10 Subtle Ways Movies Foreshadowed Major Spoilers
3. The Protagonists Share Butch & Sundance's Real Names (And Die The Same Way) - The Way Of The Gun
Christopher McQuarrie's criminally underappreciated crime thriller The Way of the Gun revolves around Parker (Ryan Phillippe) and Longbaugh (Benicio del Toro), two criminal drifters who end up biting off more than they can chew when they kidnap a woman (Juliette Lewis) acting as a birth surrogate to a dangerous money launderer.
It's not terribly surprising that Parker and Longbaugh end up shot and left for dead by film's end, but even less so when you consider their names.
You'd be forgiven for missing it, but Parker and Longbaugh are in fact the real names of none other than Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who were of course immortalised by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the iconic 1969 film of the same name.
That film famously ends with Butch and Sundance making a final last stand against the Bolivian army, with the clear implication that the pair succumbed to the overwhelming forces pinning them down.
As such, anyone with any real, historical knowledge of Butch and Sundance - namely their real names - could easily figure out how Parker and Longbaugh's quest would end in McQuarrie's film.
And yet, because so few of us know the two icons as anything more than Butch and Sundance, McQuarrie effortlessly got away with it.