Spoiler (media)

Spoiler (media)
A spoiler is an element of a disseminated summary or description of any media narrative that reveals significant plot elements, with the implication that the experience of discovering the plot naturally, as the creator intended it, has been exposed. Typically, the details of the conclusion of the plot, including the climax and ending, are especially regarded as spoiler material. Plot twists are also prone to spoilers. Spoilers can come from several different mediums, although it is usually associated with movies and television shows. The amount of outlets and mediums that are subject to spoilers has grown exponentially throughout history due to technological advancements ad the introduction of social media to society.
More broadly, the term can also be used to refer to any piece of information, regarding any part of a given media, that a potential consumer was not intended to know beforehand. Spoilers typically reveal information that is less obvious to assume about the story or characters before having learned about the plot yourself. Victims find out about a spoiler without intention of knowing that it is publicized or spoken about. Spoilers have become more common in the present day as social media continues to advance and has provided an outlet for people to announce spoilers. A spoiler can ruin a viewer's shock value and their sense of surprise and suspense, but sometimes this is done on purpose to promote the media source and draw more attention.
There are three types of spoilers: Short Spoilers, Long Spoilers, and Thematic Spoilers. Short spoilers reveal the plot ending in a very brief and less detailed manner, without any summary or explanation of themes in the story. This can be through just a quick flash on screen of a major part of a story or a description of one to three sentences. Long spoilers are usually a little more descriptive than short spoilers in the sense that they usually provide a little more context, and typically range between two and five sentences. They provide a summary and reveal the ending of a story. Lastly, thematic spoilers reveal almost all of the important elements in a story including its unifying theme, synopsis of the plot, and the ending. They range between three to six sentences. The general consensus is that there are only negative effects of spoilers but research shows that there are actually positive effects, and some spoilers are done intentionally in the modern-era to drive interest amongst a wider range of audiences.
History
One of the first print uses of the term was in the April 1971 issue of National Lampoon, in which the article by Doug Kenney entitled "Spoilers", revealed the endings of famous films and movies. Kenney wrote, "Spoilers! What are they? Simply the trick ending to every mystery novel and movie you’re ever liable to see. Saves time and money!"
The term spoiler was introduced in the early days of the Internet, and became profoundly prominent in newsgroup conversations. It is still common in internet articles and social media discussions to the current digital age. Early rules of netiquette insisted that spoilers could and should be normally avoided, but if the posting of "spoiling" information was unavoidable, it be preceded by a warning such as a "SPOILER ALERT", or the spoiler itself has to be masked so that it can not be visible to any but those keen for details and not fazed at the thought of such potentially plot-revealing information.
Sometimes, these warnings are omitted, accidentally or deliberately, and some unwitting readers have had literature, films, television programs and other works that they were looking forward to experiencing ruined, or "spoiled".
Website policies and features
Wikipedia discloses spoilers in its articles without giving advance warning, although it previously did give such warning before 2006. Mathew Prichard, the grandson of Agatha Christie, criticized Wikipedia for giving away spoilers in the play The Mousetrap. Andrew Jarecki, the producer of the documentary Catfish, argued that Wikipedia should have spoiler alerts. The ending had been posted on Wikipedia before its theatrical release because the film had been shown at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. Jay Walsh, a Wikimedia Foundation spokesperson, said that Wikipedia is intended to be an exhaustive knowledge source, so it would have spoilers.
Some internet forums and reference sites, such as the IMDb FAQ section, have optional spoiler tags covering major plot details. The information underneath may be revealed by highlighting the text or, in the case of IMDb, rolling over the spoiler tag.
There are some applications that prevent users from reading spoilers, such as TVShow Time's Google Chrome extension, which, once set up, blocks posts on social media about episodes that the user has not seen.
On Usenet, the common method for obscuring spoiler information is to precede it with many blank lines known as 'spoiler space' – traditionally enough to push the information in question on to the next screen of a 25-line terminal. A simple cipher called ROT13 is also used in newsgroups to obscure spoilers, but is rarely used for this purpose elsewhere.
Most discussion websites provide a means of tagging certain threads as containing spoilers for those who wish to discuss a fictional work in depth, including the outcomes of events and the handling of the narrative resolution. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr, allow their users to tag posts with spoiler content using hashtags that can then be placed in a user's blacklist to avoid spoiler discussions during and after the work has come out.
Some have felt compelled to avoid participating on public websites altogether, set up "closed" websites to exclude those who are sensitive about spoilers, or decided they had to unilaterally blog at the expense of public exchange.
Spoilers in different mediums
Websites
Many sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, entertainment news, TV recaps, movie databases, and literature analysis contain spoilers with and without warnings. Some allow users to tag spoilers or hide them. Specific examples include Wikipedia revealing the ending of Psycho, bloggers leaking the death on Grey's Anatomy, Reddit threads openly discussing Game of Thrones plot points, and IMDb FAQs revealing spoilers in TV show summaries.
Television
Live TV events like sports, reality competition results, and awards shows are frequently spoiled on social media or online ahead of West Coast broadcasts. Specific examples include Super Bowl winners tweeted in real-time, Survivor vote-offs leaked, and Oscar winners announced online before the ceremony airs for some viewers. Some shows like Jeopardy! have anti-spoiler policies but limited enforcement. Along with live television, full length television series are also subject to the Spoiler Effect. In an experiment conducted by Thomas A. Daniel and Jeffrey S. Katz, the participants were shown two TV episodes. The conditions of the episodes were either no spoiler, spoiler, or spoiler-alert. The experiment found that spoiled episodes were rated lower than unspoiled episodes and spoiler-alert episodes were rated lower than spoiled episodes. The findings in the experiment corroborate the idea that spoilers, especially in regards to television have a negative impact on the viewer's overall enjoyment.
Films
Test screenings, pre-release reviews, leaks, interviews, marketing materials, and early international releases can reveal spoilers for highly anticipated films before their official release date. Studios sometimes intentionally plant fake spoilers through leaks or marketing to misdirect fans and preserve surprises.
Major spoilers for Star Wars films were revealed in pre-release materials, like the death of Han Solo in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), undermining the emotional impact for unspoiled viewers. Similarly, the Snap eliminating half of life seen in Avengers: Infinity War (2018) was heavily spoiled from test screening leaks.
Classic twist endings have also been frequently spoiled, including the sinking of the 'unsinkable' Titanic in James Cameron's Titanic (1997), Bruce Willis being a ghost all along in M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999), and Darth Vader revealed as Luke's father in The Empire Strikes Back (1980).
The rise of the internet and social media has accelerated film spoilers, as plot details spread rapidly online before films even premiere. Studios have increased efforts to limit leaks with stricter NDAs and heightened security around test screenings. However, avoiding spoilers has become increasingly difficult for fans who want to go into highly anticipated films unspoiled. The use of "no spoilers" warnings has therefore become commonplace online among fans who wish to avoid learning a film's surprises prematurely.
Short Stories
Analysis, reviews, previews, book jackets, and academic study of short fiction often contain spoilers for the plots without providing warnings. Since short stories have less time to build suspense and surprise compared to novels, spoilers can be more detrimental to the reading experience.
Major short story spoilers that are frequently revealed include the emotionally impactful last line "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" in Ernest Hemingway's famous six-word story "Baby Shoes." Shirley Jackson's classic "The Lottery" also often has its dark twist ending spoiled, where a small town brutally stones one of their own to death in an annual ritualistic killing.
John Updike's "A&P" has its iconic final moment often revealed as well, where the main character Sammy quits his job at the A&P grocery store in an impulsive act after being enchanted by three girls in bathing suits who came into the store. Spoiling these endings and twists can ruin the intended surprises authors crafted in their short fiction. Yet many analyses cannot resist revealing them openly without spoiler warnings.
Books
Summaries, critiques, forums, reviews, essays, and classes frequently reference major spoilers from books like the murder in Crime and Punishment, the Goldstein book in 1984, Mrs. Danvers' sabotage in Rebecca, the ending of Great Expectations, the narrator's illness in The Yellow Wallpaper, and more. While some argue spoilers increase enjoyment, they can also reduce suspense.
Psychological effect
Negative Effects
However, many feel spoilers irrevocably diminish suspense, speculation, shock value, and the unique experience of organically discovering a narrative. The unpredictable journey is damaged if outcomes are known ahead of time.
Similar to Christenfeld and Leavitt, in 2015, Benjamin Johnson and Judith Rosenbaum conducted an experiment to examine the impact of spoiler reveals on enjoyment. However, instead of short spoilers, the subjects were presented with thematic spoilers. To assess the enjoyment, Johnson and Rosenbaum employed a multi-item measure, utilizing a 12-item enjoyment questionnaire, in contrast to Christenfeld's and Leavitt's use of a single-item measure of enjoyment. Their research revealed that, when exposed to thematic spoilers, more subjects reported findings of the stories to be less enjoyable due to their revealing nature. When confronted with a spoiler, it reduces one's ability to individually process and hinders their critical thinking skills about a given story. Therefore, spoilers may then diminish the motivation necessary to experience a work at all if the resolution has been revealed.
Additionally, research conducted by Dr. Kevin Autry, Dr. William H. Levine and Michelle Betzer found that enjoyment was reduced when spoilers were introduced, particularly within short stories. Their experiment had differed from Christenfeld and Leavitt's in that it featured even shorter spoilers and focused mainly on the story's end and its twist.
Positive Effects
In 2011, Nicholas Christenfeld and Jonathan Leavitt of UC San Diego did a psychological experiment testing whether spoilers diminish enjoyment of fiction. They gave subjects short stories with twist endings to read, giving some of the subjects information about the twist in advance. For nearly every story, subjects who had the story "spoiled" enjoyed the story more than the subjects who didn't know the ending in advance.
The spoiling of James Holzhauer's loss on Jeopardy!, which was reported upon by both print and Internet sources hours before it aired on most of the show's stations, had a somewhat unexpectedly positive impact on that episode's ratings. Instead of ruining the outcome, the spoilers had teased just enough to encourage viewers to tune in to see how the previously dominant Holzhauer was beaten. Jeopardy! does not contractually require its audience members to remain silent in regard to spoilers; members have generally followed the honor system in not leaking spoilers before episodes air.
Although many avoid spoilers to prevent the possibility of decreased enjoyment, research does suggest that spoilers can increase enjoyment for viewers under certain criteria. One is mood management, in which spoilers can function as “non cognitive desensitization strategy and a cognitive coping strategy.” Instead of spoilers inducing positive feelings, those who engage with spoilers may so as a protective measure. They can insulate viewers from negative feelings by giving a sense of preparedness or time for viewers to process such information before they actually view it. Those who report that spoilers have increased enjoyment for them while engaging in media typically either actively seek this information as a division to ease anxiety or happen across a favorable spoiler.
Those who enjoy spoilers, or feel that spoilers increase their enjoyment while viewing, entail different criteria of focus and for assessment. Another criteria in assessing how spoilers may enhance enjoyment for viewers is curiosity. Viewers may feel anxiety-ridden or impatient is the face of cliffhangers or potential plot twists, in which seeing spoilers were ways to overcome these “gaps” in viewership.
In light of media conglomeration, spoilers are becoming harder to avoid for viewers. In this way, viewers who state they embrace spoilers find enjoyment, find normalcy in spoilers, and now focus on the aesthetic elements rather than the overall plot. Knowing the end of a TV show, book, movie, etc., is perceived by viewers who embrace spoilers as only a marginal component for their enjoyment. Viewers may know the ending, but not the process in which the ways things occur or how they specifically happen.
Reactions
Writers and directors
The end credits to Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 film Les Diaboliques includes a card with an early anti-spoiler message from the director:
Similarly, Alfred Hitchcock asked audiences not to reveal the ending of his 1960 thriller Psycho, saying "Please don't give away the ending, it's the only one we have."
In an interview about his Dark Tower series (appearing in issue #4 of the 2007 Marvel Comic adaptation The Gunslinger Born), Stephen King was asked if there are spoilers in the first few novels that would ruin someone's experience of the comic. "There are no spoilers!", King replied, "You might as well say 'I'm never gonna watch Wizard of Oz again because I know how it comes out'". Later, in 2014, King was widely criticized for revelling in a major character's demise in HBO's Game of Thrones on Twitter, only moments after the episode's airing, thus revealing a plot twist for non-live and offshore audiences. King responded by commenting the end of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and the death of the eponymous protagonists. He echoed the incident in a talk with the author and screenplay writer of the scene, George R. R. Martin in 2016, summing it up as "You can't spoil a book!", followed by impromptu plot revelations for seminal works, including Citizen Kane.
In April 2015, the Under the Gun Theater created Swarm of Spoilers, a parody show based on George R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones series. The comedic play recapped the previous four seasons of the HBO television show. Kevin Mullaney, who directed Swarm of Spoilers, stated: "I'm somebody who's very sensitive about spoilers, so I wanted to make sure it was very clear from the title," though he went on to say, "There's actually this theory about spoilers that we think that they hurt the enjoyment of shows, and I definitely feel that way sometimes, but I think there's been studies that show the other side: that when we know the ending of a story that we haven't read before, it actually enhances the story, so I don't know if it would actually hurt anyone to come see it [Swarm of Spoilers]." The final production included 45 of the series' characters, and was played by an 18-person ensemble.
Film studios
Some producers actively plant bogus information in order to misdirect fans. The director of the film Terminator Salvation orchestrated a "disinformation campaign" where false spoilers were distributed about the film, to mask any true rumors about its plot.
The market campaigns for Marvel Studios' Avengers: Infinity War and its sequel Avengers: Endgame extensively promoted the maintenance of secrecy regarding the films' plots, with the latter's social media campaign including a hashtag (#DontSpoilTheEndgame), a signed letter from the Russo brothers and a video featuring the film's ensemble cast demanding that earlier viewers of the film refrain from spoiling the plot.
Film critics
In 2005, the Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert wrote an article entitled "Critics have no right to play spoiler" which contained spoilers and spoiler warnings. Ebert wrote:
"The characters in movies do not always do what we would do. Sometimes they make choices that offend us. That is their right. It is our right to disagree with them. It is not our right, however, to destroy for others the experience of being as surprised by those choices as we were. A few years ago, I began to notice "spoiler warnings" on Web-based movie reviews -- a shorthand way of informing the reader that a key plot point was about to be revealed. Having heard from more than a few readers accusing me of telling too much of the story, I began using such warnings in my reviews."
Ebert used two spoiler warnings in the article, saying "If you have not yet seen Million Dollar Baby and know nothing about the plot, read no further" and later said, "Now yet another spoiler warning, because I am going to become more explicit." Ebert discussed six films in the article and mentioned how many critics handled The Crying Game and also noted a detail about the film The Year of Living Dangerously. Ebert also mentioned two films alongside Million Dollar Baby.
Ebert additionally criticized two commentators, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved (the latter of whom had "for a long time been a political commentator, not a movie critic"), for deliberately revealing the ending of the movie due to a moral disagreement with the lead character's life decision. "[S]hould no movie be allowed to consider [the moral issue]?" Ebert asked. "The separation of church and state in America was wisely designed to prevent religions from dictating the personal choices of those who do not share the same beliefs."
Artists
In an art exhibition at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey (Mexico), artist Mario García Torres presented a series of works titled Ruining Paintings, in which spoilers of various films were written on large color canvases.
See also
Film criticism
Film trailer
Teaser trailer
Broadcast delay
In medias res
References
External links
"Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything" -(Jonah Lehrer, Wired)
Spoilers: The Official Vulture Statutes of Limitations - New York Magazine.
Websites examples
Spoiler.io is a random spoiler website.
Themoviespoiler is a movie description website.
Entertainment
Mass media
Secrecy