Spoiler Alert

There aren’t any actual spoilers of any recent pieces of media if that’s what is keeping you from reading this post. But I do want to talk about the culture that surrounds spoilers, especially recently, so I might be talking, you know, around some.

Way back in 1960 when Psycho was coming out, Alfred Hitchcock famously tried to keep people from entering theaters after the movie had started screening, going so far in some cases as to lock theater doors. Hitchcock felt that the then-current popular method of seeing movies -- seeing the middle and ending before looping around to the beginning -- would be detrimental to the experience of his movie. Even before that was (and is) The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie’s long-running play that famously asks its audience members not to reveal its secrets. In each of these cases, not giving the game away was part of the artistic intent.

But that’s a weird thing to be direct about, right? Like, of course a creator doesn’t want their work spoiled, right? Now, in both of these creators’ defense, they both created rather spoiler-prone works, an attribute that not all pieces of media have. Nobody needs to be told, for example, that the computer voice in the video game Portal is out to kill you. The opening monolog in The Other Side of the Wind tells you exactly what happens to its protagonist.

I’ve noticed a shift, though, recently, and I’m not entirely sure if I’m able to fully explain it. In 2016, video game company Atlus released the much-anticipated Persona 5, though it came with a caveat: If you were going to record yourself playing the game, you couldn’t share large parts of it without facing legal action. We’d gone from “Don’t spoil our ending; it’s the only one we have” to “Don’t spoil our ending or you’re going to get sued.” Atlus would later walk back these statements, and in the end, it didn’t really affect the game’s reputation, but the events still left a mark. Persona 5 was in the public consciousness for longer in the runup, and surely other corporations took notice.

Avengers: Endgame came out about two weeks ago now, and the runup came with a large number of pleas to “Don’t spoil this for people.” Which it should. I mean, it’s technically the finale to a decade-long story arc slash experiment, the final act that gives away the game. But there was also a lot of that incorporated into the marketing that didn’t make sense in retrospect? Like a sizzle reel that got leaked to the public days before the scenes were confirmed in a new trailer, or how only two weeks later a new Spiderman: Far From Home trailer already reveals part of the ending to Endgame. It reads to me like, while there was some artistic merit and public need for no spoilers, marketing ended up using that to push for the largest opening box-office possible.

I realize how this makes me sound, but I’m really not trying to go “old thing artsy and good, bad thing corporate and bad.” It’s pretty well accepted as common courtesy to ask for permission before spoiling just about anything. And spoiled or not, Endgame will probably be one of those things that people talk about for a good long while. But it still seems like a marketing shift is happening right now, and I’m not entirely certain if where it’s going is any good.

-F