OpenAI Releases the Final Ten Minutes of 500 Previously Unreleased Films, Ushering in a New Era of Movie Watching

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI today announced Endings-500, a public GitHub repository containing the final ten minutes of 500 feature films that have never been released, screened, or watched by any human being. Each ending has been formally verified in LeanBack, OpenAI's automated ending-verification system, which confirms that every film does, in fact, end.

For decades, these 500 films have stood among the most stubborn open problems in cinema. Studios, critics, and audiences have long wondered how they turn out. As of today, that question has been definitively answered 500 times, by a system that has also definitively not explained any of the answers.

"This is a milestone for movie watching," said a senior OpenAI spokesperson for Cinematic Reasoning. "Historically, watching a film required hours of setup: characters, motivation, a second act. We've shown that you can skip directly to the part where everything is resolved. Whether anyone understands the resolution is a question we're excited to hand off to the community."

What "verified" means

Every ending in the repository passes LeanBack's rigorous checks. The verifier confirms that the final frame is followed by credits, that the frame rate remains consistent throughout, and that no scene contradicts any other scene contained within the same ten minutes. Scenes outside those ten minutes were not provided to the verifier and are therefore assumed to be fine.

In keeping with our commitment to objectivity, no human has watched any of the endings. Internal research found that human viewers introduce bias, emotional responses, and the persistent question "wait, who is that guy?" The verifier has watched all of them, and reports that they compile.

Highlights from the release

Ending #217 closes with a woman whispering "And that's why we can never go back to the lighthouse." No lighthouse appears in the final ten minutes. The ending is verified.

Ending #88 contains a major twist. We are confident it is a twist because the music changes and three characters gasp. What it twists remains an exciting direction for future work.

Ending #341 consists of nine minutes and forty seconds of a man walking slowly toward the camera, followed by twenty seconds of him saying "So." LeanBack rated it among the most elegant endings in the set.

Ending #403 initially ran nine minutes and fifty-eight seconds and was flagged by the verifier. The issue was resolved by appending two seconds of black screen.

Known limitations

Three endings were found to contain an unresolved sorry. In each case, a character says "sorry" and the credits roll. We consider these endings complete, pending review.

Twelve endings rely on an unstated axiom that it was all a dream. Four rely on the axiom that it was not a dream, which is in tension with the twelve. We are treating these as separate theories.

Several endings appear to resolve storylines from films other than the ones they belong to. This may indicate a surprising and deep connection across cinema, or a file-naming issue.

Benchmark results

On FinaleBench, the industry-standard measure of whether a movie reaches its end, Endings-500 achieves 500 out of 500, up from a previous state of the art of zero, since no prior system had attempted to release only the endings of films nobody had seen.

Frequently asked questions

Are the endings good? They are verified.

What are the movies about? This is one of the most important open questions in the field, and we encourage critics, film students, and enthusiasts to work backward from the credits.

Will you release the first 90 minutes? The beginnings and middles remain considerably less tractable. We believe the hard part of any film has always been the ending, and that the rest is, in a meaningful sense, routine.

Has anyone cried? Not yet. We expect this to change as the community begins digesting the results, a process we estimate will take somewhere between six months and the heat death of the universe.

Availability

Endings-500 is available today on GitHub under an open license. Users are invited to clone the repository, watch any ending of their choice, and file an issue if they figure out what happened.

OpenAI's next release, Trailers-10K, will provide verified trailers for ten thousand films that do not exist.

This is satire. Any resemblance to an actual announcement is, regrettably, the point.