Films That Should Have Ended Ten Minutes Earlier

In a perfect world, every movie would end at the perfect moment. But some simply go on too long, sometimes squandering a perfect ending in exchange for wrapping things up in a tidy bow or giving a character a happy ending. It's only natural that directors would want to make their stories perfect, but sometimes what sounds like an excellent spot to end a story just doesn't translate that way for the audience. For every lovingly placed movie ending, there are definitely a bunch that should quit while they were ahead and ended sooner. Sometimes, as these movies illustrate, even ten minutes can make a big difference. The films that follow include some seriously beloved releases, but all of them go on just a little bit too long. The next time you're screening one of these, try ending it a little earlier — odds are you'll end up wondering why the director didn't do the same.

To be brutally honest, Django Unchained is just too darned long. There's a good 20-30 minutes at least that could have been cut out of this film. But have we ever known Quentin Tarantino to be delicate in his choices? Certainly not. 

A logical place to end would have been at the major shootout battle at Candyland Plantation. Though Django loses this battle in the film as is, the story could have easily been reworked to make it so that he wins and rides off into the sunset with his beloved Broomhilda. Instead, the audience is subjected to a different setting, new characters, and a serious lull in the momentum of the movie. And did we mention that one of those new characters is Tarantino himself, speaking with a terrible Australian accent? Also, the final act of Django Unchained makes an already violent movie a bit unbearable in its gore. What felt like necessary violence in the first two thirds of the movie just gets ridiculously bloody in a downward spiral toward the end. But hey, that's Tarantino.

Richard Linklater took 13 years to film Boyhood, so you'd think that that would be enough time to figure out where the movie should end. Over the course of the story, we watch Mason (Ellar Coltraine) grow up from a small boy to a young man, and much of his life is defined by his relationship with his parents — particularly his mom, played by Patricia Arquette. Many would argue that, for as much as the movie is about Mason, it's just as much an examination of Arquette's character, and how childhood and motherhood grow and change.

Which is why the movie would have had much more of a profound ending if it had closed with Mason driving off to college, leaving behind his mother, who has just expressed how quickly life has passed and how much he's grown beyond her grasp. We don't really need to meet Dalton, Mason's roommate, or have see his life-changing moment on a cliff with Nicole. Boyhood should have ended when Mason's boyhood itself ended, as he drove away from childhood.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman offers a perfect example of an ambiguous ending. In fact, the whole of the movie is purposefully vague so as to maintain the magical realism of the world in which the story takes place. Is Birdman real? Is Riggin (Michael Keaton) hallucinating most of the time? It's unclear, but the movie's representation of a former superstar and how the Hollywood machine chews up actors and spits them out certainly feels accurate. No wonder Riggin tries to escape his life.

The final moments of the movie are, naturally, the most ambiguous. Many fans feel like the closing scene of the movie, in which Riggin and his daughter Sam (Emma Stone) reunite in his hospital bed, don't actually happen. They believe his suicide attempt onstage was actually successful, and that his hospital stay and jump out the window are all imaginary — the final throes of a memory lost. Magical as the movie may be, however, it would have landed better if Birdman had a more definitive ending, perhaps at the moment Riggin pulls the trigger onstage. The "is this all really a dream?" feeling that the ambiguous ending wants to leave us with feels more like a copout.

For most of its run time, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a suspenseful but relatively quiet horror thriller. There aren't a lot of big jump scares or alien creepy crawlies like in Cloverfield, and most of the tension of the film comes from John Goodman's character, Howard, and the ambiguous sense of danger surrounding his mysterious intentions. Mary Elizabeth Winstead's character, Michelle, is more scared of being imprisoned by a strange man than she is of what he claims is going on outside, and for understandable reasons. Howard is secretive and super creepy.

So when Michelle does break free from Howard's bunker only to find out that aliens really have invaded the Earth, there's an awesome moment when she realizes that Howard was right, and has to decide what to do. That the movie then turns into an action-heavy alien battle is a total departure from the rest of the film, and not in a good way. 10 Cloverfield Lane's insistence in turning Michelle into some kind of action heroine makes the film a little more conventional than what it feels like it initially set out to be. The imagery when Michelle first emerges is great, but the subtle suggestion of aliens is better than the onslaught that follows. It's neat that Michelle makes the decision to head to Houston and fight, but it's a decision she could have made 10 minutes earlier, without the unraveling battle.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence is another example of Steven Spielberg not knowing when to quit, though given that this 2001 science fiction film was a joint project with legendary sci-fi master Stanley Kubrick, it might not be totally Spielberg's fault. But like many of his films, A.I. shows how unwilling he is to let anyone leave his movies without feeling a tiny glimmer of hope, even if it means undermining the mood of the previous two hours. 

When "Mecha" boy David finally finds the Blue Fairy he's been searching for at the bottom of a flooded Coney Island, he gets trapped by a collapsing Wonder Wheel and frozen in time. Some fans say that's where the movie should have come to a close, with David continuing to wish himself a real boy. Instead, A.I. jumps 2000 more years into the future, where either an advanced race of aliens or evolved robots called the Specialists find David and reanimate him. The future aliens/robots are cool and all, but what they end up doing is what gives the movie that hokey ending. They reanimate David's mother from a lock of her hair and David has one final day with her. Certainly there are those who find this ending lovely; even the Teddy bear gets a moment to shine. But that urge to give such an edgy, fascinating film a "happy" ending sort of undoes the mystery of it all.