Do you recall what some of those hints were? I’m still of the mind that the “Luke and Leia were siblings” was something pulled out while writing RotJ, not planned earlier in advance.
I loved the OMM spoiler in an article that went something like "I came to believe that I was invincible, just like Bruce Willis in all the Die Hard movies except the one where he was dead the whole time.
A lot of it is right out of “The Hero With 1000 Faces.” I had a suspicion about Leia when she managed to hold out against Vader’s interrogation so well. Then when Obi-wan started telling Luke about his father, some more things started to click. It’s hard to place everything in retrospect, having seen each of the originals dozens of times. Knowing just when I knew plot points is hard. But the sister bit was kind of obvious to me, I remember.
What am I getting wrong?
I figured out Sleepy Hollow and So I Married An Axe Murderer right at the beginning. Why?
Miranda Richardson and Amanda Plummer, respectively. If some psycho nut is running around hacking people up, and Miranda Richardson or Amanda Plummer is the stars, co-star, in the background as an extra, or even offstage working as the key grip, you have your murderer.
I figured out The Bone Collector, because
Leland Orser was too big of a star at the time to be relegated to the machine repairman pogue without something “deeper” going on.
And my wife sussed out the twist regarding the king’s father in The Man in the Iron Mask as soon as the first hint of foreshadowing showed up on the screen.
I hate to nitpick but in Sleepy Hollow, Miranda Richardson, while being behind everything, was not the one who did the actual killing, that was Christopher Walken (or his “headless” stunt double)
This is a variation on the rule mentioned earlier by Laughing Lagomorph. Basically, a familiar actor with near-top billing who doesn’t seem to do much during the most of the film will likely be revealed as the villain in the last reel. It was for this reason why for Se7en, Kevin Spacey wasn’t billed in the movie posters or included during the opening credits since it would’ve been too much of an obvious tip-off.
Very smart. But very eccentric, in the way some geniuses can be.
In Holes, the second I heard the nickname Zero, I had guessed he had the connection to Stanley’s family history that turned out to be the case. (and I hadn’t read the book before seeing the movie.)