Is it a twist if it turns out to be a dream? Or if it turns out not to be?
Here’s the thing.
In Hollywood, nothing succeeds like success. You have a bunch of businessmen – MBAs and entrepreneurs – who have taken over the studios during the wave of multinational acquisitions during the last couple of decades. These are people whose business education is based in basic economics – supply and demand, basic manufacturing principles, and so on.
Then they arrive in Hollywood, and they find that their background doesn’t help them at all. In the famous adage from screenwriter William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.” Nobody expected There’s Something About Mary to be a hit. Nobody expected the next film from the same guys, Me Myself & Irene, to be a relative flop. The public’s fickle taste can be predicted only to a certain degree, and it drives the suits crazy.
Their reaction is to retreat even further into their MBA-educated habits. They commodify the elements of movies as much as they can in order to predict the potential profitability of future projects. “Oh, John Cusack’s last three movies made X million, the director did this, etc., etc., so if we pair the actor with this other actress and get a script by blah blah blah…” Then they take this potential project and do audience surveys: “Would you see a romantic comedy with such-and-such about this subject?” and they use the data to make their decisions.
Except that, historically, this information has been of limited utility. Nobody predicted The Blair Witch Project would blow the roof off the box office. Conversely, when The Color of Night was green-lighted, it was the best idea in the world. What the suits fail to understand is that cinema is an art form. Yes, it’s a business, of course, but the strange alchemy that takes a good script and the right actors and the right chemistry between them and the director and the right musical score and the right editor and the right creative environment for the shoot and a thousand other details absolutely cannot be predicted. The suits are beholden to their shareholders, but they can’t say with any degree of certainty that what they’re doing will make any money. I can think of three very talented studio executives who did very well for a number of years and shepherded a number of excellent movies to the screen, but who slammed into a random lean year and lost their jobs as a result.
Getting back to the OP, the twist ending is just the latest hook identified by the suits as a possible profit driver. “The Usual Suspects was pretty successful,” they say, “and The Sixth Sense was a monster. So audiences want twist endings.” Or, at least, that’s what they tell their corporate overlords in order to protect their jobs.
This will pass. Next up, a whole lot of movies about epic battles in ancient history, because “audiences loved Gladiator so that must be what they want!”
Oh, and the late twist in Fight Club is integral to its themes. Thank you.