And thus, given that the rest of the film is literally about unpicking and unpacking this man's life, we have been given what constitutes the major plot points of the entire feature within the first five minutes.

As if that wasn't enough, the breaking of the snowglobe neatly sums up the central theme of both Kane's life and the film: That, by essentially being sold into the care of the bank, he was taken from his life, his sledge (the aforementioned Rosebud) and the people he loved, and his happiness was destroyed, making him unable to find the sense of love and belonging he needed ever again.