10 MAJOR Plot Spoilers Hidden At The Start Of Famous Films

You might think some directors pull their plot twists from out of thin air, but sometimes a second watch reveals hitherto unseen details that suggest they knew what they were doing all along. Did you spot these subtle moments of foreshadowing in your favourite movies? Beware of spoilers from this point on!

Skyfall’ – The death of M is in the opening sequence

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The opening credits for a new Bond movie are almost as big a deal as the main event, so it’s little wonder most people missed the clever nod towards M’s eventual fate. As Adele croons the movie’s title track and James Bond sinks into another superb opening sequence, few noticed the fact that Judi Dench’s credit for M appears on screen a split-second before a gravestone, making a subconcious connection in the audience’s brain that dear old M was doomed before the sky had even started falling.

‘Shaun Of The Dead’ – The zombie invasion is predicted in the pub

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One thing Edgar Wright has mastered is the art of foreshadowing - practically the entire first half of his zom-rom-com is spent setting up gags that don’t pay off until the end of the movie. Almost every incidental character shown returns later in the movie in undead form, while Ed’s early suggestion in The Winchester directly mirrors the entire plot of the movie: “We’ll have a Bloody Mary first thing, have a bite at the King’s Head, a couple at the Little Princess, we’ll stagger back here and then BANG! Back at the bar for shots.”

'The World’s End’ – The pub names spell out the action

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Yet again, pubs hold the secrets of the future in an Edgar Wright movie. There are dozens of clues to the characters’ fates during the flashback to the first Ill-fated pub crawl, but if you want foreshadowing, look no further than the names of the pubs on the map; each one accurately predicts the events that will happen inside it. So, it kicks off at The First Post, The Old Familiar is where the gang realise the pubs look the same, The Famous Cock is where Simon Pegg’s Gary brags about his sex life, The Cross Hands sees the lads first fight with the robot aliens, they meet their drug dealer turned slave at The Trusty Servant, The Two-Headed Dog sees Gary fight twins, and so on and so on. The final pub on the crawl, The World’s End, is really the only one that doesn’t technically come true.

'Jurassic Park’ – The seat belts found a way

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This is an extremely clever and extremely subtle clue as to the eventual fate of Jurassic Park and the outcome of John Hammond’s mad science experiment to breed only female dinosaurs to prevent mating. When Alan Grant and friends descend onto the island in Hammond’s helicopter, he’s dismayed to find his seatbelt has two 'female’ inputs, but Grant ties the pair together to make them work. Later we discover that the park’s female dinosaurs do eventually breed – because life finds a way.

'Fight Club’ – Tyler’s true identity

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The twist ending at the close of David Fincher’s paean to manliness is one of the greatest rug-pulls ever captured on celluloid: the kind of forehead-slappingly obvious reveal that instantly makes you want to go back and rewatch the entire movie. In actual fact, the seeds are sown throughout that Tyler Durden is an imaginary extension of Edward Norton’s character’s personality. For example: the phone box in which 'Tyler’ calls the Narrator has a note that says it can’t receive incoming calls. You might also notice that raging yin Tyler walks in puddles while Norton’s sober yang stays dry on the pavement, and that you can’t hear any of Tyler’s golf shots land – because he doesn’t exist.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe – The Tesseract makes an early bow

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If we’re to treat the MCU like one big interconnected story, then there are plot clues to future events hidden all throughout the Marvel movies – some which don’t even come into play until several movies later. By far the biggest proof that Marvel knew what they were doing years in advance is glimpsed only briefly in 2009’s 'Iron Man 2’ when Tony Stark flips through his father’s scientific notebook; look closely and you’ll see Howard Stark’s sketch of the Cosmic Cube, a macguffin that wouldn’t be seen again until 'Captain America: The First Avenger’ a year later. You could even argue that it sowed the seeds for the 'Infinity War’ storyline which won’t culminate until 2019 – that’s a whole decade of foreshadowing.

'No Country For Old Men’ – Chigurh, the unkillable animal

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Not all plot clues are immediately noticeable; some are so subtle you might not even notice their symbolism until several viewings later. The first time we see Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss in the Coens’ cat and mouse thriller is through the sights of his scope as he hunts an elk on the plains of Texas. He pulls the trigger but only succeeds in injuring the animal, which escapes leaving a bloody trail. This early scene sets up Moss’s later encounter with Javier Bardem’s ruthless killer Anton Chigurh; Moss does indeed manage to shoot him and injure him, but Chigurh is able to escape and Moss’s fate is sealed. Turns out he just wasn’t born to be a hunter.

'Godzilla’ – Meet the MUTOs

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We don’t get to see any monsters until at least half an hour into Gareth Edwards’ revival of the Kaiju classic, but the director does tease the eventual appearance of the flying “MUTOs” with a clever shot in the Japanese prologue. A schoolchild stares dumbstruck out of his classroom window as the Janjira nuclear power plant collapses in the distance, but the scene is framed by three hanging origami birds looming over the destruction, neatly foreshadowing the emergence of the flying mutant bugs.

'The Godfather’ – Orange is the new whack

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You’d hardly call it a “plot clue” but Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal crime epic has a most unusual device for foreshadowing events. The reasons for it are unclear, but whenever you see an orange in a scene - like, for example, in Don Corleone’s vineyard, or at the meeting of the Five Families, or at the dinner with studio head Jack Woltz – it means that character’s fate is sealed: death of some kind follows shortly. Quentin Tarantino nicked this device for Reservoir Dogs: every time the other characters talk about who they think the rat is, the colour orange appears in the scene (spoiler reminder: Mr Orange is the rat).

'Avengers Assemble’ – Galaga gives the game away

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It’s one of the best offhand jokes in the movie: while onboard the Helicarrier and surveying his surroundings, Tony Stark notices that one employee doesn’t have his mind on the job. “That man is playing Galaga,” he exclaims, and we later see that actually, yes, the SHIELD radar op is playing the classic arcade game when he should be working. But did you realise that Galaga accurately foreshadows the entire ending of the movie? The game sees wave after wave of alien foes descend from the sky… a bit like the forces of the Chitauri pouring through the wormhole at the Battle of New York, and it’s Iron Man who has to blast them into a billion tiny pixels. Clever, Mr Whedon. Very clever…