Warning: The following article contains major spoilers for MaXXXine.

MaXXXine director Ti West explains how the film's final shot harkens back to the end credits of the previous movie of the X trilogy, Pearl. In the final scene of the movie, Maxine Minx (Mia Goth) is now a successful movie star after stopping a string of murders enacted by her own father (Simon Prast), which became part of the promotional tour for her breakout role in The Puritan II. She is now on the set of her latest movie and discusses her newfound success with director Elisabeth Bender (Elizabeth Debicki). The film then cuts to a shot of Maxine's severed prosthetic head as it heads to the end credits, slightly calling back Pearl (Mia Goth) looking at the camera and smiling, uninterrupted, in the last film.

In an interview with USA Today, West states that the final shot was an image he had in his mind for a long time. The situation feels absurd since Maxine's goal has always been to become a star and make it on the big screen, which slightly calls back to how Pearl kept smiling in front of the camera, now being turned into a severed head. Check out his full comments on the matter below:

[The MaxXXine moment was an image] I always had in my mind as having made it in Hollywood. That was such a goal for her, was to become a star. There's something about the end of ‘Pearl,’ about her smiling and trying to keep smiling, that’s representative of the movie as a whole. And there's something also about this severed head on the bed being photographed that's representative of the absurdity of it all as well.

How MaXXXine Wraps Up The X Trilogy

Maxine Realizes a Lifelong Dream

While Pearl's events aren't directly referenced in MaXXXine, the third film in the trilogy does call back the events of X for a substantial part of the plot. The mysterious killer known as the "Night Stalker" sends her a VHS tape of the pornographic film that she shot before the events of X occurred, which is now police evidence. Private detective John Labat (Kevin Bacon) also vows to expose what Maxine did in the first film before her career takes off, which puts her on edge with LAPD detectives (played by Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan) who investigate a series of murders linked to people close to Maxine.

It turns out that the "Night Stalker" was a red herring, and the real individual responsible for the murders was Maxine's father, a televangelist priest who has been looking for his daughter for some time and attempts to "save" her from the so-called satanic Hollywood studio system. While their relationship was only briefly hinted at in X, the movie pulls back the curtain and showcases the lengths he will go to regain his daughter, even if it means committing the most heinous crimes. After a confrontation between the two and a group of disciples, Maxine kills her father, ending his reign of terror in the streets of Los Angeles.

Both Ti West's X and Pearl were shot back-to-back, and in secret, with the prequel announced at the end of the first film through a post-credits trailer.

Of course, her career does not suffer because her father was directly linked to the Night Stalker murders, and it actually helped her become the star she had always wanted. Interestingly enough, her life rights were sold for an eventual film adaptation, which could pull back the curtain on her time in X, which she only revealed to her entertainment lawyer, Teddy Knight (Giancarlo Esposito). While audiences don't know what happened next, it's safe to say that MaXXXine has showcased how everyone will know who Maxine Minx is by the end of the movie.