Friday Film Festival Vol. 5: Getting Spoiled

Have you noticed how incredibly easy it is to find spoilers for just about any movie you want? Hundreds of sites on the web can tell you all about what is going to happen in a movie that's not coming out for a few months. Some sites are specific to one movie or group of movies, while others, like Ain't It Cool News, give you info on anything and everything coming soon. One of the biggest film series to have problems with this is Star Wars. Across the web, Star Wars probably has the more sites dedicated to it than any other topic (well, sites that don't require a credit card or that you be over 18 to view). Obviously, Lucasfilm is not excited about this and does everything possible to prevent anything too specific, and certainly any images, from being released too early. When I was first planning out this post, I was going to link to this site and point out the picture of Natalie Portman pregnant in Star Wars Episode III. Unfortunately, all of the pictures were removed at the request of Lucasfilm, but plenty of rumors and spoilers about what will be in the film are still available on the site.

All these efforts by all of the various studios still don't prevent the spread of this information. I can tell you the "big twist" or ending of probably half a dozen recent movies I haven't seen. By the time Star Wars Episode II came out I had already read the entire screenplay online as well as reading a half dozen reports of watching the finished film. It isn't limited to Star Wars either; the screenplay for Kill Bill was available online even before it was decided to split it into two films (this of course, does mean there were some significant differences between the screenplay I read and the two films Tarantino eventually released).

Why do we have this need for instant gratification? Why can we not wait a couple more months until the movie comes out to learn the ending? Have we become an entire society of people who skip to the end of a book because we can't handle the anticipation?

I don't have the answers. I'm the guy that can barely stand waiting through an hour-long TV show to find out what's going to happen.

Until later...