20 More So-Called Happy Movie Endings That Absolutely Aren't

It's almost instinctive for an audience to want, and typically expect, to see a happy ending to a film. Of course, there are some exceptions, but it's often the satisfying conclusion, to see the heroes ride off into the sunset with the conflict of the story fully in the rear view mirror, that cinema-goers came to see.

This is particularly true when connections have been formed with certain characters, even over such a short period of time, and for the most part, filmmakers tend to give the masses what they want in this regard.

Good usually prevails over evil, the will-they-won't-they narrative tends to end with "of course they will", and anyone trying to get home for Christmas typically does. Again, there are exceptions to this, some that are actually hidden beneath what may seem to be a happy ending on the surface, but in truth are anything but.

Maybe audiences are happy with such a finish that they don't like to look beyond the obvious, or maybe the writers themselves didn't actually think of what happens next at the time. Either way, whether facing unknown time-travelling consequences, merely delaying inevitable defeat, or even saving the day but at the cost of casualties too many to count, there are endings that can deceive you into thinking that all really does end well.

Time travelling stories can be a tricky business, as there is typically always some loophole or some aspect that doesn't quite make perfect sense. X-Men: Days of the Future Past was actually pretty tight in this regard, but there were still certain consequences that weren't truly explored.

When Professor X and Magneto (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen) sent Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) back in time to save the world from a terrible dystopian fate, they were successful in that when Logan returned to the present, things were much better.

This essentially retconned everything that happened in the original trilogy, and though several members of the team survived through to 2023 this time, there is no telling what other consequences there were. The theory is that even the tiniest changes in the past could cause a huge ripple effect, and in doing something as big as this, who could possibly say what else changed.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) once said that when you mess with time, it tends to mess back, and there is absolutely no way that every single change, no matter how big or small, was for the better. There's not even a guarantee that such a future was actually stopped and not just delayed, and who knows, such meddling may have directly put the universe on the path that led to Logan's ultimate death, and the subsequent crumbling of the entire reality.