And on this we agree 100%.
I’m not sure it was a cop-out exactly, but I hated the way they “eased” the audience into the (surprise?) ending of American Beauty.
Why does the narrator ruin it by telling us what’s about to happen?
“This is the day I die” dialog
Why not let the audience watch and actually be surprised?
Thanks for the link - I see I mentioned The Vanishing there, too, as well as in this thread. I’d completely forgotten being told there that the American remake was by the same director.
These are excellent points. (I have yet to read on from this post, by the way—some 75 or so posts.)
I will say that Python did a better job with the ending of Life of Brian, in my view. Perhaps mainly due to Eric Idle’s immortal song.
I remember sitting through Emmanuel back in the '70s. Sylvia Kristel was gorgeous, but the movie itself wasn’t just a cop-out: it never went anywhere. It was just a lot of soft-core porn set to beautiful music. Ninety minutes after it started, I was still waiting for something to happen. Then the lights went up, and I said “That’s it? That’s the end of the flick?!?” 
Quite right.
The exemplar of cop-out endings is The Natural. I adored the book, where Roy Hobbs strikes out and his career is at an end when it is found out that he took a payoff to throw the game, even though he had a last-minute change of heart and really wanted to hit a homerun. The 1984 film, with Robert Redford, is a wonderful, beautiful movie about baseball, but the film ends with a homerun and Hobbs later seen playing catch with his son. Redford wouldn’t be seen as a disgraced loser, but instead a shining example of a comeback. I was disappointed and surprised that it didn’t follow the book, but the film is wonderful in its way.
Two households, both alike in dignity
(In fair Verona, where we lay our scene),
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.
-Romeo and Juliet, Prologue
Sometimes, the point of telling a story isn’t to surprise the audience with the destination, the point is to tell them the destination from the outset, and then have them watch as it inexorably and unavoidably arrives.
The ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail is LITERALLY a cop-out. The cops literally take them out.
Personally I thought it was a clever way to end it.
I LOVE that idiotic organ ditty. I made a wave file of it, copied it to a CD 10 times without interruption, and have played it for unsuspecting victims several times. It’s never gotten past the second repeat without the certain peril ensuing.
NOTE spoilers are unmarked for movies that came out in 1941 and 1963, respectively.
Not to mention the Milk with A Light Bulb Inside that he served her! Hitchcock never explained THAT one!
(It was supposed to be poison, of course. What would Cary Grant have been doing with a light bulb that would work inside a glass of milk?)
I’m “meh” about the Elf ending, but I do know what you mean about Mad Mad Mad Mad World. Yes, Spencer Tracy does get to laugh. But he really is horrifically punished for what appears to be a momentary lapse of judgment.
He should have been tried, etc. (I’m not arguing that what he did was okay). But did he deserve to have every bone in his body broken along with losing his pension? Surely not.
One of the best movie endings, ever, but also a cop out in its own way. If you listen to the dialog, Idle starts rambling about how the record is available in the foyer and the producers will never make their money back.
Doesn’t Sunset Boulevard begin with Joe Gillis dead in the water, literally, and then the movie is about how he got there?
Look, let me go back in there and face the peril.
Well, yeah, but it’s not really the ‘breaking the fourth wall’ part that some of us are calling a Cop-Out. It’s okay to break that fourth wall so long as you provide some kind of satisfying resolution to the events we’ve been watching. And by “satisfying” I basically mean, “does not make the whole thing a one-note joke.”
So I’m okay with Idle trying to sell records. 
Whereas Ethel Merman’s character should have had the building, two taxi cabs, and a fire engine land on top of her, and all she does is slip on a banana peel.
(I’m not going to spoiler anything about an 80+ year old movie) This was Hitchcock leading you all by the nose, and you just didn’t like realizing you’d been had.
Every single point in the plot that made it seem like he wanted to kill his wife was accounted for in those three minutes before they drove home together. The poison? He was going to kill himself to avoid disgrace and to spare her. The glass of milk? There was never anything in it, all that was Hitchcock being dramatic and misleading. The car on the cliff? He didn’t stop it until she practically jumped out, he was trying to close the door that flopped open. Did he kill off old Beaky? No, that was someone else (explained earlier in the film, although she wasn’t convinced). Remember the title of the film, the problem was her suspicion of him as a low-class gentleman-wannabe who always looked for the easy way out. Probably some of that was leftover class prejudice on her part. At the end, she realizes it was all her fault, and that he needed her support and trust to make things right.
It’s true the original book (Before the Fact by Francis Iles) has a much more sinister plot, and that Johnny really was a murderer. That doesn’t mean that’s the best ending for the story, nor that the ending Hitchcock used was a cop-out.
I personally enjoyed learning years later about the financing of the movie (tax shelter for/charity from George Harrison).
Yeah, it’s a pretty common trope. There’s even a movie called John Dies at the End.
Guess how it ends?
Psyche! He survives.
Well, it was the sixties. Theater chains wouldn’t have been willing to show a feature with the degree of violence you suggest.