The hill I will die on: Films and TV shows are better if you read the spoilers first | Jason Okundaye

Sun, 04 Jan 2026

Please note, this piece absolutely includes spoilers for Cruel Intentions, a film made 26 years ago. Do read on

I love spoiling the plot for myself. It’s something I do fairly regularly. Before watching a film, I tend to open Wikipedia and read the entire plot synopsis. If every episode of a series has been uploaded to a streamer, I often open the last episode, watch the final five minutes, close it and then start from the beginning. I did as such when the final season of Top Boy dropped in the autumn of 2023. When I tweeted about it from my now-deleted X account, I drew a range of bewildered and outraged responses, including from the official Top Boy Netflix account.

I’m sure you also probably think I’m a sociopath, a philistine or stubbornly impatient (the last has some truth). But the fact is, sometimes spoilers relieve a sense of burden – that you might have to stick out some film or TV show with this uncertainty hanging over you, this itch to just know who gets snuffed out or who did the snuffing. Isn’t that the point of watching something, I hear you say. Well, yes. But frankly, I’m not willing to put that effort into every bit of media I consume – particularly in the streaming age where there is such a constant abundance of things to watch, all of it varying in quality, and the pay-off is not always guaranteed.

Jason Okundaye is an assistant opinion editor at the Guardian and the author of Revolutionary Acts