Tearing Through the Movie Screen

"The girl is about to forgive the guy for the cliché misunderstanding... after she battles these robots."

"Oh, darling. I knew nothing would ever tear us apart."

— Female Actress moments before the theater screen is ripped by Plankton, SpongeBob SquarePants, "F.U.N."

An action scene tears through a movie theater while a movie is playing. In the process, the movie screen gets torn, interrupting the action.

The audience may groan in disappointment, but there's bound to be a gullible individual who thinks the action is part of the movie, particularly when the movie is being shown as a 3-D Movie — they'll assume the effects are just that good. Alternatively, they might call the movie's "effects" out as obviously unrealistic.

Often, whatever's playing on the screen will connect to the interrupting action scene in an ironic fashion. For example, the audience is watching a classic monster movie, which gets interrupted by a real monster barging in. On the other hand, it might be so unrelated to the film in question that it's laughable. If the audience is watching a romance film, expect the tear to take place right before the main couple is going to kiss (likely splitting the screen right in between their faces).

This is much more common with scenes taking place in theatrical films, or other areas with soft screens, than when people watch something on television or play a video game, since projector screens are much easier to tear from behind than a glass screen. However, it can still occur when something crashes through a TV, video game console, or other media device.

Subtrope of Disrupting the Theater. Compare Paddleball Shot, for when actual 3D movies make things appear like they're coming out of the screen. Also compare Sheet of Glass.

Note that this is for characters physically tearing through movie screens, not fictional characters or objects from that movie coming out of them. The object must exist in real life before it crashes through the screen.

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Examples:

Advertising

• There was a bumper that played on Nickelodeon that showed a train actually bursting through the screen and driving up the aisle of the theater. This is a reference to one of the first films ever recorded (The Arrival of the Train At Ciotat), which showed a train coming towards the camera; reportedly, audiences thought the train would burst through the screen and into the theater.

Anime & Manga

• Doraemon: Nobita's Chronicles of the Moon Exploration: The giant rabbit kaiju made its introduction to the audience by attacking a theatre in Moonbit Town (showing an Indiana Jones-esque Show Within a Show) and bursting through the screen halfway through, causing dozens of terrified Moonbits to flee the aisles in panic.

Asian Animation

• In the Lamput episode "Martial Art", Lamput and the docs end up behind the movie theater's screen when the former realizes his popcorn has been destroyed. This angers him so much that he punches the docs through the movie screen during a part of the film where the characters are fighting each other; the docs have objects on them and ripped clothes that make them resemble the characters from the movie, and the audience cheers for them.

Film — Animated

• In Chicken Little, a giant globe rolls through a movie theater, tearing through a screening of Raiders of the Lost Ark as it plays the Signature Scene of Indiana getting chased by the giant boulder.
• Escape from Planet Earth: As Gary crash-lands on Earth, a couple at a nearby drive-in theater are watching a film about an alien invasion. The lady complains about the film not being in 3D like her apparent boyfriend says it is. As the film shows an alien ship approaching the camera, Gary's ship flies through the screen and over the couple, and she assumes it to be part of the film.
• In the Vídeo Brinquedo film Little & Big Monsters, the real monster tears through the screen while the scientists are watching a monster movie.
• In Phineas and Ferb The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension, Candace's parents mistake the robots coming through the screen as part of the (romantic) movie, with Lawrence commenting on how great the 3D is.
• Soul: The corrupted 22 and Joe tear through the theater screen during Terry's award ceremony, prompting the Jerry to take Terry's award back.

Film — Live-Action

• In The A-Team, a movie is being shown in the facility where Murdoch is being held. The screen shows a vehicle driving along a desert road, straight at the camera. As the vehicle fills the entire screen, an actual car crashes through the wall and the screen.
• In the 1993 remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Giant Nancy peeks from behind a drive-in movie screen calling for her husband Harry. The movie showing: the original Attack of the 50 ft Woman.
• Climactic scene near the end of Bachelor Party, where a school bus drives through a movie screen where a 3D sci-fi movie is playing.
• Final Destination 4: The explosion that triggers the mall collapse in a vision arises behind a movie theater, and goes off in perfect synch with a bomb's detonation in the action flick playing on screen. In this case, the perfect timing of flames simultaneously blasting on and out of the screen is justified by Death, which engineers such random-seeming mayhem in this franchise, being a Troll.
• Inglourious Basterds: Shosanna Dreyfus enacts her revenge upon the Nazis by hosting a film premiere for them at her theater, and then locking the doors and lighting a fire right behind the screen, which quickly grows to consume the rest of the theater thanks to all of the highly flammable material everywhere. She even takes the time to record a final message that she then splices into the film, timed to play just before the flames burst through the screen:
  Shosanna: I have a message for Germany: that you are all going to die!
• Johnny Dangerously features this at the end when Danny Vermin is shot and falls through a screen. He does this in time with the action on the movie too.
• In A Muppet Family Christmas, the gang watches an old home movie of the Muppets as babies. At the end, Baby Animal pops out of a present, causing the audience to go "Aww, Animal." Then adult Animal rips through the screen, and the audience responds with "Aw, Animal!" in a more disappointed tone.
• The Muppet Movie's main plot is told via a Framing Device, namely the Muppets watching a dramatization of their origin story in a movie theater. Just as the In-Universe film ends, Sweetums tears through the screen, capping the film and cuing the credits.
• In The Sandlot, while Benny is getting chased by the huge mastiff (known to him only as The Beast), both of them tear through a movie theater screen, into the audience. Coincidentally, the theater is showing Lon Chaney Jr's transformation into a werewolf from The Wolf Man.
• Twister has a variant with an F-4 Tornado tearing up a movie screen during an airing of The Shining. Downplayed in that everyone had already fled the drive-in theater, because of the Tornado.

Music

• Overlapping with Video Full of Film Clips, in the video of "Born To Raise Hell", Motörhead, Ice-T, and Whitfield Crane tear through the screen at a theater showing Airheads, which featured the song as its theme.
• As part of the Godzilla (1998) soundtrack, the beginning of Jamiroquai's "Deeper Underground" music video, the audience is watching a scene of the movie when Godzilla's foot walks towards them underwater as if it's part of the movie until it smashes through the screen, bringing actual flood water.

Theme Parks

• Muppet*Vision 3D plays with this trope multiple times; at one point it is inverted when a penguin from the orchestra is sucked into the movie by Muppet Labs’ Vacuu-Muppet, it is inverted again when the projectionist, the Swedish Chef, uses a cannon to destroy the movie screen and part of the theater, and is played semi-straight at the end when Kermit uses a fire truck’s ladder to extend into the theater through a hole in the wall where the screen was in order to address the audience, despite the fact he is is still, technically, on the screen. Yes, it’s just as meta as it sounds.
• Mickey's PhilharMagic features a similar example, aa it ends with Donald Duck getting blasted out of a tuba, past the audience, and straight through a brick wall.

Toys

• Cats Vs Pickles: One advert for the toyline starts with the cats at the theater watching a movie. Suddenly, one of the titular pickles bursts out through the theater screen, which scares the cats.

Video Games

• Sonic Adventure: During Amy's Hot Shelter level, you eventually reach a dead-end room with a puzzle for you to solve. The monitors on the walls initially display nothing but static, but once you solve the puzzle, they change to display footage of ZERO angrily shaking its fists at you. A moment later, the real ZERO crashes through the monitors and starts hunting you down; luckily, you can escape through the hole he just created.
• In LEGO Batman 2, in one cutscene, the Joker point at a giant TV screen with his face on it, asking "What's he gonna say? What's gonna come out of that mouth of his?" and then, Batman smashes through the screen, at the exact spot where the mouth was.

Western Animation

• Big Mouth: In "Am I Gay?," Coach Steve, blinded from pinkeye, tears through the movie screen during a showing of Paul Bunyan: NYC because he's trying to find a Walgreen's. He also seems to think he's actually in the setting of the movie.
• Camp Lakebottom: In "Cluck of the Were-Chicken", the campers at Camp Sunnysmiles are watching a 3-D movie about a were-chicken when an actual were-chicken tears through the screen. Buttsquat complains about how unrealistic the special effects are.
• Futurama: In "I Dated a Robot," the army of Lucy Liu robots march and tear through a movie screen playing the in-universe Lucy Liu movie Charlie's Angels III.
• In the Jem episode "The Jem Jam" during The Misfits song "Gimme a Gimmick", Pizzazz tears through the movie screen while the others are watching highlights from their past exploits.
• Mickey Mouse (2013): In the episode "Black and White", Mickey has a fight with the physical manifestation of his fears and cowardice in a movie theater. The fight ends with the two bursting through the screen of a horror movie, scaring everyone in the audience.
• My Life as a Teenage Robot: In the episode "See No Evil", Jenny who is blind from removing her robotic eyes accidentally crashes through a movie screen while a 3-D monster movie was playing. The audience initially think she's part of the movie until the lights come on.
  Kid in theater: Hey, she's not a 3-D effect! She's just three-dimensional! [Cue boos and popcorn throwing from the audience.]
• In the Regular Show episode "Grave Sights", while the park is playing a zombie film for Movie Night, real zombies suddenly appear, and the patrons mistake them as being 3D effects from the movie.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: In the episode The Gathering Gloom, Mayor Nettles hosts a movie night at the cemetery to spark some support for her. It goes well... right up until a hideous ghoul tears the screen in half and scares away pretty much everyone.
• The Simpsons:
  • In the episode "Itchy And Scratchy Land", while watching "Pinitchio", after Bart and Lisa wonder if they're becoming desensitized to all the violence, a robot Scratchy bursts through the movie screen in front of them and falls down. Its head then pops off its body and lands on the ledge above it, leaking fake blood everywhere. Bart and Lisa's reaction?
    Bart: Wanna get a snow cone?
  • Marge tears through the cinema screen to kill Nazis during the Inglourious Basterds parody segment in the episode "The Fight Before Christmas".
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • Inverted in the episode "F.U.N." Plankton runs into the movie screen to escape, tearing the screen apart and stopping the movie right after the female lead tells her lover that nothing could ever tear them apart. Unfortunately for him, he forgets that there’s nothing but a wall behind the screen.
  • "Bumper to Bumper" features two teenage fish watching a movie called Goin' Bananas 3 in 3D. The movie starts with a fish driving towards the camera, saying "Here I am! I'm comin' at you like your worst nightmare!" SpongeBob and Mrs. Puff, who are taking a driving test, promptly crash through the TV and the wall of the house. The two fish laugh it off, assuming it's a 3D effect.
• In the short, "Lifestyles of the Rich and Rotten" from the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "It's Buster Bunny Time", Montana Max cancels his interview with Buster and Babs, so they decide to tour his mansion without him. Monty then orders Arnold the Pit Bull to find the two rabbits and kick them out for trespassing. At one point in the episode, Buster and Babs watch 3D movies in Monty's private theater, and Arnold tears through the projection screen. Buster and Babs duck as Arnold pounces at them, causing him to land in the popcorn machine and burn his butt. Babs then comments on how life-like the 3D movies are, almost swearing they were real.

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