I recently posted a thread about an old movie from the 1950s (12 Angry Men), and provided spoiler warnings. More than one person replied jokingly that they were grateful for the spoiler warning for a 70-year-old movie. I've heard the same comment in one form or another many times over the years, and I really don't get it.
What's the expectation here? That we're all LLMs who've been trained on every movie released prior to 2010? It would be literally impossible to watch every film - even excluding obscure or foreign films - that humankind has produced since the beginning of cinema. I'm a huge movie fan who watches 2 or 3 new (to me) movies a week from pretty much every era, but I had only watched this very famous movie from the '50s in the last year, because I'm not a magic space baby with a brain containing all of the film scripts in history. The more films that are made every year, the less they will be watched by future generations, because time is a straight line and we haven't figured out how to pause the fucker yet so we can all catch up on 100 years of film.
I'm grateful that this old movie hadn't been spoiled for me, because I wasn't even an itch in my father's nutsack, nor he in his, when the film was first released. But the jokes in that thread would seem to imply that I would have had no right to be annoyed if the film had been spoiled for me, because... what? I should have had the good sense to be born during the depression instead of the '80s? I should have a working knowledge of every story every told prior to my birth? The fact that this very famous and very old film hadn't been spoiled for me shows that even very famous and very old movies don't automatically weave themselves into the fabric of your reality by the mere force of time itself. I had no clue what the movie was about beyond the very basic premise, because even spoilers for old movies are hard to come by when there're so many movies in existence. The jokes would only make sense if the opposite were the case.
If you care about spoiling films for other people, then there is really no time frame for a film's release that makes it 'fair game'. People have varied and unpredictable lives when it comes to the media they've consumed, and more often than not they're busy watching the current output of Hollywood rather than watching their grandparents' favourite films featuring actors who are all long dead, and before colour image was even technologically possible. The noble spoiler warning should be eternal.
And all of the above also applies to novels, plays, TV shows, video games, and anything else where spoilers might ruin one's first taste of it. Spoiler warnings are free, but they can conjure great cultural value seemingly out of thin air for those who are protected by them.
The only time I spoil a movie on purpose is when I hate it so much I want to make sure no one gets tricked into watching it.
I would love to spoil Gods of Egypt for that very reason. No one deserves to sit through that pile of non-movie. Problem is that I have no memory of the plot, so it is impossible to spoil. You could probably convince me that anything happened in that film and I would believe you. All I know is that it was so anti-immersive, that I ended up becoming painfully aware of the fact that my friend and I were sitting in her apartment, in front of a black box that makes color and noise for two ours. It is that bad.
Btw, 12 Angry Men is a great movie. I think I had it spoiled for me back in the day, but I still thoroughly enjoyed the movie, because it's not so much about the conclusion, it's the journey through their conversations and arguments that makes the movie so appealing. In fact, I think that most people watching that film will know exactly where it ends up and roughly how it gets there, but the execution is still so fucking good that it doesn't even matter.
Btw, if you're still in the mood for oooooold movies that are great, I would highly recommend Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) which is a silent film about an unfaithful man who decides to kill his loving wife in order to be with his mistress. What happens after that is, in my opinion, one of the best silent films ever made. Fantastic acting, emotional music and beautiful visuals. You forget that you're watching a silent film where no one is saying a word. You forget that it is in black and white. You forget that you have seen a hundred years og technical improvement in film. You are reminded that actual skill and quality is timeless. It made me cry the first time I saw it. It just fucking wrecked me in a way I didn't expect and it is legit on my favourite movies of all time. It's old enough that you can watch it on youtube or some other video hosting site without issue. If there is any achievement in this world that I would be proud of, it's to know that I helped someone find this move.