13 Movies That Should've Ended 5 Minutes Earlier

An ending can make or break a movie: get it right and audiences come out of the cinema feeling uplifted, enriched or at least rewarded. Get it wrong and it can sink a lot of what came before, undoing prior audience goodwill in favour of a cheap "crowd-pleasing" send-off...or something much, much worse.

Now, these movies are mostly good enough that the endings aren't make-or-break, but each one massively over-extended itself with a conclusion that felt done about five minutes before the credits actually rolled.

Either to appease fans or because casual audiences don't really like more ambiguous endings, these 13 films took things just a little too far, and had they ended a little earlier, they'd be even better than they (mostly) already are. Such is the beauty of home video, of course, that viewers can just turn the movie off at the logical leaping-off point if they so wish (even if that's hardly ideal).

Here are 13 movies that should've ended 5 minutes earlier...

How It Ended: Lincoln is shot at the Ford's Theatre and we see him die from his injuries, before Spielberg cuts back to show him delivering his second inaugural address.

How It Should've Ended: Spielberg had such a neat, tidy ending ready-made just a few minutes earlier, with Lincoln leaving a cabinet meeting to head to Ford's Theatre.

There's a brilliant, statuesque shot of Lincoln heading out that would've been a killer one to end on, and considering that everyone knows what happened to Lincoln, actually showing him die seemed like, well, overkill.

It's still a great movie, but perhaps out of a misplaced desire to tell a "definitive" Lincoln story, Spielberg went a little overboard.