Warning: Contains spoilers

In the world of entertainment, a war has long been raging over spoiler etiquette. It is a fraught battleground, with those who tolerate spoilers and those who don’t locked in a stubborn stand-off. This spoiler stoush is made even more fierce by fundamental disagreement and the constantly shifting sand on which the battleline is drawn.

To quickly bring everyone up to speed, “a spoiler” is a bit of information that ruins an entertainment. This could be the shocking twist in a film, a surprise reveal in a television series or the final score of a big game.

In our hyper-connected world, avoiding spoilers requires extreme vigilance as plot-ruining information can strike without warning. You might spend the entire day resisting the pull of social media, avoiding the workplace kitchen and then bump into someone on the walk to the bus stop who excitedly blurts out that Darth Vader is, in fact, Luke Skywalker’s father and inadvertently ruining the dramatic power of The Empire Strikes Back’s climactic scene and your whole night.

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Adding to the conflict is the lack of consensus around how long content should be kept “spoiler free”. For movies, a two-week grace period is gaining traction, while TV series seem to be settling around a 72-hour window.

But rules only work if people follow them. And when it comes to spoilers, it’s still very much the Wild West. Many see no issue with discussing spoilers immediately, without care or consideration for others.

When it comes to such folks, popular film critic Kate Rodger doesn’t mince words.

“I fall in the camp where anyone who goes around spoiling movies for other people — including trailer makers — has a very special place in hell reserved just for them.”

Rodger, who delivers reviews across radio and TV and writes The Projector, a weekly Substack newsletter dedicated to movies, has been navigating the spoiler minefield longer than most.

“It's been an absolute tenet of my reviewing over the last 20 years that I want to avoid absolutely anything that could be deemed ‘spoilery’,” she says. “It’s really important to me.”

She learned this the hard way when, to her shock and horror, she inadvertently became everything she despised.

“I’ve got a friend who avoids all spoilers, he won’t even watch trailers. I’d just seen Gone Girl and saw him after and blurted out a spoiler about a main scene,” she admits sheepishly. “He was really pumped to see that film, and I completely ruined it for him. He’s never forgiven me.”

For Dr Kyle Barrett, Senior Lecturer in Media and Creative Technologies at Waikato University's Te Kura Toi School of Arts, spoilers aren’t unforgivable sins. In fact, he sees them in a positive light.

“To me, spoilers offer a bizarre sense of reassurance,” he says. “Knowing the plot from start to finish in detail offers a degree of satisfaction. In re-watch culture, this is a crucial element. We like knowing what's going to happen and enjoy the unfolding of the familiar. It's comforting to know what's ahead.”

Before spoilers were demonised, they were prized. As example, he cites the British Film Institute-produced magazine Sight and Sound, which would detail entire film plots before release. This information didn’t spoil the experience; it enriched it. Story, Barrett explains, is just one element of a movie or TV show. Even if you know the butler did it, a film’s visuals, music, and themes still hold power.

The modern-day equivalent of this is movie trailers. Rodger describes these as “a minefield” for people wanting to avoid spoilers.

“You can sit and watch one and go, ‘Well, that's the whole film’. And then when you watch the film, yep, it was the whole film,” she sighs. “You want to see a movie pure. In a perfect world, it would be great not to have trailers, because you would be completely immersed and surprised, and everything would be fresh. But we don't live in that world anymore. Those days are long gone.”

Curiously for a spoiler-averse film fan, Rodger is also a fiend for trailers. She devours them, reposts them, and writes about them. When pressed on how she reconciles these conflicting values, she laughs and says, “I know, I can't marry it”.

“I love trailers. Any spoilers are like a commission you pay to gird your loins and get excited for something. I get pumped watching trailers and going, ‘Oh, I absolutely have to see that film’.”

Aside from the community that seeks out leaked scripts, Hollywood itself can be the biggest culprit when it comes to spoiling its own product with trailers. It doesn’t appear to have done any harm. Rodger notes an IMDb listicle of the Worst Spoiler Trailers ranked Sir Pete’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers as the number one, worst offending trailer. And that film made just shy of a billion dollars.

In that light, do spoiler-phobes need to just get over it?

“It depends on what an audience wants. A lot of people just want a story told without complexity, and that's fair enough,” Barrett says. “When detailed synopses were coming through from different time zones, you had people staying up late reading every element of what happened before they saw it. This gave a feeling of superiority. However, now I think that's changing. We are slightly going back to the weekly or monthly releases, where we don't want to know what's going to happen in a film or episode.”

“It's harder now to avoid spoilers, especially with social media,” he continues.

“I would mute channels if you follow film or television in the build-up to its release or screening.”

This leads into the crux of the whole spoiler issue: What is the statute of limitations on spoilers?

“It’s the ultimate question,” Rodger muses. “I don't feel the next day or the next day or the next day is appropriate. People have jobs and lives, and they might not be able to rush off to watch a movie or an episode or whatever it might be.

“I don't want to give something away, because that would break my heart. But there's probably a vast number of people who aren't as passionate about these things and are like, ‘Oh, he dies at the end? I don't care. I'm going to watch it anyway.”

* Karl Puschmann is a freelance arts and culture writer who also pens the spoiler-free TV and Film substack Screen Crack