Times where somebody is Right for the Wrong Reasons in Live-Action Films.
- Advance to the Rear: General Bracknbury is court-martialed for cowardice after retreating in the middle of battle. Brackenbury didn't mean to retreat, and only did so because his horse got out of control (something that his superiors refuse to believe), but he has been cowardly avoiding battle by arranging to fire a few shots at each other without actually making an effort to fight.
- In the 1995 Antonio Banderas and Sylvester Stallone film Assassins, the evil assassin is searching for the escaping female hacker who has the secret data. He knows that she is returning to her apartment in a hurry before going on the run from him, but he doesn't know which apartment is hers, so he tries to find out by touching the front hoods of several parked cars, muttering to himself "Cold... Cold...", until he stumbles upon a car with warm engine. He concludes that must be the hacker's car, and gets the apartment number from the parking spot believing that should be her apartment. However, the hacker was actually traveling on foot for the last 10 or so minutes to get home and didn't use a car. The car with the warm engine belongs to a neighbor who just happened to return home around that time for completely unrelated reasons.
- Back to the Future Part III:
- An inversion: 1955 Doc Brown has Marty set to make his trip into 1885, but Marty protests that he'll hit a billboard with some Indians on it. Doc assures him that since he'll go back in time before reaching the billboard, the Indians won't be there. Marty does as told...and arrives to find actual Indians charging at him in the same place. Doc was Wrong for the Right Reasons. Or you could say this is a straight example, and Marty was Right for the Wrong Reasons.
- A straight example: One of Buford Tannen's mooks reads the "Injun" word on Marty's "moccasins" as "Nee-kay." That's a completely incorrect way to pronounce Nike, the shoe company. It's pretty close to the correct pronunciation of Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.
- In the 2017 film Bad Match, Harris correctly guesses that someone in his life is responsible for hacking his Twitter account and framing him for downloading child pornography. His only mistake is in the identity of the perpetrator, as he assumed it was his recent one-night stand turned stalker when it was actually a teenager he was playing against in an online game.
- Black Lightning (2009):
- A car following Dima signals him to stop. Dima thinks it's somehow related to his dad's heroics and cues Chase Scene. They are actually Kuptsov's assassins looking for the Volga.
- Dima tries to swindle his boss for more pay, saying there may be a competition who wants to hire him. The boss meets one of Kuptsov's assassins who are looking for a delivery boy in a Volga. The boss says he doesn't know one, then calls Dima that his pay is increased.
- Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers: When Ellie is tied up at Sweet Pete's bootlegging facility, she is forced to call Dale and tell him that she's fine, but she leaves an innocent-sounding remark that's supposed to be a coded message for help: that the Rescue Rangers episode "When You Fish Upon a Star" is her favorite. Dale watches said episode and, through he doesn't get the true meaning of the phrase, he still manages to get her message through his jumbled train of thought.Ellie: See? He understood the clue!
Dale: Of course! It was obvious.
Ellie: In "When You Fish Upon a Star", Gadget was double-crossed, just like us.
Dale: Right... Totally!
Chip: You had a completely different take, didn't you?
Dale: Yes, mine involved Thai food. - In Ed Wood, when watching his masterpiece unfold near the very end, Wood concludes that "this is the one they'll remember me for." And it would be his most well-remembered film... just not the way he intended it.
- In Fantasy Island (2020), a later 'flashback' reveals that Patrick refused to run into a burning building to save someone who was trapped inside, insisting they wait for the firefighters. While he does so out of fear, Patrick wasn't any better equipped to run into a burning building than Gwen was when she tried to relive the moment as part of a fantasy, and she passed out from smoke inhalation before even reaching the proper floor.
- In Fireworks Wednesday, Mojdeh accuses her husband Morteza of cheating on her with the neighbour. Although most of her evidence turns out to have an innocent explanation, she is actually correct.
- The Foreigner (2017): Ngoc Minh Quan seeks revenge when his daughter is killed in a terrorist bombing by a group calling themselves "the Authentic IRA". When he learns the politician Liam Hennessy used to be in the original IRA, he keeps attacking him and demanding the bombers' names and locations, even after Hennessy explains that he left the IRA long ago to atone for his sins and he is trying to investigate the bombers to bring them to justice. Hennessy did know who they were because most of them are his old friends and mistress, and his wife is their leader, all of which completely horrifies him when he finds out.
- In Get Out (2017), Rodney quickly realizes that his friend Chris is in trouble, but comes to a laughably wrong conclusion about the kind of trouble Chris is in. He thinks that Chris has wandered into an erotic thriller in the vein of Eyes Wide Shut, one in which rich white people kidnap and brainwash black people for kinky sex games, as opposed to the horror movie about white people stealing black people's bodies to attain immortality that's actually going on.
- Godzilla:
- In Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, after the new incarnation of Godzilla has defeated King Ghidorah, one of the onlookers says "would you look at the size of that thing, it's not going to be friendly." He makes the odd assumption that if a creature is really big, then it is evil, which contradicts the portrayal of other notable Toho giants like Mothra and Sanda, who have been friendly. But the onlooker turns out to be correct, as Godzilla proceeds to go on another destructive rampage.
- In Godzilla (2014), Joe Brody believes the so-called "nuclear meltdown" in 1999 which killed his wife was much more than the government lets on to. However, he thinks it's because the military is testing some sort of secret EMP weapon which had Gone Horribly Wrong fifteen years ago, while in reality, both the destruction of the reactor and the electromagnetic pulses were caused by an escaped kaiju.
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Mark Russell is technically right that rebuilding the ORCA will only cause the Titans to wreck humanity instead of minimizing the future collateral, but the bad scenario doesn't happen for the reasons he originally believed it would. Rather than Monarch using the ORCA to try and pacify the Titans having the complete opposite effect, the ORCA is stolen by eco-terrorists who start using it to awaken as many dormant Titans as possible and let them decimate their human-populated surroundings with the aim of culling humanity — and to make things worse, one of the first Titans that the eco-terrorists unleash is Ghidorah, who later takes awakens all the other Kaiju at once and bends them to his will so that he can thoroughly wipe out all multicellular life on the planet.
- Home Alone:
- Harry and Marv notice something strange about Kevin and begin following in their van to see which house he goes in. When he runs, they conclude something must be up because, in Harry's words, "I knew he looked at me weird! Why would he run?" Of course something is in fact up because Kevin is home alone and recognized Harry as the police officer from the beginning, but the real reason he ran is because two creepy guys in a beat up van were following him down the street.
- Later Buzz isn't worried and declares that Kevin will be just fine because "A, he's not that lucky. 2, they have smoke detectors, and D, they live on the most boring street in the USA where nothing even remotely dangerous will happen." He's right about Kevin being alright, but it's only thanks to the little guy's ingenuity, affinity for traps that would make Jigsaw ask for an autograph, and one tough grandfather.
- Played for Laughs in The Hateful Eight, Chris Mannix states that Joe Gage poisoned the coffee that killed John Ruth. Not on any basis of evidence, just because he's the ugliest guy in the room. When Gage is forced to admit that he did in fact poison the coffee, Mannix excitedly claims that he knew it.note
- In Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Chance says they should just stay at the farm because they've been abandoned. He believes since their owners don't want them any longer, they might as well eke out a living on the farm. Of course, he's right all along that they should have stayed, not because they were abandoned but because their owners were coming back for them in a couple of weeks.
- There was a massive scene in Hot Fuzz where Nick Angel accused Tim Dalton's shopkeeper character of committing the murders, complete with motives. He didn't identify the correct motives, and the shopkeeper had a watertight alibi, BUT - and it's a big but - in TWO twists, not only was he right all along with the shopkeeper being complicit with the murders, but he'd actually name checked all of the REAL motives in passing over the course of his original speech. So it was right for the right reasons, and while he did acknowledge the right reasons, he didn't identify them as being the right reasons until the very climax. He hadn't anticipated the creepy cult running the village to have been immensely petty, enough to murder people over incredibly minor things.
- The Informant plays this as a revelation for audiences. The seemingly moron protagonist Mark Whitacre is speaking to the FBI to expose that the company he works for is defrauding people of millions with price scheming. It turns out Mark was motivated to do this not because it was wrong but because he was also embezzling from the company and hoped to distract investigators from his own crimes and in the ludicrous hope of taking over the company.
- The Island (2005): One of the clones, Jones Three Echo, believes that the Lottery is rigged. This is correct, but it's because the donors need the organs, not because of Jones' numerology conspiracy theory.
- In Just Cause: Bobby Earl Ferguson is convicted because he was beaten into confessing and is a black in the deep south, meaning the jury convicts him out of racism. However, he actually is guilty of the crime he's being convicted for.
- Kingsman: The Golden Circle: When Whiskey breaks the vial of Poppy's antidote, Harry believes he did it intentionally under someone else's orders and shoots him in the head. As it turns out, he was partly correct - Whiskey did break the vial intentionally, but he wasn't working for another organisation, as he was acting on his own when he did it.
- Looper: Kid Blue is able to capture Old Joe by staking out the house of a sex worker the Joe was fond of, reasoning that he might show up to see her. Joe does appear, but he didn't even know that the woman lived there; her child was coincidentally one of the three he had identified as potentially growing up to be the Rainmaker.
- Major Payne does this, as something of a Genius Bonus for people who know how grenades work in real life. Payne scares the kids into going through the obstacle course by pulling the pin from a grenade and ominously counting, forcing the kids to run through the obstacle course as it's the only path to get away from him, but astute viewers will notice he doesn't release the safety leaver to prime the grenade. That grenade's not going off, at least until the Major actuall throws it, and the only one who isn't fooled is Stone... because he believed the grenade was just a fake.
- In Men in Black 3, J travels back in time to 1969 and is pulled over by two racist cops who believe that he stole the car he's driving because it happens to be a very expensive model and Will Smith is black. After Neuralyzing them, J admits to the stupefied cops that he did steal the car, but it had nothing to do with the color of his skin.
- In The Mist, Mrs. Carmody ends up being entirely correct in saying that everyone should stay holed up in the grocery store in order to survive. Her reasoning behind why, however, is completely skewed and ends up creating more problems than it solves given that it involves forming a tyrannical religious cult that is totally down with human sacrifices.
- Monty Python and the Holy Grail plays this for comedy, After Bedivere "proves" that witches are made of wood, he asks the peasants how they can test if someone is made of wood. One of them shouts "Build a bridge out of her!" Bedivere wisely shoots this down—because you can also build bridges out of stone. Additionally, the peasants seemingly did catch a witch, but it seems to have been by blind luck, as none of them can give a good or genuine reason for why she's a witch aside from "we want to burn something."
- In The Prestige, when Olivia begins working for Borden as a spy for Angier, she comes to believe Borden's trick is accomplished using a double as she sees wigs and makeup lying around. Angier thinks these are just plants by Borden to misdirect her. Olivia is actually right, but not in the way she had expected. The makeup and wigs aren't for a double to pretend to be Borden, but for one of the Borden twins (and nobody knows that they're actually twins) to pose as Borden's agent Fallon.
- The Princess Bride:
- Inigo finding Westley is a complex example. Inigo is able to track down Westley when he hears his scream, which echoes all throughout the land, and when questioned by Fezzik how he knows it's Westley, Inigo replies that it is the sound of "ultimate suffering" and Westley is the only one who could feel it that night due to his true love marrying another. Technically, it's because he was just tortured to mostly-death. However, he was tortured purely out of spite because Prince Humperdinck realized Princess Buttercup loved Westley instead of him.
- In the battle-of-wits scene, the Man in Black secretly poisons some wine, sets out two cups, and challenges Vizzini to find the poison. Vizzini takes several rounds of Insane Troll Logic explaining why one or the other cup is clearly poisoned, then eventually grabs one and drinks it. Too bad for him he didn't figure out that he was right about both cups.
- Psycho: Marion's boyfriend and her sister believe that Norman murdered Marion for the forty-thousand dollars she had on her. They're correct that he did murder her, but they're wrong that he did it for the money. Norman didn't even know the money existed and in fact accidentally threw it away while disposing of the evidence; he killed her because he's insane and has a homicidal split-personality.
- In the 2014 film Reasonable Doubt, after District Attorney Mitch Brockden accidentally kills a man in drunk hit-and-run, he stages the subsequent trial of Clinton Davis to avoid an innocent man being sent to prison without implicating himself in the death. However, Brockden later realises that Davis is a serial killer who targets parolees (essentially so that they won't commit other crimes); he was trying to kill the hit-and-run victim that night but the man ran out of the alley where he was assaulted only to get hit by Brockden's car, so the trial was targeting the relevant suspect but the circumstances of the death were quite different.
- Scream: Gale Weathers is the only person who believes that Cotton Weary is innocent in the rape and murder of Maureen Prescott. She believes this because it makes a good story for the press, which doesn't help her already shoddy reputation. It is later revealed that Cotton indeed didn't kill Maureen; they had sex right before she was murdered by Billy Loomis, so Cotton was merely in the wrong place at the wrong time.
- In Searching, David finds some disturbing messages between Margot and his brother Peter and based off their messages, believed they did something terrible behind his back. David is correct but for the wrong reasons. David had assumed they were in an incestuous relationship but in reality, Peter was sharing his weed with Margot and was not responsible for her disappearance.
- Shaun of the Dead: While it's clear David has a point when he remarks that Shaun's plan isn't very well thought-out, and his ultimate goal amounts to little more to sitting around and waiting for rescue, his criticisms of said plan are more out of personal dislike for Shaun than him actually having any idea of what to do. On top of that, he himself rarely has anything to offer but unhelpful snark and just makes things worse on the rare occasions he actually tries to do something; Diane even lampshades it, remarking that if David really was as capable as he was trying to act whenever he was putting Shaun down, he would have taken charge of the group himself rather than just following along with whatever Shaun was doing. He also ends up being absolutely right that they should have just waited out, as the Army shows up to slaughter both the zombies and the Militaries Are Useless trope in a quest to save the survivors, but of course he had absolutely no way of knowing that and his only motivation in voicing his plan was to spite Shaun. Ironically, this also makes Ed sort-of right as well, since the only reason he wanted to go to the Winchester was because it was familiar and so he could smoke, but the Winchester is in fact very well fortified (at least until David smashes the window) and the only place where the main characters would be able to get their hands on a gun to fend off the zombies when they do breach the doors.
- In Sleepy Hollow (1999), Ichabod Crane is initially convinced that the Headless Horseman is just a local fairy tale and that there is some human behind the murders attributed to him. His skepticism lasts right up until he encounters the Horseman in person and witnesses his grisly work first hand — but, after several more clues are discovered and he improbably survives further encounters with the Horseman, he comes to realise that despite appearances the Horseman's murders are not random; he only kills certain people, all of whom are connected, while leaving others alone if they leave him alone. Meaning that there is a human behind the murders after all, using the Horseman as his or her puppet...
- In Species, scientists choose to create a female alien-human hybrid rather than a male, believing that females are more docile and less dangerous than males. At this point, they do not know that the aliens have sent them this DNA, because the aliens anticipate that creating hybrids can reproduce on Earth and wipe out humanity.
- The assumption that a female is less dangerous and aggressive than a male is wrong, because in the animal species on Earth mostly the opposite is the case. Birds, insects, amphibians, in most species females are larger, stronger and more aggressive than males. Mammals are the only exception. And even female mammals do not like it at all when someone approaches their kittens. So what made the scientists believe that it would be completely different in an alien species?
- However, the sequel Species II shows that the decision was correct because female hybrids reproduce much more slowly and therefore can create fewer hybrids in a very short period of time. There the villain of the movie is a male hybrid, and he pairs with many human women, so in a short period of time a lot of hybrids are born.
- Played for laughs in Stand by Me. In the scene where the four boys are walking through the back woods, Vern asks Teddy if he thinks Mighty Mouse could beat up Superman. Teddy says "No you idiot. Mighty Mouse is a cartoon! Superman is a real person! There's no way they could have a fight."Vern: Yeah, I guess you're right. (Beat) It'd be a good fight though!
- In Star Trek (2009), Kirk connects several events that have occurred as meaning the Narada is attacking Vulcan, and even Spock says his logic is sound. He's right, but his conclusions such as "lightning storm in space=Narada" are wrong (the lightning storm being Spock Prime coming through a black hole in this instance, which Kirk simply can't know of at this point).
- Bonus points for this being a double case. Kirk's desire to raise shields may be born out of his unwarranted certainty in his conclusion but the circumstantial evidence is enough to suggest that raising shields and proceeding with caution is still a good idea.
- A retroactive version where Nero blames the Federation for not helping save his homeworld of Romulus from a supernova, even though Spock tried to save them. The later series Star Trek: Picard would reveal that the Federation really did leave the Romulans to die (albeit because they suffered a devastating attack that damaged the shipyards building the refugee fleet and didn't have time to rebuild), an act that angered now-Admiral Picard, who also tried to save them.
- Kirk does it again in Star Trek Into Darkness, with his evidently very reasonable conclusion that the recently bombed Archives didn't make sense as a target. It was a wholly redundant facility with no strategic value, and consequentially the attack only made sense to as a primer, to trigger the meeting that had to take place in that very room in response to any such attack. Cue the Oh, Crap! as they realize that the meeting, not the Archives, was the target and a gunship opens fire on the room. Except, it turns out that the "Archives" were a front for a high value experimental weapons facility, which the attacker knew. This meant that it did indeed make sense as a target, though Kirk was still right that it was being used to set them up for an ambush.
- In Terminator 2: Judgment Day John Connor flees for dear life from the T-1000 not because it's a murderous killing machine sent to kill him (he's unaware at the time), but because he just robbed an ATM and the T-1000 is disguised as a police officer who John assumes wants to arrest him for the theft. This is mirrored by Sarah later in the film who hides from the T-1000, this time disguised as a guard, because she's in the midst of escaping the mental institution and doesn't realize he's actually a terminator there to kill her.
- In Tremors 2: Aftershocks, the shriekers manage to seemingly outsmart the heroes by disabling vehicles and the radio tower equipment, cutting off means of escape and communication. Turns out it was because they only see heat and thought it was food.Grady: You mean they've been acting so smart 'cause they're so stupid?
- In Without a Clue. Holmes' (and Watson's) contrived method of solving the final clue turns out to be true, but the real solution is far simpler. To elaborate: Holmes and Watson read the final clue, a partial serial number (234) as being part of a kidnap victim's code. The victim's favorite book of the bible was the book of Psalms. Psalm 23, verse 4 leads them to a passage that referenced an In-Universe famous play: The Shadow Of Death, which played at a local theatre which was, in fact, where he was being held captive. Of course, 234 was also the address of the theatre, which was what the victim really intended. It is left to the viewer to decide, which conclusion Professor Moriarty drew. He just said "very clever", but then said that the only other man able to solve the riddle, Dr. Watson, was at the bottom of the Thames. An educated guess would be that he arrived at the conclusion the same way Watson and Holmes did. The solution being the address just seems a bit - pedestrian.
