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I’ve had movie twists on the mind lately. After writing back-to-back articles covering the best twist-fueled movies currently streaming on Netflix and Prime Video, I was very curious to ask Tom’s Guide readers to pick what they think is the best movie twist of all time.
To find my answer, I created a dedicated reader poll and watched to see which classic twist would come out on top. This necessitated first picking eight of the biggest twists for the poll, so I scoured online rankings to find the movies that featured most often, and loads of the usual suspects kept popping up, including “The Sixth Sense,” “Planet of the Apes” and “Oldboy.”
After giving readers a couple of weeks to vote, I had almost 2,000 responses (the final vote total was 1,975). Surprisingly, the final winner was more unanimous than I anticipated, and it took the lead straightaway. But I won’t keep you in suspense anymore. You can see the results in the table below.
Movie | Total votes | Percentage of votes |
"The Sixth Sense" | 727 | 37% |
"The Usual Suspects" | 385 | 19% |
"The Planet of the Apes" | 209 | 11% |
"Shutter Island" | 208 | 11% |
"Fight Club" | 136 | 7% |
"Oldboy" | 123 | 6% |
"Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back" | 114 | 6% |
"Saw" | 73 | 4% |
Note: the rest of this article contains full spoilers for the eight movies selected for the poll.
27 years later, ‘The Sixth Sense’s’ legendary reveal still shocks
“I see dead people” is one of the most iconic lines in movie history, and well, young Cole Sear (Haley Joel Osment), it turns out you’ve also been getting help from a dead person the entire time. “The Sixth Sense” big reveal is that psychologist Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) has actually been a ghost the whole movie, stuck between this plane of existence and what comes next because he needs to help Cole come to terms with his supernatural ability.
M. Night Shyamalan is a director who has made a career out of producing movies with third-act twists, but “The Sixth Sense” has to rank among his very best. It’s got all the hallmarks of a great twist. It’s unexpected but logical, not contradicting information given to the viewer, and most importantly, in hindsight, you feel like you should have seen it coming.
It’s worthy of the title “best movie twist ever” in my book, even if it wouldn’t have been my No. 1 choice (but we’ll get to that…). Scoring 37% of the vote, it wasn’t even a close contest. “The Sixth Sense” ran away with it. The 1998 classic left its rivals in its wake. Kudos to M. Night Shyamalan.
These movie twists were also voted as favorites
“The Sixth Sense” may have won, but it wasn’t the only movie in the poll that amassed an impressive share of the votes. “The Usual Suspects” came in second place and was the personal pick of the majority of the Tom’s Guide streaming team. For good reason, the reveal that the meek Roger “Verbal” Kint (Kevin Spacey), who recounts a story of his brush with crime lord Keyser Söze, was actually the criminal mastermind all along is brilliant.
The bronze medal went to 1968’s “The Planet of the Apes,” the oldest movie on the list. The final scene sees astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) discover he isn’t exploring an alien planet full of intelligent primates, but is on a future Earth, ravaged by nuclear war. It’s spine-tingling, and the shot of the Statue of Liberty half-buried in sand is iconic for a reason.
I think what hurts “Planet of the Apes” in 2026 is that the twist is now so ubiquitous it's hard to imagine many modern viewers watching it for the first time completely unspoiled. I know by the time I saw the movie for myself, the twist was even being telegraphed on the DVD cover.
“Shutter Island,” where it’s revealed that detective Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) is actually a patient at an insane asylum he’s investigating, and “Fight Club,” where Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is actually a figment of the narrator’s (Edward Norton) imagination, rounded out the top five.
Meanwhile, settling for last place was 2004 horror “SAW,” which is a shame because I think its twist, which sees a supposed dead body come back to life, revealed to the serial killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), is a fittingly dark finale.
I’m not saying 2,000 people are wrong …
Who am I to overrule the democratic process? I’m just a guy who has watched a lot of movies and has a lot of opinions about them. However, if you were curious which way I would have voted in the poll, I think my top pick would have been 2003’s “Oldboy.”
I’ll admit to being slightly swayed by the overall quality of Park Chan-wook’s movie, “Oldboy” is such a masterfully crafted dark thriller that it gets extra credit in my book, but the twist is also phenomenal. The entire movie is about a deeply-flawed protagonist, Oh Dae-su (Choi Min-sik), searching for the reason for his 15-year imprisonment by an unknown captor.
The twist comes when Oh Dae-su finally gets his answer. But the revelation is so shocking, he finds out he’d rather have stayed oblivious. His captor, Lee Woo-jin (Yoo Ji-tae), holds a grudge due to Oh Dae-su’s actions in their youth, but that’s not the haunting twist.
The twist is that the young sushi chef, who has become Oh-Dae-su’s lover through the movie, is actually his own daughter. Their relationship was orchestrated as part of Woo-Jin’s twisted plot. It’s a devastating and deeply unsettling reveal, and it sees “Oldboy” go out on a highly chilling note.
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