Times When Movie Spoilers Were Revealed Before Release

In today's world, keeping a movie from getting spoiled before release is a full time job. Studios take a crazy amount of steps to protect a production's secrets. Aside from filming on closed sets and having everyone sign confidentiality agreements, actors won't even know the whole story and scripts will be printed on special paper to prevent it from being copied. Sometimes, though, studios are so focused on keeping outside people from spoiling the movies that they don't realize that they're doing it themselves. Whether they don't time the release of merchandise properly, or they don't pay close enough attention to the marketing, the biggest secrets sometimes come from the filmmakers themselves. Here are movies that accidentally revealed huge spoilers before their release.

There's probably never been a movie more anticipated than Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. During production, the studio and filmmakers went to great lengths to keep the film's plot from leaking to the public, and many fans also took extreme measures to keep from having the movie's details spoiled. When toys for the movie first started appearing, they were mostly for characters that the general public didn't really know anything about. Mostly these products didn't really reveal anything other than what certain characters looked like, and the packaging description was careful not reveal anything other than vague plot points. That is, until an action figure for Rey, based on her appearance from the later scenes in the movie, appeared on store shelves. The artwork on the package showed Rey holding Luke's lightsaber, giving away the reveal that she's the actual Jedi, and that Finn had just been a red herring this whole time. It must have been especially heartbreaking for Star Wars toy collectors to have their faith broken by the very thing that they spend their money on.

The Force Awakens wasn't the first Star Wars movie to have a major plot point revealed before release. There are rumors that the actor who played Darth Vader accidentally revealed that he was Luke's father in a magazine interview, but those turned out to be fake. The interview had been conducted before the script had even been written, and the actor was just joking around and happened to be right. It wasn't a joke, however, when the soundtrack for The Phantom Menace was released, since one of the tracks was titled "Qui-Gon's Noble End," and another included the words "Qui-Gon's Funeral." Qui-Gon Jinn was one of the main character's of the movie, and the Jedi that discovers Anakin Skywalker. The name of the track made it pretty obvious that his ultimate fate in the movie was death. Sure, Star Wars takes place in a different galaxy, but it's not like they have funerals for people who are alive and doing well in any part of the universe.

What if a villain doesn't want to be a bad guy anymore? That's the question that the movie Wreck-It Ralph asked. The titular character is a video game villain, and he lives with the rest of the video game characters at the arcade. When he tries to become the hero of a different game, he ends up stuck in a candy-themed racing game called Sugar Rush Speedway. The movie's villain, King Candy, isn't revealed to be the bad guy until the very end of the movie. Moreover, we find out in the film's climax that he's actually Turbo, a character from a completely different game who took over a Sugar Rush Speedway to avoid being deleted. Disney released a coloring book, however, that gave away the film's ending two weeks before the movie's release. The film was meant for both little kids and adults, because it combined both older and newer video game references. A lot of adults don't color, so luckily this only spoiled the movie for the children who wanted to see it. But it's good for kids to learn about disappointment early on in life.

American Godzilla movies are just never as good as the Japanese ones. The worst example of this is the 1998 remake starring Matthew Broderick. It was created by the same team responsible for Independence Day, and the movie promised a lot of destruction but failed to deliver anything resembling an interesting plot. Before the movie's release, however, there was a lot of hype behind it. This was partially because the filmmaker's purposely withheld Godzilla's new look. All of the promotional material from the movie obscured the creature, only giving audiences brief glimpses of it. All anyone knew before the film's release was that Godzilla was bigger than he'd ever been before. That was, until the movie's toys were released early. Apparently, the toy company was more interested in selling their wares than they were in maintaining the mystery. It didn't matter: people hated the design and the movie, so the toys didn't sell anyway.

Everyone always forgets about one of the best Batman movies ever made, Mask of the Phantasm. It's set in the world of Batman: The Animated Series, and it maintains the tone and quality of the show. A new vigilante has appeared in Gotham, and he's murdering supposed crime bosses. Batman gets framed for the crimes, so he has to figure out the identity of the mysterious Phantasm and clear his own name. The Phantasm was created specifically for the movie, so it's not like fans of the comic would know the character's real identity. Unfortunately, anyone who walked through a toy aisle in the weeks leading up the movie would find out early. The action figure of the Phantasm had a removable mask, revealing the face of Andrea Beaumont, Bruce Wayne's love interest in the movie. Considering that the Phantasm was voiced by a man, this was a pretty big surprise. Even worse, it was packaged with the mask off. It was almost as if the toy makers were mad at the movie and specifically went out of their way to ruin the surprise.

Trailers are a really difficult thing to do correctly. Studios want to show enough footage from the movie to get audiences excited, but they don't want to reveal too much to make going to see the movie pointless. Back in 1994, the trailer for Speed made the biggest mistake possible. The story for the film was simple: a madman has placed a bomb on a public bus, and if it drives slower than 55 miles per hour, the bomb explodes. It's a well-made movie, and the plot is incredibly tense, but it was hard to promote. Without all of the build up, the scenes of the bus speeding down the highway weren't all that exciting. In order to spice things up a little bit, the studio included the scene of the bus exploding in the trailer. On it's own, that would have been fine, but they also included a shot of all of the cast members reacting to the bus blowing up. Knowing that the bus blows up when nobody is on it kind of killed the suspense of the movie. It made it hard to feel like any of the characters were ever actually in danger.