The Princess Bride ending explained: what the final kiss and the grandfather's last line mean

The Princess Bride spends its whole running time training you to hear a two-word phrase as something other than what it says. The last line of the film is a quiet test of whether it worked.

Rob Reiner's 1987 adaptation runs 98 minutes and was written by William Goldman from his own 1973 novel. Inside the story, Cary Elwes and Robin Wright play Westley and Buttercup. Outside it, Peter Falk is a grandfather reading to a sick, sceptical, videogame-playing grandson (Fred Savage) who spends the first half of the film objecting to the kissing and demanding to know where the sports are.

How the last two minutes play

Westley, Buttercup, Inigo, and Fezzik escape Florin on four white horses. Inigo, having finally killed Count Rugen, has run out of a profession, and Westley offers him the Dread Pirate Roberts job. Then the narration takes over for the kiss.

The grandfather reports that since the invention of the kiss there have been "five kisses rated the most passionate, the most pure", and that this one beat all of them. The end. Note what the film doesn't do: it declines to dramatise the kiss at all. You get a rating and a ranking, read aloud by an old man in a cardigan, and that is the whole climax of a love story.

The grandson, who has spent the film complaining about exactly this sort of thing, says nothing.

The two words

"As you wish" is established in the film's first minute. Buttercup gives Westley orders on the farm; he answers with those three words; and the narration explains that what he actually means is "I love you". Everything after that runs on the substitution — most famously when Westley says it while rolling down a ravine, and Buttercup works out who she has just pushed.

So when the grandfather gets to the door, awkwardly checks his pockets, throws up a hand and says "so long", and the boy stops him to suggest he could come back and read it again tomorrow, the grandfather's answer is not politeness.

"As you wish." It's the same sentence Westley uses. Delivered by a man who has just spent an afternoon getting his grandson to sit still for a love story.

What the novel does instead

Goldman's book is framed as an abridgement of a fictional Florinese author, S. Morgenstern, with a fictionalised Goldman cutting the boring parts. Its ending is markedly less tidy:

Read more: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: what the title means — Kesey wrote the novel on night shifts at a psychiatric ward

• The escape is not clean. Inigo's wound reopens, Westley relapses, Fezzik takes a wrong turn, and Buttercup's horse throws a shoe, with pursuit closing behind them.
• The narrator won't commit. Goldman declines to confirm that the four of them get away, then speculates that they probably did, which is not the same thing.
• The frame is bleaker. The novel's outer story is an adult Goldman with a failing marriage, trying and failing to recover a sense of wonder — replaced in the film by Falk and Savage in a bedroom.
• Inigo's future is open. The film hands him a career; the book leaves him bleeding.

The ending Reiner shot and threw away

There was an alternative. Reiner told The Daily Beast that after the grandfather leaves, the boy would leaf through the book, hear something outside, go to the window, and "see the four heroes on the four white horses" suspended in the night sky, waving at him — which would have made the story literally true rather than merely worth believing.

They shot it. It was a nightmare. The horses had to be suspended in the air, and André the Giant weighed over 500 pounds, so he had to be lowered on cables and a pulley rig instead of a horse. Reiner has said that on the scheduled shooting day the Beaujolais Nouveau arrived and André worked through roughly twenty bottles of it. The sequence was cut, on the grounds that the film had to end on "as you wish".

One postscript. In 2020, a lockdown charity remake, Home Movie: The Princess Bride, restaged the scenes with different casts per chapter; Jason Reitman directed the final one, with Rob Reiner playing the grandson in bed and his father Carl Reiner as the grandfather. Carl Reiner died that June, aged 98. The last line he delivered on camera was "as you wish".

Earlier we wrote: Ex Machina ending: what it means, and what Alex Garland has said about Ava's final scene