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"At the risk of mixing metaphors, good writing places the variables in view and requires the audience to do the math in order to reach full understanding," Murano said.
"When it comes to endings, specifically, I think a lot of writers give into the urge to say too much and do the math for the audience. There's no fun in that—and it's especially disappointing to see it happen when the rest has been well executed," the writer and editor explained to Bored Panda that when writers trust that their audience will be able to put some things together themselves, instead of having everything handed to them on a silver platter. Your readers are smarter than you might think! Give them the chance to prove it to you.
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The ending of any creative project, whether it’s a movie, a book, or a play, is important because it sets the mood with which the audience goes back into their daily lives. End the movie with the fabled Hollywood happy ending and your audience will feel picked up. (Though according to some researchers, there are various types of happy endings in films and we can’t just mix them up into one single blob.)
Meanwhile, ending the film on a sad or depressing note will leave your audience feeling deflated. Surprise surprise! And, well, from a business perspective, that’s not what you really want, is it?
You want your viewers to keep coming back for round two of the silver screen (Netflix during the pandemic, but you know what I mean), instead of wistfully looking out the window, thinking philosophical thoughts.
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So there’s a certain amount of pressure that moviemakers feel to make audiences feel happy. Of course, this doesn’t happen in every single case (the viral Reddit thread alone proves that), however, some films really do feel as though they’ve had happy endings shoehorned in, no matter that the tone of the project was very different, to begin with.
At the end of the day, what viewers really want (besides a bucketful of popcorn nom nom) is to be entertained. And one of the ways this can be achieved is by making the story immersive. If the viewer forgets they’re watching a film and feels like they’re inside the story and that it’s real, you’ve got them: hook, line, and sinker.
However, immersion means believability. And believability means consistency. Or rather, a certain amount of consistency in the plot. The audience has to believe that the inner workings of the story and the world make sense. There must be a logical consistency to how all the pieces interconnect.
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And that respect for the inner logic of the story applies to all films. Yes, even fantasy and sci-fi films! For example, you can’t be adding dragons willy-nilly to a story where dragons have been extinct for thousands of years or one where there are giant flying whales instead. You also wouldn’t add someone who speaks in a modern dialect, unless it’s a comedy or you’re doing it on purpose for whatever other reason.
So if an ending doesn’t match the tone or the inner logic of a story, the audience will notice and (odds are) won’t like it very much. There’s a bond of mutual respect between the audience and filmmakers that gets cut if the latter don’t abide by the laws of the story they’ve created. Or, in other words, it’s simply not polite to invite others into a world you’ve created only to pull the rug from under their feet (unless it’s a slapstick comedy or the twist is really, _really_ gosh darn good).
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If for some reason you’ve accidentally spoiled an ending to a movie that you really wanted to watch, there’s really no reason to get upset. At least, according to psychology professor Nicholas Christenfeld, whose research has shown that spoilers don’t ruin a story. Rather, they make you enjoy it even more.
“What we found, remarkably, was if you spoil stories they actually enjoy them more,” Christenfeld said, who repeated his experiment with mystery stories, ironic twist stories, and literary fiction. “Across all three genres, spoilers actually were enhancers. The term is wrong.”
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