Does fear of spoilers make the actual films / TV worse? No spoilers please ;)

[SinkGirl]

This is something I’ve been pondering while obsessively rewatching Line Of Duty. Jed Mercurio admits that after each season has aired they look carefully at public reactions, what has worked and what hasn’t, and start the next season from there.

That basically means IMO they’re looking at what fans think is going to happen, and then they do something else, which is surely diluting any narrative integrity.

Now this isn’t actually spoilers, it’s just theories, but JM seems quite bothered that some fan somewhere may have guessed and therefore spoiled his endgame, and that’s directly impacting the narrative.

Even worse, I was reading about Avengers Endgame (no spoilers here please, none from me!) and the absolutely ludicrous way it was made - where actors were given only their scenes for that day, and all the other lines were redacted, and some actors have said that they don’t even know their own character’s arc in the film. How can an actor do the best possible job under those circumstances? It’s absolutely ridiculous.

While reading about that I spotted this article which I definitely agree with overall (spoilers for Sixth Sense included, just in case you really want to watch it but haven’t found time in the last couple of decades 😂)
www.vox.com/culture/2019/4/22/18412716/avengers-endgame-spoilers-game-of-thrones-spoilers-no-spoilers

What do other people think?

I've always thought this was the reason the ending to Lost was so poor. I think this was one of the first victims of what you describe.

Like the producers looked online at everyone saying what they thought was going on and then tried to do something different, but it wasn't that different really, just not as good as where they were probably going with it.

Imo that's why GOT is so successful/great. It was all planned out and written (I think?) before they started making it so could pull out things that were going to be important.

With Lost, I’m not sure they ever knew what the mystery was - as you say it was one of the first shows to have a big mystery and trigger obsessive online discussion, I don’t think Abrams knew what he was getting into when he took it on!

GoT is an interesting one because the book series isn’t complete - so many of the things that have happened since S5 weren’t covered in the books, and some things that are there have been changed from the books (eg Ramsay Bolton married someone else in the books, Robb had a different wife with a different fate, etc - sorry, trying to not to include any spoilers here!).

Thing is, I do hate spoilers - hate them! It’s so annoying when you’re looking forward to something and someone ruins it. But the fact that the tendency to spoil actually impacts plots and productions is really infuriating!