Spoiler Warning: There are some major spoilers for A House of Dynamite below. If you’ve yet to watch the 2025 Netflix movie, please turn back before you cross the point of no return.
When word first broke that Kathryn Bigelow was making a movie about the start of a nuclear war, a lot of us circled its release date on the 2025 movie schedule. Being able to watch a new thriller from the Academy Award-winning filmmaker behind The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and Point Break from the comfort of your own couch seemed like a good reason to keep a Netflix subscription.
Now that the dust has settled following the release of the apocalyptic thriller that critics say “packs a wallop,” and we’re making sense of the polarizing A House of Dynamite ending, it seems like a good time to break down those final, ambiguous moments, as well as what the film’s screenwriter has to say about it and the polarizing fallout.
What Happens At The End Of A House Of Dynamite
Before we get into what writer Noah Oppenheim and director Kathryn Bigelow have to say about people being upset about A House of Dynamaite’s ending, let’s first break down what happens in those final moments of the new thriller.
Throughout the movie, we see the same series of events – a nuclear warhead has been fired on the United States from an unknown location somewhere across the world – from three different perspectives over a stretch of about 20 minutes. Each of these chapters – “Inclination is Flattening,” “Hitting a Bullet with a Bullet,” and “A House Filled with Dynamite” – complements the others while also adding more context with extensive scenes in the White House Situation Room, STRATCOM, and the United States President’s motorcade.
Though we find out near the end of the first chapter that the missile is heading towards the Midwest, later confirmed to be Chicago, we never find out for sure if the bomb hit the “Windy City” or if it actually exploded instead of being a dud. It’s left ambiguous so that we, the audience, can come to our own conclusions.
What A House Of Dynamite’s Writer Says About The Ending
Conventional movie wisdom tells us that if a gun, or a nuclear missile, in the case of A House of Dynamite, is fired, we’re going to see it explode. We’ve seen countless great war movies and riveting political thrillers where death and destruction were on full display. But that’s not the case here, and that was always part of the plan. As screenwriter Noah Oppenheim told Deadline in November 2025:
We were in agreement on the ending from the very beginning. And the reason for that is simple. We understood that there would be some people who craved the morbid satisfaction of seeing a CGI mushroom cloud, or maybe an orgy of many CGI mushroom clouds. We also understood that there would be some people who would want the relief of it all turning out to be some false alarm, and the disaster is narrowly averted, and we all go back to our lives.
Oppenheim’s rationale behind leaving things ambiguous when it comes to the fate of Chicago (and the world, for that matter) in A House of Dynamite probably won’t change the minds of those who are upset about the ending, but he does make a point. As he continued:
But in our view, both of those endings would have been cop outs, and, more importantly, they’re not really the appropriate ending for the story we’re trying to tell. We’re trying to tell a story about this machinery that exists and invite the audience into a conversation and a debate so that people finish the movie and they ask themselves, regardless of what happens in the next frame, ‘Is this the world they want to live in, where what they just saw could kick into motion at any moment?’ And if it’s not the world they want to live in, what kind of ending do we want for ourselves collectively?
Well, Oppenheim’s desire for audiences to start a dialogue after finishing the movie certainly has happened, as the internet was immediately flooded with comments from people on both sides of the discussion, claiming why they were right.
Director Kathryn Bigelow Has Made Similar Comments
Noah Oppenheim’s comments about the ambiguous nature of A House of Dynamite ending with one of the biggest movie cliffhangers in years are very much in line with everything director Kathryn Bigelow has said about the movie since its release. In an interview with Netflix Tudum, breaking down the conclusion, Bigelow sounded like she knew audiences would be divided:
I want audiences to leave theaters thinking, ‘OK, what do we do now?’ This is a global issue, and of course, I hope against hope that maybe we reduce the nuclear stockpile someday. But in the meantime, we really are living in a house of dynamite. I felt it was so important to get that information out there, so we could start a conversation. That’s the explosion we’re interested in — the conversation people have about the film afterward.
Though much of the conversation about the ending has been about the fate of the world being left up in the air, Bigelow does bring up a good point about living in a reality in which the chance of nuclear war isn’t zero percent. And if the movie, like Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid games, can get us to speak out about the threat of nuclear armageddon, then so be it.
So, Did A House Of Dynamite’s Creative Team Make The Right Call?
Though there’s an argument to be made for needing to see the bomb go off in A House of Dynamite and having some kind of conclusion about the fate of the world, Noah Oppenheim and Kathryn Bigelow both make a good point about taking a different path. Remember, the point of this movie wasn’t about seeing death and destruction, but instead a conversation about this scenario not being so far-fetched.
There are so many movies with disaster-porn shots of cities (and the world) being destroyed. And as cool as it would have been to see a nuclear blast vaporize Lake Michigan and turn the city of Chicago into a wasteland, that wasn’t the point of this movie. So, yeah, the creative team did make the right call. Not everyone feels this way, but that’s the beauty of cinema.
While A House of Dynamite didn’t give audiences the big explosion everyone wanted to see, there’s the upcoming book-to-screen adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario by Denis Villeneuve that’ll certainly do the trick.
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