Glass director M. Night Shyamalan talks ending of movie

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Glass.

This weekend, audiences who watch M. Night Shyamalan‘s superhero film Glass are discovering that the writer-director has wrapped up his Unbreakable cinematic universe in unsurprisingly surprising fashion. In the film, Samuel L. Jackson’s supervillain Elijah Price is killed by James McAvoy‘s Kevin Wendell Crumb after the latter learns that the former was responsible for the death of Crumb’s father. Meanwhile, both Crumb and Bruce Willis’s David Dunn are themselves murdered by a secret organization — whose membership includes Sarah Paulson‘s Dr. Ellie Staple — desperate to keep the public unaware of the existence of real-life superheroes. But it was Elijah who seemingly has the final laugh by ensuring that his mother (played by Charlayne Woodard) can release surveillance footage of Crumb and Dunn in full superpower-exhibiting mode after Price’s demise, presumably creating more heroes and villains around the globe.

Phew!

So, did Shyamalan always have in mind this kind of conclusion to the movie trilogy he began with 2000’s Unbreakable and continued with 2017’s Split?

“I did,” he says. “I always thought it was a little bit of like an opera, even when I was starting on Unbreakable. I thought this was a very operatic end to it all [with] people screaming and all of these kinds of implications. It was about implications more than anything. I’m a big fan of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as you can probably tell. The format of that movie just blew me away when I saw it. The idea that the journey of the main character gets fulfilled by another character is a very powerful idea.”

While the ending of Glass leaves the door open for further tales in the Unbreakable realm, Shyamalan confirms that it is a fictional world to which he is unlikely to return.

“I have a lot of original stories I want to tell,” says the director. “I’m an original filmmaker and I want to keep on telling new stories and new characters. It’s fun for me to figure out a new language, and then learn it, and try to get an audience in two hours to learn, and accept it, and really find their way.”

Watch the trailer for Glass, above.

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• Sarah Paulson’s character in Glass was almost played by a male actor