25 Films That Intentionally Spoil Other Films

Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire The Player is as sprawling as most of the director’s other films, but manages to posit a biting critique of the studio system, its producers and financiers, with a compelling plot at its core about an executive who kills a screenwriter who has sent him death threats.

Tim Robbins is the exec in question, a Griffin Mill, who has his hands in many pies, and Vincent D’Onofrio is David Kahane, the poor screenwriter whose pitch Mill rejected and who meets his untimely demise in a bar parking lot.

The film is positively loaded with in-jokes and references to other movies, filmmakers, stars and execs right from the start. The Player opens on a long tracking shot that calls direct reference to Orson Welles' iconic opening to Touch of Evil (1958), not just in its composition but in several lines of dialogue ("It was six and a half minutes long!"), but this is not what it spoils.

In fact, the most obvious spoiler is the pitch Griffin takes from a screenwriter for “The Graduate: Part 2”, which will have Ben and Elaine (Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross) from Mike Nichols original picture still together (spoiling that film’s conclusion) and living with Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft), who has had a stroke.  

It's all tongue in cheek, intentionally trying to get a chuckle out of the audience, but that doesn’t change the fact that a spoiler’s a spoiler.