Seeing a shirt on Threadless (posted to my tumblelog) that “spoils” a few classics and one or two recent movies got me to thinking. What should the shelf life on spoilers be?
I don’t get out to the movies much and as a result have missed a fair number of “classics”. For me to moan or complain because someone spoiled the surprise ending of say The Others for me a good six months after it had come out, would be silly. I realize that some amount of the viewing experience could be adversely affected if certain details are revealed and we should respect that to a reasonable degree, but that’s too much to ask. For a movie I would argue that if you know something that you consider spoilerish, you should protect it for about the first month as best you can.
The nice thing about the internet is that you can generally provide a layer of protection from spoilers with good use of hyperlinks and colored text, but what about real life? If you’re talking about a movie and one of the people in the conversation hasn’t seen it yet and requests that the talk remain spoiler free, you should certainly honor that. That’s especially true if the person is a spouse or significant other. If it’s a geeky friend then you have every right to give them crap about it or possibly give them three bucks to rent it, depending on the level of charity you’re feeling.
So what if it’s a movie that has just come out on DVD? Given the one month rule, should spoilers still be announced? By then, most people who’ll really care about the movie in question will probably have seen it and if they haven’t then they’re on their own.
If the movie has been out on DVD for more than a year and someone grouses then you should be able to blow them off. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.
What do you think?