Interstellar- I was convinced due to the similarity in appearance between the main character’s daughter and the female astronaut meant dun dun dun that the astronaut was a time traveled future version of his daughter. Nope.
Daughter:
Astronaut:
Neville should have been the chosen one. I don’t care what JK Rowling has to say about it.
He cut off the snakes head and defied the Carrows, while Harry moped around and later won by technical Knockout. So, he kind of was.
Off the top of my head, a recent example for Fast and the Furious 7:
Thought that Kurt Russell’s character was going to turn out to be a bad guy. Was pleasantly surprised when he didn’t.
I was sure that one of the Matrix sequels would reveal that the “real world,” the world that you enter after taking the red pill, was another illusory virtual reality. When this didn’t happen in the second film, I was positive there’d be a big revelation in the third film. Nope.
I was convinced of this AFTER the ending of the second film, Neo disables the squid machines with his Jedi powers in the “real world”. Other characters witness this and remark that this is impossible, but the film ends right after, I was sure this was leading to a twist in the third. But no dice, the scene is never mentioned again.
I think I mentioned this in one of the Seinfeld threads once.
In the finale, Newman tells Jerry that he will soon see “me in all my glory! Hahaha!”
At that moment, it came to me-they are all in Hell, and Newman is the devil. He’d show up at their jail cells at the end, asking how their “stay” is going, an establishing shot from over his shoulder showing their shocked faces (Kramer hides his face in a pillow, Elaine sobs, George covers his eyes).
Jerry: “Somehow…I knew. Deep down, I always knew…”
Closeup of Newman in full diabolic regalia, replete with horns and pitchfork, laughing maniacally. Slowly fade to black.
Except that it never happened. They completely dropped what they apparently had foreshadowed (whatever it was), and we never saw any sort of reveal of Newman before the show, and the series, ended.
Damned shame-that would have kept them talking for a good long while.
When they were revealed to be guilty on Seinfeld, Newman began choking. I thought jerry and the crew would save Newman and be seen to be good, thus redeeming them and avoiding jail, pissing off Newman.
Like the other poster mentioned, they kind of share the killing voldemort duty. Neville is almost equally chosen and nearly as brave.
I expected Captain America to pick up Thor’s hammer in THE AVENGERS.
They also did a bit where Thor inadvertently overcharged the Iron Man armor by hitting it with lightning. I thought for sure that would come back in the climax but it didn’t. I expect it was just seeding it for later use.
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it was shown that when one Slayer dies, another is called from the list of Potential Slayers. When Buffy died and came back to life, we got another Slayer- Kendra. And when Kendra died, we then got Faith. Even though Buffy later died again, another Slayer wasn’t called- because the line now went through Faith.
- Therefore, the death of a Slayer calls, sequentially, the next Potential.
When Buffy died her second death, Willow was able to resurrect her. But when Tara was shot, she was unable to bring her back- because apparently only mortals who are killed by magic can be brought back by magic.
- So if you are killed by magic, you can be resurrected by magic.
In the later seasons, Willow went dark. Like “destroy the world”, evil dark. She eventually kicked the habit and devoted herself to good magic (well, mostly). In the final episodes, when the Scoobies were plotting to destroy the Hellmouth, she said that her part in their plan really scared her.
- Willows part in final plan obviously involved dark magic.
Willow was originally a bit of a hacker- she approaches magic like an engineer would. I figured that her plan was to make a self-sustaining spell, one that would run like a computer program.
1: Use magic to kill the current Slayer, which calls the next Slayer from the list of Potentials.
2: Magically resurrect the (new) Slayer.
3: Goto step 1.
I figured we’d be treated to an ever accelerating montage of girls worldwide suddenly becoming Slayers, dropping dead, then immediately coming back to life.
But no, apparently all it took was a spell to just activate them all at once- an experience described by Willow as “neat”. I was very disappointed.
Terminator 2. Early on the bad terminator had grappled onto the car John Connor was in. Somehow they cut off the terminator’s hooks and John flicked them off the car onto the road. Bad terminator then resorbs them.
I thought they were setting up the bad terminator mimicking John Connor later in the movie, since he’d had John’s imprint. They never did.
The hook get severed by Ah-nold shooting it off with a shotgun. I never though of that before, it’s the only time Connor touches it. Probably would have been too obscure for the audience to get later on. They cut the scenes at the end of the reformed T1000 ‘glitching’ because of this,
When I first saw JJ Abrams’ *Super 8 on PPV I was really hoping: [spoiler] …for a twist where the black scientist and the monster were in fact villains and the army guys were trying to stop them. No such luck, turned out to just be an E.T. *redux…[/spoiler]
In Pacific Rim I thought they were going to find aliens inside the kaiju, driving them in something like the same way humans drive the giant robots. Up to a certain point in the movie where they were stomping around inside a dead kaiju, it just seemed like that was where things were going. Then they detect a heartbeat or something, and I’m like “yep, it’s the driver(s).” But… nope. It was something else entirely.
The terminator had been shown earlier to mimic people before and the way he was looking at the car speeding away and slowly resorbed the blob with his foot just seemed so menacing. I really thought it would come back as a plot point. Such a good movie.
The Cider House Rules is full of these. Once you get about halfway into the book, you are constantly expecting half a dozen disasters to happen . . . and for the most part, they don’t. It’s an odd sort of story to tell, but it’s done well enough that it’s interesting.
Yeah, exactly! The to my recollection, it wasn’t even particularly obscure. The 2nd one seemed to be just outright saying the “real” world was just another layer of matrix reality–and I thought there was an implication that the layers go really far up (and have gone really far down in the past).
I was genuinely surprised, not just disappointed but actually surprised, when the third film seemed to have no indication that anything like this is the case.
A lot of people like the first one and ignore the other two, but honestly I think that what the second one hints at is great, it’s just that somehow, the authors turn out not to have realized what they were obviously hinting at. So I pretend there’s another, different third film, the one the second one hints at, and in that way I enjoy both the first two films.
In Norma Rae, I was expecting Sally Field to end up in bed with the union organizer. Never happened. 
In James Plunkett’s novel, Strumpet City, right in the opening conversation, we learn that Mr. Bradshaw owns some tenement buildings that are likely to fall down at any time. It gets mentioned a few other times too. Since a lot of the main characters live in those buildings, I went through most of my first reading of the novel with a sense of dread, knowing that sooner or later all this foreshadowing would come into play and one of those buildings would collapse and kill somebody I’d grown to care about. Yes, one of the tenements does eventually collapse, but no one who’s played an important part in the story is killed.