#historical fiction is so focused on wars and biopics and i get it i do there are Stories and Narratives there

[thefabelmans2022]

i think there should be more movies about living through the great depression i think they would be really interesting and resonant.

[amazingviralinfo]

The film and TV industries go to extreme lengths to protect the details of their stories, from shoving NDAs up everyone's ass to literally locking scenes inside vaults. So it's hilarious when their biggest plot twists are revealed not by master hackers or corporate spies, but by random jackasses making off-the-cuff jokes. But how often could that happen? All the time, it turns out ...

WARNING: This is an article about plot twists. Expect some!

6

Fans Joke About Hodor, Spoil A Major Game Of Thrones Twist Years In Advance

There have been a lot of shocking twists throughout the course of Game Of Thrones; from the Red Wedding stabbings, to Jon Snow getting stabbed a bunch of times, to the stabbing of- You know what, they're mostly stabbings. One twist no one could have seen coming (because the books haven't even gotten to that part yet) had to do with Hodor, the loveable manservant who serves as young Bran Stark's personal piggyback service.

HBO Apparently, the people in Westeros are too busy sword-fighting and getting naked to invent the goddamn wheelchair.

But why is his name Hodor? Did he have annoying, Gwyneth Paltrow-esque celebrity parents? The answer is far more complicated. Basically, Bran's time-travelling melted poor Hodor's brain -- as his future self is being commanded to "hold the door" to block a horde of White Walkers, his past self starts muttering "Hold the door" over and over, eventually morphing into "Hodor" (a transition that caused headaches for the show's international translators). So, people just started calling him that.

HBO

HBO If the same rule applied to 12-year-old boys in this universe, there'd probably be a hell of a lot more kids named "Boobs Pokemon."

That's a pretty intricate twist, but a few people actually predicted this outcome. How the hell? By doing what we do for a living: making dumb-ass pop culture jokes. Way back in 2008, before the TV show even started, a fan of the books posted this on a message board:

Not all commenters were receptive to the idea:

This poster wasn't the only fan to randomly stumble onto this bad pun, either. Writer Michael A. Ventrella blogged in 2014 about an encounter with GOT creator George R.R. Martin at a convention, where Martin mentioned an interest in being an elevator operator. When Ventrella ran into him again, this happened:

So a terrible pun that people balked at actually became one of the most poignant moments in the show. What we're saying is maybe now's the time for HBO's gritty Bazooka Joe reboot.

5

Darth Vader's Actor Randomly Guessed He Was Luke's Father

David Prowse was the guy who acted inside of the original Darth Vader suit, and who will one day be wiped from all historical records and replaced with Hayden Christensen. We've talked before about how he publicly spoiled the twist of The Empire Strikes Back years before the movie came out, during a 1978 appearance at Berkeley:

That's not all. He also blabbed to Little Shoppe Of Horrors magazine that same year:

But here's the weird thing: He shouldn't have been able to spoil this, because he didn't know. No one did. This was back around the same time Leigh Brackett was writing the early drafts of Empire, which included scenes where Luke's dad is a decidedly non-evil ghost:

And Vader even refers to Luke's dad in their final confrontation:

A recent documentary focusing on Prowse delves into this mystery, but somehow Prowse doesn't remember blowing the twist. The director literally has to pull up the old newspaper clipping on an iPad and show Prowse that he totally ruined the ending for people. In fact, because the line "I am your father" wasn't even recorded on set, Prowse recalls being surprised by the reveal at the premiere.

The documentarians also interview Gary Kurtz, the producer of A New Hope and Empire, who claims it was just an amazingly lucky guess. So either Prowse's random bullshitting stumbled upon one of the biggest moments in movie history, or George Lucas was pulling story ideas from magazine interviews given by his non-speaking supporting cast.

Similarly soothsaying the future of the franchise was a 1982 Mad Magazine bit about Lucas' Star Wars plans. It was just a bunch of ridiculous jokes -- and in a testament to just how silly the series got, some actually came pretty close to reality. For starters, they predicted 50 percent of Episode II's title:

And that Episode III would feature the Wookiees fighting the Empire:

One prediction jokingly states that Darth Vader is Han Solo's father, which is crazy. It also says that Vader will turn out to be C3PO's dad which is ... no, wait, that's exactly what fucking happened.

Another throwaway joke says that Luke's real father is "The Force" -- which sounds stupid as all hell, until you realize that "The Force" is actually his grandfather. Then it sounds stupider.

4

Someone Wrote An Erotic Novella About Taylor Swift And Tom Hiddleston (Before They Actually Dated)

We're switching it up to talk about a real-life twist: the announcement in 2016 that pop-star Taylor Swift was dating actor Tom Hiddleston. You know, the guy who has played Loki so many times he apparently just started wearing the costume in everyday life.

While that bit of news may have caught you off guard, it wouldn't have if you'd read Wildest Dreams -- a 58,000-word piece of erotic fan fiction by online author Jennifer Stanley. Stanley's story imagined a (sexy) world in which Hiddleston and Swift were a couple back in 2014. Before they even met.

That's a pretty random guess. Other than the fact that they often have the same haircut, what do these two celebs have in common? Loki's not even the Marvel villain you'd expect a music superstar to end up with -- young Magneto's handsome as hell, not to mention that pruny hunk Thanos and his blinged-out Michael Jackson glove.

Furthering the theory that Stanley is a god and our entire universe exists only as the backdrop for a sex-filled internet story, she predicted that Hiddleston and Swift would meet at the Met Gala, and, yup, that's what happened. She explains that she guessed that by doing good old-fashioned research and finding out which type of event they'd both be likely to attend -- because how will anyone masturbate to this if it isn't completely realistic?

Of course, a lot of the book is just straight-up celebrity doing it. (If a mustachioed Tom Hanks showed up delivering a pizza it wouldn't feel out of place.) And when Stanley first saw the pictures of the couple at the Met Gala, her first thought was: "Oh my god, what have I done?" Presumably her second thought was "I should never have bought that typewriter at Stephen King's garage sale."

3

Kevin Smith Called Tim Burton's Planet Of The Apes Ending Years Earlier

We all remember Tim Burton's remake of the classic Planet Of The Apes, the one that scrapped the classic Statue Of Liberty twist, ending instead with the apes and humans putting aside their petty differences to chill out at a suburban mall's Sears Portrait Studio.

Actually, Burton added his own bizarre twist to the movie. After returning to Earth, Marky Mark is shocked to discover that the Lincoln Memorial statue is an ape -- which is a way more dramatic way of revealing this than if Wahlberg simply found a penny on the ground, or rented a DVD of the Daniel Ape Lewis biopic.

It was a startling, utterly unpredictable twist ... unless you were a Kevin Smith fan. A few years earlier, Smith (who, as a reminder, didn't do drugs at this time) released a Jay And Silent Bob comic that riffed on Planet Of The Apes, and there is a strikingly similar image:

At first, Smith seemed to accuse Burton of plagiarism, saying "I think I got robbed and I'm talking with my lawyers about possibly suing." Then, later, he claimed he was only joking -- either because he genuinely was, or because he soon realized no one should want to take credit for that monkey turd of an ending. Burton defensively claimed that he wasn't an avid reader of Jay And Silent Bob comics, and that "anybody that knows me knows I do not read comic books." He's gonna flip his shit when he finds out where Batman came from.

2

A Random Comedy Sketch Calls The Insane Direction Lost Was Going

Back when Lost was on TV, a good chunk of the internet consisted of just people trying to figure out where the show was going. Amid all that rampant speculation, one sketch troupe actually got one key detail right, but in the most random way possible. The internet comedy group Olde English had a sketch that made the rounds back in 2007 about how ridiculous the Lost writers' room must have been. They're just frantically coming up with ideas like polar bears, four-toed statues, and, say, how about a magic turtle?

The ideas get more and more ludicrous, and that's the joke. However, in throwing out the craziest possible suggestions, they actually anticipated a real storyline. Look at the cue cards on the back wall:

See how two of the cards are about Locke?

They read "Locke Dies" and "Locke Becomes a Zombie" -- which sounded completely ludicrous. Come on, not even this show would go as far as to kill a fan-favorite character and then bring him back to life as some sort of evil force, bent on destruction. Right?

Around the same time this sketch came out, on the Season 3 finale, we saw Jack moping over someone's casket in a funeral parlor. Because this show was infuriating, it took them a whole year to show us who was in the freaking casket: it was fan-favorite Locke! Gasp!

Locke then promptly comes back to life, but with a grumpier, more murder-y attitude. It turns out his dead body had actually been reanimated/possessed by the Smoke Monster -- as in, an evil force, bent on destruction. Maybe if we examine the magic numbers some more, that whole all-powerful top-hatted turtle theory will pan out too.

1

Austin Powers Had The Exact Same Twist As Spectre, 13 Years Earlier

Spectre is that James Bond movie that works way better if you assume it mostly takes place inside the inane imaginings of 007's lobotomized brain. Otherwise, eh. The movie is packed with twists that don't really add much to Bond's mystique. For instance, there was the reveal that the head of the evil organization Spectre, Franz Oberhauser, was actually ... Ernst Blofeld, who was the head of Spectre in every other James Bond movie! Wait, how was this a twist? The movie was literally called Spectre. That's like trying to make it a surprise that Jim Morrison is a character in The Doors.

Anyway, early in the movie, we see a photo of Bond with his adoptive dad, and another kid whose face has been burned off:

Then, towards the end, Blofeld reveals that it was his father who took Bond in. He was the little boy in the photo ...

... which makes Bond and Blofeld brothers! Bond didn't remember this because, again, martinis.

While that's certainly a shocking development, if you got the sense that it was strangely familiar, you weren't alone. Over a decade earlier, the Bond parody Austin Powers In Goldmember had an extremely similar third-act twist. It ends with Powers' father admitting that Dr. Evil (the blatant Blofeld ripoff character) was actually Austin's brother.

The plot twist actually works better in Goldmember, probably because Michael Caine and Beyonce are there, while the Bond producers apparently wouldn't pony up the cash. Also, Goldmember was just going for a silly ending, not trying to predict where the Bond franchise was actually headed. Still, we can't wait for the sequel where Bond finds out his other brothers are Shrek and the Love Guru.

You (yes, you) should follow JM on Twitter, or check out the podcast Rewatchability.

For more twists we all should've seen coming, check out The 5 Most Ridiculous Ways Studios Spoiled Their Own Movies and 6 Movie Characters Whose Names Spoiled Huge Plot Twists.

Subscribe to our YouTube channel, and check out Sherlock Holmes Is Based On A Real Guy (Who Was Even Cooler), and other videos you won't see on the site!

Follow us on Facebook, and we'll follow you everywhere.