Book Ends/Film

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In the early days, a projector would have a beginning and an end slide. Note that some Book Ends can be spoilers, so beware.

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Films - Animation

• Some notable examples from the Disney Animated Canon:
  • Lampshaded in Disney's Pinocchio. Not only is the film set inside a book bearing the film title, opened by Jiminy Cricket, but near the beginning of the film, the Blue Fairy brings the eponymous puppet to life, and Geppetto celebrates by activating all his music boxes and dancing. He does the same thing at the end of the film when Pinocchio Becomes a Real Boy, and Jiminy remarks, "Well, this is practically where I came in."
  • Bambi and The Lion King begin with the births of Bambi and Simba, respectively, and end as the respective protagonists have Babies Ever After.
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame is bookended by Clopin asking to figure out, "Who is the monster and who is the man?" and also to "sing the bells of Notre Dame." This is even referenced by the commentators.
  • The Princess and the Frog begins by showing the evening star, then fireflies flying down from the night sky onto New Orleans. The film ends by showing fireflies flying up from New Orleans into the night sky, encircling two evening stars.
  • Fantasia's The Rite of Spring begins and ends with the same sequence of notes, played on the same instrument.
    • An almost series-wide example would be the fact that at the near beginning of the first Fantasia film, the second segment involves several small fairies changing spring in summer, summer into fall, and finally fall into winter. At the end of the second film, there is a segment involving a larger fairy changing winter into spring, therefore bringing the series full circle.
  • Aladdin starts with the Peddler singing "Arabian Nights". Aladdin and the King of Thieves, Aladdin's final movie, ends with the Peddler singing a reprise of "Arabian Nights". The reprise was originally composed for the ending of the first movie, but rejected.
  • Treasure Planet: Jim has fun on his homemade solar surfer and then the police bring him to the Benbow Inn, which is absolutely packed, followed by an indirect view of Silver. And the entire thing doubles as an Ironic Echo.
  • Lady and the Tramp actually begins and ends on a Christmas Day.
  • Pocahontas begins with the first scene fading in from parchment, and ends with the last scene fading into parchment.
  • Verna Felton. The first character she ever voiced in her entire career was an elephant from Dumbo. Coincidentally enough, the last character she ever voiced before her death in 1967 was yes, an elephant from The Jungle Book.
    • Speaking of The Jungle Book, this is how Kaa and the Elephant Patrol are both introduced: at the very beginning of the film, Kaa appears, then the Elephant Patrol; and at the end, the Elephant Patrol appears, and then Kaa.
  • Hercules begins and ends with a shot of a Greek vase in a museum.
  • Atlantis the Lost Empire begins with the former Queen of Atlantis sacrificing herself as an attempt to save her kingdom from a tidal wave which then drowns said kingdom. The film ends with her daughter, Kida, becoming the next Queen as a result of her father, the King of Atlantis dying of internal bleeding.
    • Originally, Atlantis was actually going to avert this trope altogether, where the film was actually originally going to begin with a team of Vikings making an attempt to find the titular Atlantis using the Shepherd's Journal, only to end up being killed off by the Leviathan.
  • The RKO logo at the very beginning of Alice in Wonderland is shown as a banner held up by two playing cards. So is the "The End" card.
  • Similarly, one of the opening title cards seen at the beginning of Dumbo is placed on an orange circle background. That exact same background was used again for the film's "The End" card.
  • Near the beginning of The Little Mermaid, Ariel and her friend Flounder can be seen exploring a sunken ship. At the end of the film, Ursula, now in her One-Winged Angel form actually traps Ariel inside a large graveyard full of sunken ships, one of which was actually used by her love interest Prince Eric to kill Ursula.
  • Beauty and the Beast begins and ends by showing stained-glass windows depicting the characters.
  • Similar to the Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron example below, Brother Bear begins and ends with an eagle (representing the late Sitka) in the sky.
  • The Emperor's New Groove begins and ends with Tom Jones (the Theme Song Guy) singing "Perfect World", with the first time happening after we see Llama Kuzco stranded in the jungle leading up to the flashback, but before Yzma turns him into a llama; while the second happens after Kuzco and Pacha defeat Yzma and turn Kuzco back into a human, but before we see Feline Yzma grumbling as her former crony Kronk starts teaching several children how to speak Squirrel.
  • At the very beginning of The Aristocats, we see Toulouse growling and hissing just right before Marie and Berlioz's piano lesson, and at the end of the film, just right after Thomas O'Malley and his alley cat friends rescue Duchess and her kittens and send Edger the butler to Timbuktu, we see Toulouse growling and hissing again.
  • Mulan: Little Brother the dog leading the chickens.
• The Triplets of Belleville begins and ends with the previous scene being shown on a TV screen, accompanied by the only real lines of dialogue in the film.
• The opening shot of Toy Story and the final shot of Toy Story 3 are of a blue sky with uniquely-shaped white clouds, those of Andy's old wallpaper. (3 also starts with a sky, making both a film- and a series-wide bookend)
• Spirited Away has the family walking through the tunnel with the mother chiding "Chihiro, don't cling like that, you'll make me trip."
• The very first and very last shot of The Last Unicorn are almost identical, and a refrain of the opening song plays over the last minute or so.
• Finding Nemo: "Wake up! Wake up! Time for school! Time for school!"
• A Goofy Movie actually begins and ends with the sound of Goofy screaming.
• Cars: "Well, I eat losers for breakfast."
  • The second film begins and ends with Mater rescuing Otis from a ditch and dragging him to Radiator Springs.
  • The series as a whole starts off in the middle of a race at the very beginning of the first film, and ends in the middle of a race during the finale of the second.
• Rock-a-Doodle actually begins with an orbital shot of the Sun rising above the Earth. At the end of the film, when Chanticleer finally crows for the very first time since his departure, we see the exact same shot of the Sun rising above the Earth just right before it turns the evil Duke of Owls into an Eric Cartman-lookalike.
• The eagle from Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.
• Monsters, Inc. begins and ends with a monster sneaking up to a sleeping child's bed in silhouette.
• Tom and Jerry: The Movie begins and ends with Tom and Jerry chasing each other, all without any dialogue.
• Kung Fu Panda opens with Po having a dream where he is a great warrior, loved by many, and to whom even the Furious Five, the most elite fighters, respect and bow down to. It all comes true at the end.
• How to Train Your Dragon has Hiccup's narration.

Beginning: "This is Berk. It's twelve days north of hopeless and a few degrees south of freezing to death. [...] We have fishing, hunting, and a charming view of the sunsets. The only problems are the pests. You see, most places have mice, or mosquitoes. We have... dragons." End: "This is Berk. It snows nine months out of the year and hails the other three. The food that grows here is tough and tasteless. The people that grow here are even more so. The only upside is the pets. You see, most people have ponies or parrots. We have... dragons."

• • Also, in the beginning of the film, Hiccup opens a door, seeing a dragon flying and quickly shuts the door. The ending has the same thing, only this time the dragons have now intergrated into the community.
• Happy Feet begins and ends with a shot of Antarctica seen from Earth orbit.
• The first and last Shrek films both begin with the DreamWorks logo in the middle of a nighttime sky. Since the DreamWorks logo at the end is static, Forever After also ends with the logo in a night sky.
• The Plague Dogs begins with Rowf being drowned in a tank of water at a research facility. It ends with he and Snitter presumably drowning after trying to swim to an island that may or may not exist.

Films - Live Action

• The Darjeeling Limited begins and ends with people running to get on a train as it pulls away from the station.
• The Sound of Music opens with panoramic views of the mountains, then zooms onto Maria (Julie Andrews) singing ecstatically how "the hills are alive with the sound of music!" before she rushes back to the nearby abbey. The movie ends with Maria and her new family, having escaped the Nazis at the same abbey, hiking through the same mountains towards the safety of the border. As the soundtrack sings "Climb Ev'ry Mountain", the camera pulls back to another panorama of those mountains.
• At the beginning of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Spock gives Kirk a copy of A Tale of Two Cities as a birthday present. Kirk opens it and reads out "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times." At the end he recites from memory, "It's a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before. A far better resting place I go to, than I have ever known." Bones is confused, but Kirk just says that he understands Spock's message.
  • Similarly, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier uses the scenes of Kirk, McCoy and Spock at the campfire (singing "Row, row, row your boat...") as bookends to the movie.
  • In the 2009 Star Trek, a scene near the end of the first act features a special assembly of the Starfleet Academy, then immediately cutting to a scene of the Captain of the Enterprise addressing his crew before the depart. The end of the movie features another special Academy assembly and once again cuts right to the Captain of the Enterprise addressing his crew before they take off.
• Charly, based on the book Flowers for Algernon, begins and ends with Charlie Gordon playing on a swing in a playground.
• In Inception, the scenes when Cobb meets an aged Saito are actually false Book Ends, as it's just a scene from near the end, on which the plot later returns. However the music from the actual last scene almost perfectly loops into the music from the very first scene.
• An early scene in Star Wars: A New Hope features Luke Skywalker gazing out at Tatooine's binary sunset. Revenge of the Sith ends with Owen and Beru Lars in the same position holding an infant Luke and also watching the suns set.
  • The binary sunset in Star Wars: A New Hope also serves as a bookend with a scene near the end of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, where Luke is watching his father's funeral pyre, down to similiar musical cues.
  • Likewise, the first line of A New Hope and the last line of Revenge of the Sith are both spoken by C-3PO aboard the Tantive IV.
  • Chronology-wise, both The Phantom Menace and Return of the Jedi end with a funeral and a celebration.
• 2001: A Space Odyssey has shots of the Earth, Moon, and Sun, accompanied by "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". There's a theory that the opening shot is actually from the Star-Child's perspective, and that the rest of the film is a flashback.
• Pirates of the Caribbean ends its trilogy with Jack Sparrow in a one-man dinghy, having lost the Black Pearl to Barbossa; as an echo of his iconic introduction in the first film. And the trilogy really opens (before the title) and ends (after the credits) with a child singing a song about piracy.
  • Near the start of the first movie, Pintel finds Elizabeth in a closet, and growls a menacing "'Ello Poppet." In the end, as Elizabeth is saying her goodbyes, Pintel waves with a sorrowful "Goodbye Poppet."
  • The first film alone begins and ends with young Elizabeth and Jack Sparrow respectively singing "A Pirate's Life for Me" to the sea.
• In the 1993 film version of The Secret Garden, Mary mentions at the start that she didn't know how to cry. At the end of the film her closing narration says that her uncle learned to laugh and she learned to cry.
• The film version of Sin City begins with an unnamed hitman claiming his victim before the opening credits. He is not seen again until the end of the film when a character who turned traitor encounters him in an elevator. He introduces himself to both of them the same way.
• Director Terry Gilliam is an obvious fan of this trope and uses quite regularly:
  • Time Bandits begins with the map of the timeholes being unrolled across the screen, and finishes with it being rolled back up.
  • 12 Monkeys begins and concludes with closeups of the main character when he was a child.
  • Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas begins with Hunter S. Thompson (Raul Duke) driving to Las Vegas and ends with him driving from the city.
• Citizen Kane opens on a "no trespassing" sign before moving in closer to Kane's mansion. At the end, when the audience but not the characters learns the secret of Kane's final word "Rosebud," the camera retreats from the mansion and ends on the same sign, signifying that Charles Foster Kane will forever remain a mystery.
• Juno begins and ends with a shot of a chair, with the narration explicitly pointing it out.
• Bride of Frankenstein opens with Mary Shelley, played by Elsa Lanchester, telling the story of Frankenstein. As she begins relating the sequel, she spreads her arms wide... and at the end of the film, the Bride of Frankenstein, also played by Lanchester, makes the same gesture.
• The film Notting Hill begins and ends with the song "She". There is also a walk through the seasons scene which starts with a pregnant woman and ends with the same woman holding a young child.
• The Mask of Zorro begins and ends with a man recounting his adventures to his baby, seeing his wife, and saying that he never did anything that foolish again.
• Saving Private Ryan opens and ends with a shot of the American flag.
• The Other Boleyn Girl starts and ends with 3 children playing in a meadow.
• Forrest Gump starts and ends with a shot of a floating feather.
• The Jerk ends with the hero singing and dancing on their porch just like at the start.
• The 1932 drama Grand Hotel opens with a character stating of the title locale: "People come, people go...nothing ever happens." At the film's end, and following numerous dramatic episodes, the same character repeats the line with unknowing irony.
• Serenity starts and ends with majestic, sweeping shots of the ship, quickly interrupted by a part falling off the ship and Mal asking "What was that?"
  • Before the opening credits, The Operative makes a short speech about The Power of Love. At the end, Mal makes a short speech about the importance of love.
  • In the beginning, Mal is telling Simon that River has to go on a job to earn her stay on the ship. Simon, of course, says that what he does should pay for both of them, and then Mal says that she should learn from his fine example. She winds up being his new pilot since their previous one died.
• The Maiden Heist begins with Christopher Walken staring in wonder at a beloved painting. It ends with a guard at the Danish museum looking at the fake painting and getting the same reaction.
• An alternate ending for 28 Days Later has the protagonist dying in a hospital, having woken up in one at the beginning of the film.
• The Searchers begins with the camera moving from a darkened interior, through an opening door, to the spectacular vista of the Utah desert. The reverse happens at the end.
• The Bourne Ultimatum ends with Jason Bourne being shot at from behind, falling into water, and being lost and presumed dead by his pursuers. This directly mirrors the events preceding the first film, where we first meet Bourne being rescued from the ocean, having been shot in the back and left for dead by Wombosi and his men.
  • And like The Bourne Identity, it turns out that he's not quite dead although unlike TBI, Bourne swims away under his own power in TBU.
• When Trumpets Fade begins with Manning giving his wounded friend Bobby a piggyback ride. The film ends with Manning being given a piggyback ride by Sanderson.
• Total Recall begins and ends with Quaid and Melina looking towards the Martian horizon.
• The Men Who Stare at Goats begins with a flashback of General Hopgood attempting to run through a wall... and failing. At the end, it features Bob attempting to do the same thing... and succeeding.
• Pulp Fiction begins and ends with Pumpkin (AKA Ringo) and Honey Bunny.
  • Interestingly, watch the film in chronological order and you get the same effect: The first scene has young Butch receiving his father's watch, the last scene has him retrieve it from his apartment.
    • Yes, except, not at all : First, the last scene in chronological order is the one where Butch and Fabienne leave the town. Second, the first scene is the one where Vincent and Jules talk about Amsterdam ... OK, Butch received the watch long before the 'So, tell me about the Hash Bar.' scene. But in movie, it was show as a dream that happens way later in the movie ... Not the same actors, not the same context, not the same day, not the same ... everything ... doesn't look like a Book Ends very much ...
• American Beauty begins and ends with an aerial shot of the residential street the majority of the story takes place at.
• Shaun of the Dead is bookended with shots of the title character shambling in a zombie-like fashion after waking up in the morning.
• V for Vendetta begins and ends with a British landmark getting blown up to the tune of the 1812 Overture on November 5th. The fact that everything else is so different between the two events shows just how much can happen in a year.
• Starship Troopers, the movie, begins with Rico watching the ad to enlist as soldier, and ends with him starring in an otherwise identical ad.
• Lawrence of Arabia begins with Lawrence's death in a reckless motorcycle accident. The rest of the film, which is told in flashback, ends with Lawrence being driven along a road in a jeep, while a man on a motorcycle speeds by and recklessly passes him.
• Glengarry Glen Ross starts and ends with a shot of a passing train.
• Blue Velvet begins with shots of rose gardens and smiling firemen and ends with the same images.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: A particularly sad example involving a clock.
• Pretty Woman: The Happy Man walks by both near the beginning of the film and at the end, telling us that this is Hollywood, the Land of Dreams, and asking, "what's your dream?" The first time his appearance is ironic, the second time it is meant to be taken at face value.
• Hellboy Compare the opening monologue:

Dr. Trevor Bruttenholm: What is it that makes a man a man? Is it his origins, the way things start? Or is it something else, something harder to describe?

• • To the ending monologue:

Agent John Myers: What makes a man a man? A friend of mine once wondered. Is it his origins? The way he comes to life? I don't think so. It's the choices he makes. Not how he starts things, but how he decides to end them.

• The Lovely Bones has Susie's narration of "My name is Salmon, like the fish. First name, Susie. I was fourteen years old when I was murdered on December 6th, 1973." said near the beginning and at the end of the movie.
• The Av Club review of the Marmaduke movie notes that it book ends itself with a fart joke. Which pretty much sums it up.
• The Big Red One Begins with TheSargent (played by Lee Marvin) stabbing a German claiming that the armistice has been signed at the end of World War I, and returns to base to find out that it actually had. Repeated almost exactly at the end of World War Two but when he finds out the war ended, he goes back and saves the life of the man he just stabbed.
• Eight Legged Freaks starts and ends with Harland's radio broadcast.
• Shane begins with him riding into the valley on a clear morning and ends with him riding away in the middle of the night.
• The King and the Clown begins with Jaeng-sang and Gong-gil on a tight-rope doing their usual routine and ends with their final performance.
• Five Hundred Days of Summer has three, Tom examining his relationship with Summer in each. The Simon and Garfunkel song "Bookends" even plays during one of them.
• The film Temple Grandin begins and ends with Temple looking right into the camera and saying "My name is Temple Grandin!" While in the beginning, she was standing in front of a closed room, at the end it's in front of a wide-open sky.
• The first and last shot in the movie Daybreakers is that of a bat flying overhead.
• X2: X-Men United closes with Jean Grey (in narration) giving the same spiel about evolution that Professor X narrates over the opening of the first film.
• I Robot has a scene at the end that serves as a perfect mirror for the drawing Sonny made to show Spooner his dream, although YMMV on whether or not this counts, as the scene where Sonny creates the drawing is more towards the film's middle.
  • Also, it's worth pointing out that, when Sonny first creates the drawing, Spooner and Calvin assume the man in the picture is him, but Sonny says it's Spooner. At the end of the film, the man leading the robots to freedom turns out to indeed be Sonny.
• The Prestige: Every magic trick consists of three parts, or acts...
• Going the Distance has in the beginning and towards the end, Dan contemplating that there are no baby pigeons in New York and Garrett playing Pac Man at the bar.
• DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story begins and ends with a commercial for a successful gym.
• A subtle one in Enchanted was that the first song sung in the film contained the lyrics "I've been dreaming of a true love's kiss." The last song sung by Carrie Underwood in the Where Are They Now? Epilogue contained the lyrics "I've been dreaming of a true love's kiss."
• The Last Picture Show opens on a shot of the Royal Theater and pans left along Anarene’s main street. The closing shot of the film is the exact reverse -- the camera pans right and pauses on the closed and shuttered movie house before fading to black.
• Averted in Outlander where even though the final version of the film ends with a Viking Funeral, a deleted alternate opening was actually originally going to begin with one too.
• Also averted in the film We Were Soldiers where an alternate ending actually shows a lizard emerging out of its hiding spot just right after the Americans leave Vietnam (when the Americans arrived there at the very beginning of the film, the lizard ran away).
• Labyrinth begins with a barn owl flying into a park in time to observe the arrival of the heroine, and ends with it flying away after observing her and her newfound friends celebrating her triumph at her house. In the interim, this creature has been revealed as the villain's shapeshifted form.
• The ending of Halloween 4 would have applied this to the entire series, had the film bombed and no more sequals been made.
  • The theatrical cut of Zombie's Halloween 2 ends with Laurie committed to Smith's Grove, and having the same vision young Michael had at the beginning of the film.
• The Lives of Others features a play written by Dreymann, one of the film's protagonists,at the very the beginning and towards the end. The first time, it takes place in Soviet-controlled Berlin and Dreymann's girlfriend has a lead female role. The second time it's shown, Communism has fallen, Christa-Maria has been Driven to Suicide and the play has gone a drastic change in tone and costume.
• The Da Vinci Code begins and ends with a dead body in the Louvre. The first time it's Jacques Saunière's. The second time it's the corpse of Mary Magdalene, whose tomb was hidden under the Louvre by the Priory of Sion.
• The Saw series begins and ends in the same Disgusting Public Toilet. In addition, the first shot of the main character in the series is also the last via the last of the series' trademark flashback montages.
• The plot of Metropolitan is set in motion when the protagonist shares a cab with the other main characters, after they refuse to steal it from him. Late in the movie, he hails a cab, in the process stealing it from another person he barely notices.
• Mystery Team begins and ends with the eponymous trio getting a new case.
• The first piece of music that plays during the end credits of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - Part 2 sounds exactly like the opening music of the first Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.
  • In the first book, Harry arrives at the Dursleys when he was just a baby, brought there by Hagrid on Sirius' bike. In the last book, Harry leaves the Dursleys when he was an adult, being taken away by Hagrid on Sirius' bike. Hagrid even lampshades this.
  • Also, near the end of the first movie, Harry hugs Hagrid. Near the end of the last movie, they embrace again.
• Shinjuku Incident has Jackie Chan's character Steelhead save detective Kitano from drowning in the sewer near the beginning, and ends with Kitano trying to save Steelhead from dying in the same way.
• The live-action Transformers films actually does this twice: In the first film, we see two Decepticons named Scorponok and Barricade, who only appear during the first half of this film, and they both disappear about halfway. However, Scorponok eventually returns during the climax of Revenge of the Fallen, and Barricade does the same in Dark of the Moon, where they are both immediately killed off.
  • Each film also begins and ends with Optimus' narration. Had the line not been cut, the ending of the third film would have even reflected the closing line of the first (the Dark of the Moon line survives in the novelization):

Optimus: [Transformers] I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message to any surviving Autobots taking refuge among the stars. We are here. We are waiting. Optimus: [Dark of the Moon] I am Optimus Prime, and I send this message out into the universe. We are here. We are home.

• The Mouse That Roared actually begins with the Columbia Pictures Torch Lady being scared off by a mouse on her pedestal and dropping her torch, and ends with the same scene shown in reverse.
• Walkabout has Bilingual Bonus Book Ends. The film opens with the sound of a roulette wheel, and the croupier's call to place bets "Fait vos jeux, mes sieurs, dames." (Make your plays, sirs, madams.) It ends with the printed text "Rien ne va plus" (Nothing goes any more), the croupier's call for no more bets. Perhaps a reference to the way that the protagonists lives were thrown to the whims of fortune by the events at the start of the film, and to the way that this has now reached a conclusion, and perhaps not the happiest one.
• Near the start of Tomboy Laure introduces herself as a boy named "Michael" and at the end as "Laure".
• My name is Quintus Daius. I am a Centurion of Rome. And this is neither the beginning, nor the end of my story.
• A musical version in The Red Violin. The first music of the film is a woman humming a few notes -- "Anna's Theme." The woman's voice changes, gradually, to the tone of the violin playing that same melody. That melody becomes the basic theme for the violin's long journey through the years. Then, the End Titles music is the violin returning to that simple melody, for it to shift back gradually into Anna's voice.
• The opening and closing lines of Killshot are both Mickey Rourke's character reciting/narrating the set of rules that he lives by as a contract killer, albeit in truncated form the second time around.

You gotta know what you're doing when you go in. You gotta have it figured out. Those are the rules. How you get in, how you get out. How many shots you're gonna need. Make sure you know where everybody is. Make sure nobody sees you. Don't hang around. Don't get interested. And you don't make mistakes.

• Flight 180 from Final Destination 5. Yes, the same flight 180. "Boy, it's a good thing we survived that whole bridge collapse and aftermath, now we can enjoy our flight to Paris. Hey, why are those students getting kicked off the plane...?"
• The Social Network begins and ends with a more grounded female character assessing Mark Zuckerberg, specifically whether he is an "asshole".
  • An Ironic Echo version - the movie begins with Mark working with Eduardo on Facemash after being dumped by Erica. The movie ends with Mark trying to friend Erica on Facebook after seeing how much of a chasm had grown between him and Eduardo.
• Love Actually begins and ends with the arrival's gate at Heathrow airport, with shots of families and friends reuniting.
• The Guardian begins and ends with narration of the legend of the Guardian.
• The Clint Eastwood film Dirty Harry begins and ends with Harry facing down a criminal and doing a version of the 'do you feel lucky punk?' speech. In the opening sequence he's phrasing it to intimidate the criminal and keep him from taking a shot. In the final sequence, he's phrasing it to get the killer to take a shot at him so he has an excuse to kill him.
• William Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet begins and ends with a news broadcast on TV.
• In De Laatste Zomer (The Last Summer) the film starts with the main character at home during the start of summer vacation. After a fair bit of drama and adventure the film finishes with him sitting at home again and with his family returning from their vacation.
• Taxi Driver begins and ends with Travis Bickle driving his cab on depressing, nighttime streets.
• Richie Rich has the titular character wanting to play baseball for a group of kids but is pulled away before he could in the beginning of the movie. The end of the film has Richie playing baseball with that same group of kids.
• The original Hitcher begins and ends with C. Thomas Howell's character lighting a match, although photographed in very different ways.
• The Wizard of Oz begins and ends in a sepia toned Kansas.
• Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger vs. Space Sheriff Gavan the Movie, Gavan first appears to the Gokaigers beaming down from his spaceship, landing on top of a flight of stairs. At the ending, for old time's sake, Gavan, with Battle Kenya and Denzi Blue, poses on top of those same stairs before saying goodbye.
• Lost in Translation starts - discounting the absolute first scene of a sleeping Charlotte - with Bob arriving in Tokyo and ends with him leaving.

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Remember that any and every film has both a beginning and an end.