Second Chapter Cliffhanger

4 Following

• Kingdom Hearts II: For a while, the manga entered a hiatus as Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days was written. It leaves the Power Trio in their Gummi Ship, trying to get Cid Highwind, who has just announced that they've found Ansem's Computer —which contains the world Space Paranoids. Meanwhile, Kairi and Pluto are in prison in The World That Never Was.

• The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part: Subverted. The movie seems to end on a low note, with Rex Dangervest revealing himself as an embittered future version of Emmet who tricks him into starting the Armageddon but then strands him on Undar of the Dryar. Meanwhile, the Systarians and all of Emmet's friends are trapped in the Bin of Storage, unable to help. Then Lucy interrupts "Everything's Not Awesome" to rally everyone else to turn things around and save the day.
• Kung Fu Panda 2: While the movie ends with a satisfactory defeat of the Big Bad and Po getting a lot of character development that results in growing closer with his dad, it's revealed that another panda community continues to thrive in a place far removed. Furthermore, who appears to be Po's biological father gets the sudden revelation that his son is alive. Po going to said village is the plot of the third movie.
• Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ends on several heavy notes linking it up to the upcoming third movie, Beyond the Spider-Verse: Miles is trapped on Earth-42 captured by an alternate version of him who became the Prowler and that Earth's Uncle Aaron and is set to glitch out of existence if he doesn't get back to his own Earth in time, Miguel and several members of the Spider-Society are out hunting for Miles to prevent him from saving his father from his seemingly preordained death to The Spot's havoc, The Spot has become an Eldritch Abomination intent on ruining Miles' life starting by going after his family and home, and Gwen, having realized that Canon Events may not be truly preordained after her father effectively prevented one (The death of a police captain close to that Earth's Spider-Man) by quitting his job as police captain, assembling a team of Spider-People to find Miles and get him back home.
• Wishology: Parodied in the sixth season's three-parter finale of The Fairly OddParents!. Timmy wishes to do his own Movie Trilogy but things start going haywire when his fairies are removed from the picture. While "The Big Beginning" ends with a very vague Sequel Hook, "The Exciting Middle Part" ends in a Heroic Sacrifice, with Timmy turning himself to The Darkness. We are meant to believe it ends like this but, as any genre-savvy viewer knows, of course, it doesn't. The over-the-topness doesn't help in taking it seriously either.

• Back to the Future Part II: The film resolves the alternate timeline story but Doc Brown winds up trapped in the past and everything else, including the lingering plot thread of Marty's problem with being called chicken leading to him becoming a Future Loser, is saved for a big fat "To Be Continued".
• The Dark Knight: The series can't very well end with Batman being demonized and hunted, so how will he atone for Two-Face's crimes and regain Gotham's trust? Yet that ending is so organic and un-gimmicky that it takes a minute to recognize it as a hook.
• Evil Dead 2: The movie ends with Annie reading the Necronomicon, which opens up a hole in spacetime and blasts the demons back to Hell. This is a good thing, however, the anomaly also casts Ash to the Middle Ages, in which he's hailed as a hero for killing a deadite. The third movie, Army of Darkness, starts with Ash still trapped in the past, but he's a slave now.
• The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug: Gandalf is captive in Dol Guldur, the orc armies are on the march, Bard is in a jail cell, Smaug is on his way to destroy Laketown; and none of our heroes is in a position to do anything about any of it.
• The Matrix Reloaded: In a Two-Part Trilogy case, it ends with Neo in a coma and the emergence of Smith as an enemy unaligned with the machines, though just as dangerous. It also removed the possible solution that Neo had been working towards during the rest of the movie. This possibly reduced the drama because it made a lot of the actions of the second movie a great big "Shaggy Dog" Story when going into The Matrix Revolutions.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: It ends with Captain Jack Sparrow killed by the Kraken and thus captured in Davy Jones' locker, leaving us with the promise of Will, Elizabeth, the crew, and Tia Dalma to get him back. Shock heightened by the return from the dead of Captain Barbossa.
• Spider-Man: Far From Home: All seems to be going swimmingly by the end of the film when, suddenly, an unknown third party reveals Peter Parker as the man behind Spider-Man's mask. Cut to the credits. The third movie's main gist is Peter dealing with the consequences of his identity being public.
• Star Wars:
  • Attack of the Clones: While the Jedi have won the battle at Geonosis and Padmé and Anakin are married, the Clone Wars have just started, with no way of knowing how the Republic will fare on them. While this might not seem like such a big cliffhanger, one has to remember how the Battle of Naboo's successful push-back against the Separatists was rather easily erased in the interim between this movie and the previous one. There's also the fact that Anakin's emotions, while righteous for now, have drawn him closer to the Dark Side.
  • The Empire Strikes Back ends with Han Solo being frozen in carbonite and captured by a new enemy and crime boss Jabba the Hutt (who is not strictly in league with The Empire) leaving us with just Luke and Leia's promise to rescue him, and that's not even getting into the Trope Namer for Luke, I Am Your Father.
  • The Last Jedi ends with the Resistance having lost most of their military assets and only the main characters having escaped in the Millenium Falcon. The First Order, meanwhile, still manages to take over the Galaxy despite their own heavy loses. To nail the coffin, Luke has died a martyr.

By Work:

• Catching Fire: The first novel ends on a mildly happy note. Although Katniss's PTSD might come back to haunt her later, we're still assured that she manages to survive the game. Then comes the second book, which ends with the destruction of her district, the death of her best friend, and the abduction of her Love Interest, which is an obvious bridging gap for the final book and is definitely not self-contained (or happy).
• The Daevabad Trilogy: In the climax of the second book, Daevabad falls in a surprise attack. The Big Bad reveals herself, King Ghassan (The Heavy until then) is killed, all the djinn are Brought Down to Normal, and the protagonist and her friend narrowly escape in an emergency teleport to another country. Nothing Is the Same Anymore in the third book.
• Insurgent ends with the reveal that Chicago's walled society is a social experiment designed to see if dividing people into virtue-themed factions and then having Divergents rebel would help them regain their humanity. The suspense is drawn further with the assassination of Janine, the Factionless leader. The third book's main plot is rejoining the wider society outside the walls.
• To Ride a Rising Storm, the second book of the Nampeshiweisit series, ends with a sudden Mood Whiplash when usuper Sveni Audulfsson and the Ravens of Joden attack the jarl's palace in the middle of their Valkyrjafax celebration, and Jarl Joeversson escapes to the academy with only one of his two sons and interrupts their own celebration to announce that all his loyalists and their dragons have been killed—and people conclude correctly there is likely to be an incoming attack on the academy to come after the jarl, Frau Kuiper, Theod, and Anequs. A violent battle ensues at the academy from an attack by the Ravens, where students and professors alike fight against their attackers and Kasaqua flies for the first time. The school professors and students successfully hold off the attackers long enough for reinforcements come in, and Anequs, Sander, and Theod are confirmed to be alive—but the fates of many other characters, including Marta, are up in the air and the Ravens have taken over control with Sveni Audulfsson declaring himself Wroughtjarl.

• Reboot Me: More like a seventh-song cliffhanger, as the Villain Episode "So Open" ends with several Wham Episode reveals. VIRI, the Big Bad ransomware virus, corrupts Trashbin.exe and Reece. It's also revealed that Ele.OS might cause an AI singularity.

• BloodRayne 2: Its ending has the profile of a typical second part of a Two-Part Trilogy; complete with the antagonistic factions gathering to pull off a The End of the World as We Know It and leaving the narrative in suspense. It's ultimately subverted since there's no third game to resolve the Myth Arc and the plot gets its Conclusion in Another Medium —i.e., the comics.
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2: It ends with the only surviving protagonists as public enemies, a major villain still alive, the main character stabbed in the chest, being hauled towards a helicopter, and when the pilot is told they have to get out of there, he replies that he "knows a place".
• Dreamfall: The Longest Journey: All three protagonists end in dire fates. Kian is arrested, April is dead, and Zoë is in a coma with hints that she might have died too. On top of that, The Bad Guys Win.
• Final Fantasy XIII-2: It ends with Serah abruptly dying and the world suddenly being reformed due to the release of Chaos. Lightning is revealed to have been crystallized again and "To Be Continued" is displayed. Although this was thought to be a hint for the player to unlock the rest of the game's multiple endings, the Paradox Endings were simply alternate ways to end the story early, while the secret Omega Ending reveals that Caius succeeded in his goal.
• Halo 2: The cliffhanger between this installment and Halo 3 most certainly counts, as it leaves players knee-deep in The Climax but gives them no denouement. After defeating the Final Boss Tartarus, the removal of the Index shuts Halo down, which triggers the "Feel Sick" protocol. This causes the remaining platforms to enter standby and get ready for remote activation from the Ark. Then Truth's ship arrives on Earth, Admiral Hood utters that he's "finishing this fight" and the game ends. The Stinger also shows us Cortana is now the prisoner of the Flood, adding to the cliffhanger nature of the whole thing.
• Utawarerumono: Mask of Deception: It ends with conspirators having seized control of the Imperial Capital, the Princess and rightful heir poisoned and on the run, most of the main characters forced to flee with her, and the main character, Haku, forced to fake his own death and disguise himself as his late boss, Oshtor, in a desperate attempt to keep the Empire from falling completely apart, leaving his team heartbroken as to his apparent demise.

• Virtue's Last Reward: It ends with the protagonist Sigma, having mastered his time travel powers, going back in time to meet Akane in the past so they can stop Free The Soul from unleashing the Radical-6 plague that has just killed off 6 billion people.

• Red vs. Blue: The Recollection: "Recreation", the seventh season of the trilogy, ends with Washington teaming up with the Meta and capturing the Reds at Valhalla while the remaining characters are trapped by attacking aliens.

• Amphibia: The first season ends a bit triumphantly as Anne finally stands up to Sasha and Wartwood gains a decisive victory over the toads. At the end of the second season, in "True Colors", King Andrias reveals that he's Evil All Along and is planning an invasion of Earth, Anne is shown to have a powerful Super Mode, Marcy is gravely stabbed by Andrias, and Anne and the Plantars end up on Earth.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: In the first season, the heroes successfully repel the enemy Fire Nation navy from the Water Tribe. In the second season's finale, "The Crossroads of Destiny", the heroes are betrayed by Long Feng and Prince Zuko, Aang is apparently dead — shut down by Azula's lightning attack, and the Earth Kingdom falls to the Fire Nation.
• Hilda: The first season has a bittersweet ending with Hilda having adjusted to life in Trolberg and Frida successfully mending her friendship with Hilda and David. In the second season, Hilda and Johanna successfully mend their friendship. And then, Hilda is teleported from Trolberg and begins learning what life is like as a troll while Johanna begins her search to bring back Hilda before Erik Ahlberg kills her.
• The Owl House: The first season ends with Luz handing over Eda's portal to Emperor Belos and destroying it, leaving her stranded in the Demon Realm — and as it later turns out, only hindering his plans since he's able to rebuild the portal). Meanwhile, Eda and Lilith, though now on better terms, have lost their ability to use magic. Despite this, it's still much more upbeat and less of a cliffhanger than the ending of the second season, where Luz and her friends are trapped in the Human Realm while the rest of the Boiling Isles are left at the mercy of the Collector thanks to King making a deal with him to save everyone from Belos' attempt to murder them all, and we don't see the other main characters recover onscreen so their fates are left up in the air. Not to mention the very end of the credits hint that Belos (who was presumably killed by the Collector earlier in the episode) isn't completely gone, as a bit of his remains followed our heroes to the human realm and is sentient enough to shut a door...