1. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)
The "False" Ending... Well, here is is: the big boy. The one you knew was going to make this list no matter what. So what happens, exactly? Having finally completed his perilous quest to the fires of Mount Doom, hobbit Frodo Baggins finally rids himself of the One Ring (and Gollum). Making his way down the mountain with best friend Samwise Gamgee, we see Mount Doom exploding in the background, leaving the pair stranded on a rock as lava flows around them. The movie fades to black as Frodo says: "I'm glad to be with you, Samwise Gamgee, here at the end of all things."
But Wait... Here's the perfect case of a filmmaker obviously manipulating movie-goers to his own humorous effect: after everything we've witnessed over the course of nine hours, Peter Jackson dares to fade out at such a crucial and ambiguous moment? I mean, the man's just taking the , isn't he? Fact is, the movie still has about half an hour to go at this point, and the endings just keep on coming from then. Firstly, we fade back in to see Frodo and Sam rescued by Eagles. Then we get an individual coda for Aragorn, Bilbo, Frodo and Sam. But ultimately, this has to stand as the most intense "false ending" of all time - absolutely everybody who was subjected to Jackson's fade-out in the cinema surely stopped for a moment and said to themselves: "That's
not the end, is it?" The fact is, at this point, we really didn't know whether or not the director would opt to leave Sam and Frodo on that smoldering rock for lack of a better ending. I'm getting angry just thinking about it.
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