2019's "Escape Room" is a wild ride with a bonkers ending, and you can say the same for
its 2021 sequel, "Tournament of Champions." From mysterious planes to the meaning behind those
strange shipping containers, this is the ending of "Escape Room: Tournament of Champions" explained.
At the end of 2019's "Escape Room," we learn that the evil Minos organization
behind the movie's killer game chose each participant for their status as a sole survivor
of various disasters. As the Games Master at the end of the first movie put it,
“They wanted to know if luck had anything to do with it."
"Tournament of Champions" introduces a host of new characters, who, like Ben and Zoey,
have done this dance before. None are particularly keen on repeating the experience.
Soon enough, we learn about the qualities that got these characters sucked into Minos' machinations
in the first place. Rachel can't feel physical pain, and likely faced horrifying psychological
torture during her game. Brianna survived a game featuring notable influencers. Nathan entered the
game with fellow priests, to test his faith. By picking specific groups of people,
Minos wants to test hypotheses about faith, pain, fame, empathy, and survival. They don't care who
gets hurt in the process, and if it makes them a hefty sum of money? All the better.
While many things still aren't clear at the end of 2019's "Escape Room," we can say with certainty
that Zoey and Ben aren't still trapped in an escape room when they leave the first game alive.
But their victory is still short-lived, as we then see Minos operatives planning
what seems to be their next game with Zoey and Ben's intercepted flight information.
So while the two champions may be back to their old lives, that doesn't mean Minos isn't still
watching them. And given the number of people involved in the airplane testing at the first
film's close, it's safe to say that Minos isn't exactly a small-time operation.
It's clear that Minos has people in the "real world" manipulating things from the outside,
whether they're directly involved in Ben and Zoey's lives or placed on the
outskirts to watch and report back. Furthermore,
Minos is capable of both hijacking a plane and a subway train. One private
company can't do that without some high-level connections, no matter how evil they are.
What's more, since we don't see most of the "dead" characters actually die, there's no telling which
players might have been Minos double agents from the start. The players first suspect Ben,
after all. Could they have been right all along? Or is someone else pulling the strings?
The deaths of the first film seem pretty cut-and-dry by the time that story draws to a
close. But in light of the events of "Tournament of Champions," we have to question everything.
If Amanda can survive hurtling into an endless abyss, who's to say that other apparently deceased
characters didn't also cheat death? And which ones might have been involved with Minos from the jump?
In "Tournament of Champions," we're led to believe that everyone except Zoey, Amanda,
and Ben bite the dust. But how true is that, really? As Amanda tells Zoey, if she didn't see
the deaths herself, they didn't happen. Since Rachel checks out Theo's electrocuted body to
determine he's actually dead, he's the likeliest actual casualty. But the other deaths are murkier.
After Nathan saves Rachel from quicksand, he sinks to his presumed death. But that's how we
initially lose Ben, too. We later discover Ben survived, to serve as leverage for Zoey
to follow Minos' bidding. It wouldn't be surprising if Nathan survived too, then.
That brings us to Rachel and Brianna. We watch as a monsoon of acid rain assaults them,
but the film quickly cuts to Zoey freaking out. The steam and smoke make it impossible
to tell what really happens to them, which could be another trick. As Amanda says,
"If you didn't see it, it didn't happen." So are they really gone?
What the heck is going on with Amanda? She shows up out of the blue toward the end of the movie,
claiming Minos forced her into designing the game that Zoey just played.
That's an interesting sentiment for her to express,
considering Amanda doesn't come close to beating the game in the first film.
As an evil organization, Minos doesn't seem likely to applaud anything less than first place,
and Amanda was one of the first few "casualties" in the 2019 film. While it's reasonable to believe
that Minos might force her into designing the latest game -- especially since the game appears
to be Plan B -- it's just as likely that our innocent Amanda has been a Minos plant all along.
While Amanda has mentioned her daughter, we never actually see any flashback clips with Amanda and
Sonya. We do, however, see Amanda's time as a soldier, alongside the other characters' flashback
sequences in the first film. The culmination of events at the end of the film feels way too easy,
as Zoey notes. It's entirely possible that Amanda isn't who she says she is. For all we know,
her daughter Sonya is a total fabrication, invented to hoodwink Zoey into cooperation.
A massive display of huge shipping containers can be glimpsed when the characters escape the creepy
bedroom. They're labeled NYC, BDRM, BCH, and BNK. These letters seem likely to be shorthand for "New
York City, bedroom, beach, and bank" -- in short, the escape rooms Minos throws the characters into
during this go-round. At the top, of course, is our lone subway car. We also see a painting
of an eight-ball, hinting that the original escape rooms might be in this underground bunker as well.
The games have to exist somewhere, of course, but the scope of the subway car and the NYC room
is mind-boggling. Zoey and Ben appear to get on a real subway platform and a real Q train,
as we see it dislodge at the beginning of the movie. That's a massive feat to pull off.
Any New Yorker can tell you that the MTA is a hot mess on a good day, but building, hiding,
and/or usurping an extra track wouldn't exactly go unnoticed — to say nothing of
how Minos lured the other champions onto this particular car without anyone else hopping on.
The fact that Minos pulls off the subway heist of the century speaks to the connections and
tech they have at their disposal. But it also tells us that reality isn't always what it seems.
The subway car is likely a mix of reality and a few Minos adjustments. But what about the police
station? When Zoey and Ben are on their doomed flight and Zoey questions how easy it all seems,
Ben says, "You really think the whole police station was bulls---?" Yes, Ben. Yes, we do.
If there really was a raid on Minos' extracurricular activities, the involved
parties would be high-tailing it to a country without extradition laws, not throwing together
another deadly escape room. So it seems, like everything else, that the news broadcast about
four found bodies and a manhunt is fabricated. That means the guy who steals Zoey's bag and
compass at the beginning of the film is a Minos plant, who lures Zoey and Ben into the specific
subway car. That also means his arrest is an illusion. Given how massive the police station is,
this conspiracy goes dramatically deep -- a staggering number of people must be on the Minos
payroll. There are probably multiple cops pulling the strings and hiding evidence, at Minos' behest.
It's too big of an enterprise not to have those kinds of connections in place.
While killer planes are certainly scary, learning a trusted ally is, in fact, a manipulative liar is
even scarier. When someone talks to a therapist, they expose their vulnerabilities -- to learn that
their therapist is destabilizing their concept of reality would be devastating. Someone with
deep-rooted PTSD from being trapped in a killer escape room would be especially shaken by this.
While it's not abundantly clear that Zoey's therapist is involved with Minos, there are
some pretty shady coincidences surrounding her. First off, there's the lighthouse painting in the
therapist's office, which foreshadows the beach escape room. Then, at the start of the film, the
therapist encourages Zoey to take the trip to NYC with Ben. That's not entirely damning on its own:
Part of a therapist's job is helping patients work through trauma to achieve some level of
normalcy. Let's call this an orange flag, then -- not quite a red flag, but not green, either.
From there, things get worse. Minos originally plans on hoodwinking Ben and Zoey with a hijacked
flight. They move to Plan B when Zoey can't bring herself to get on the plane. What's Plan B? Oh,
just a commandeered subway car. And what's the title of the book the therapist brandishes at
Zoey while accusing her of finding clues in everything? It was called "Free Will: How
to Stop the Train of Negative Thinking." That's a little too much of a coincidence to not be a clue.
It's difficult to say for sure what exactly goes down in "Tournament of Champions,"
due to Minos' love of deception and digital trickery. The "why," however, isn't so muddy.
The "Escape Room" franchise might bear similarities to horror titles like "Cube" and
"Saw," but "Tournament of Champions" has a "Hunger Games" vibe -- specifically, "The Hunger Games:
Catching Fire." Just as that film forces previous Hunger Games winners to do battle,
"Tournament of Champions" pits those who have survived Minos' escape room against each other.
The motivation for the games in both film series is simple: The wealthy view everyone
who isn't part of their high-class circle as entertaining playthings. In "The Hunger
Games," the bloodthirsty elite are the denizens of the Capitol. In the "Escape Room" movies,
it's whoever's paying for a front-row seat to Minos' deadly games. They say that money
can't buy happiness, but apparently it can buy gladiator-style death matches. Through this,
the "Escape Room" series critiques societal stratification and the way wealth corrupts
morality, as well as offering a glimpse at the horrific things people can do with technology,
if they're so cruelly inclined. "Our customers are some of the most
powerful people in the world, but every year, they demand more."
Among all of the perks privilege can buy is anonymity:
Minos and all of its wealthy patrons are able to remain unknown. They hide behind their technology,
torturing kids for fun from an ivory tower while everyone else gets their hands dirty.
In contrast, Zoey and Ben don't have the luxury of disappearing behind a dollar sign.
The "Escape Room" movies deeply explore what it means to be a survivor, and the lengths to which
someone will go to save themselves. Who will fight for others, this series asks, and who will simply
save their own life? The premise of the first film hinges entirely on survival. Each unwilling
participant's "sole survivor" background tells Minos something about who they are,
whether it's Jason killing his best friend or Ben drunkenly (but unintentionally)
killing his friends in a car crash. But something about Zoey saving Ben
continues to pique Minos' interest. While the rest of the champions' games seem to have been
one-and-done experiments, Minos remains fixated on the concept of the survivor. Why else would they
throw previous survivors in one ring to duke it out yet again? The rest of the survivors appear
to be cannon fodder, as Minos' sight remains fixed on Zoey and their desire for her to build them a
new game. Zoey continues to survive, despite the criminally low odds of living through the game.
This makes her the perfect person to design a genuinely unbeatable escape room sequence ... but
she'll never agree to it -- or so we think. Check out one of our newest videos right here!
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