Take That / Film

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• The movie premiere that Stacks takes Annie and friends to is MoonQuake Lake, an obvious shot at the Twilight movies. In a twist, though, people (or at least the girls, Stacks, and Grace) seem to generally like it.
• One of the opening scenes of Armageddon (1998) has a dog chewing on a toy Godzilla. Godzilla was another big blockbuster the same summer.
• Biff Tannen, the brutish villain of the Back to the Future films, was named in "honor" of an executive Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale worked with on I Wanna Hold Your Hand. Word of God later revealed, during the 2016 presidential election, that the characterization of Biff in Part 2 was based on Donald Trump.
• The Beastmaster: Beastmaster 2 mildly mocks Cold War politics as Arklon calls the whole "balance of terror" idea deliciously barbaric and wants in on the whole sweet nuclear weapon action (he's also the villain, if you didn't already guess).
• The Big Lebowski: Included in the narrator's opening comments:
  "..And even if he's a lazy man, and the Dude was certainly that: quite possibly the laziest in Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin' for laziest worldwide.."
• Clash of the Titans is a widely regarded classic, but the 2010 remake couldn't resist making a joke at the expense of Bubo the mechanical owl (Perseus's sidekick from the original):
  Perseus: [picking up a robot owl] What is this?
  Solon: Just leave it!
• Matrix's Pre Ass Kicking One Liner to Cooke in Commando is quite possibly one to Rambo, as he, like Cooke, was also a Green Beret.
  Matrix: I eat Green Berets for breakfast. And right now I'm very hungry!
• In Crazy, Stupid, Love, Emily says she went to the theater and watched Twilight, and it was really bad.
• In Daredevil, the film opens with a rapist getting turned loose by the courts thanks to a mob lawyer's intervention. Daredevil hunts the rapist down, breaks his bones and lets him fall to the train tracks, and as the subway approaches, Daredevil coldly states "That light at the end of the tunnel? Guess what? That's not Heaven. That's the 'C' train!" And what is the name of this rapist who has earned a Marvel superhero's damnation? José Quesada.
• One of the tidal wave scenes from Deep Impact shows the water wiping out an offshore oil drilling rig, which was a Take That! against Armageddon. As mentioned earlier, Armageddon didn't consider Deep Impact enough of a threat to Take That!; they took their shot at Godzilla (1998) instead.
• In George Romero's Diary of the Dead, there are two occasions in which Jason chides Ridley about his Zombie Gait citing "Dead things don't run!" This seems to be a Take That! To the remakes of Romero's own movies, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, where zombies are depicted as being fast and agile, unlike the slow-moving zombies of the original.
• Sacha Baron Cohen's film The Dictator has multiple ones, but a lengthy one against G.W. Bush and co. stands out at the end:
  Aladeen: Imagine if America was a dictatorship. You could let 1 percent of the people have all the nation’s wealth. You could help your rich friends get richer by cutting their taxes and bailing them out when they gamble and lose. You could ignore the needs of the poor for health care and education. Your media would appear free, but would secretly be controlled by one person and his family. You could wiretap phones. You could torture foreign prisoners. You could have rigged elections. You could lie about why you go to war. You could fill your prisons with one particular racial group, and no one would complain. You could use the media to scare the people into supporting policies that are against their interests.
• Doctor in Trouble: After seeing Dr. Burke's Julius Caesar costume, Basil scoffs and asks if he's supposed to be Twiggy.
• The Stinger of DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story is basically a Take That! to the studio executives who forced him to change the ending from a Downer Ending to a Happy Ending, as well as American audiences for not being able to handle sad endings or any complexity in their movies.
  White Goodman: "Yep, I hope you're all happy now. Good guy wins, bad guy loses. Big freakin' surprise! I love happy endings. You know, that's the problem with the American cinema. Can't handle any complexity in it, you know, 'Don't make me think, I just want to be entertained!'"
• Don't Look: In the car at the start of the movie, the group take part in a thought experiment: how would they each kill Justin Bieber?
• The original The Evil Dead (1981) showed a torn poster of The Hills Have Eyes (1977) in the background of one scene. Bruce Campbell reveals in the DVD commentary that Sam Raimi intended it as a sly dig at Wes Craven's film, as if to say: "If you thought that was scary..." Craven responded goodnaturedly, by having A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)'s protagonists seen watching the trailer for The Evil Dead (1981). Raimi then answered back by showing Freddy Krueger's infamous glove hanging above a door in Evil Dead 2. The whole thing was actually started by a scene in The Hills Have Eyes with a torn poster for Jaws in the background, which Raimi took as a similar "If you thought that was scary" swipe.
• Ex Machina has Nathan's quip about the cell phone companies not being able to complain that he hacked their networks because that would be admitting they were spying on their own customers too. This is clearly a dig at how the major phone and Internet companies in Real Life retain people's personal data for their own use and sale to third parties, or disclose that information to government surveillance programs.
• The 2014 film adaptation of The Fault in Our Stars added an opening voiceover in which Hazel disparages the sort of movie in which "everything is fixed with a Peter Gabriel song".
• Fright Night (2011) has Charlie, after being told Jerry is a vampire, accuses Ed of reading too much Twilight. Ed's response?
  Ed: That's fiction, okay? This is real. He's a real monster and he's not brooding or love sick or noble. He's the fucking shark from Jaws. He kills, he feeds, and he doesn't stop until everybody around him is dead. And I am seriously so angry you think I read Twilight.
• Funny Games, an attempted Deconstruction of the Torture Porn genre, consists of an extended Take That! directed at its own audience for being the kind of people who would like that kind of movie.
• The direct-to-video sequel to the George of the Jungle movie had a jab at Brendan Fraser for not appearing in the film, but it got followed up by the new replacement explaining the studio's too cheap to hire Fraser again.
• Ghost Lab (2021): When trying to record a video of the ghost Dr. Wee and Dr. Gla see in the waiting room, the latter denotes that it's not showing up on the video, unlike the ghosts in Shutter, which Gla derides as not very good.
• The indie movie God Bless America is one big Take That to the American culture and people. The teenage girl also makes a very harsh and mean Take That toward Juno at one point.
• Godzilla: Apart from the film's Take That, Critics! dig at Siskel and Ebert, its trailer has Godzilla step on a Tyrannosaurus rex as a dig at Jurassic Park.
• Godzilla:
  • During Godzilla: Final Wars, the Japanese Godzilla has an encounter with "Zilla", the monster from the infamous America Godzilla movie made in 1998, and dispatches it rather easily. The bad guy even growls out "I knew that tuna-eating monster was useless!"
  • In Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!, a student asks his teacher if Godzilla attacked the United States recently. The scientist responds with "That's what the Americans say, but Japanese scientists believe differently."
    • The main impetus behind the film is that this version of Godzilla is practically a zombie, animated by the wrath of those who died during World War II, not just the Japanese victims, mind you, but all of them. Japan’s tendency towards historical revisionism, and their tendency to downplay, if not straight-up deny, the atrocities committed by the Japanese forces during the conflict is called out specifically as the driving force behind Godzilla’s fixation on destroying Japan in particular.
  • In Godzilla 2000: Millennium, the aliens' flying saucer attack could be seen as a subtle Take That! against Devlin and Emmerich's Independence Day. And in the final act, one of the forms adopted by the alien Kaiju Orga is an obvious Expy of GINO.
  • Mark Cerasini's Godzilla 2000 includes a sequence where the titular monster walks into and apparently stands down a tornado; maybe it's coincidence that director Jan De Bont released Twister the prior year, after leaving the American Godzilla project in Development Hell ...
  • Godzilla: The Half Century War has a villain named Dr. Deverich. In the fourth issue, he inadvertently summons SpaceGodzilla and Gigan and King Ghidorah.
• The Great Dictator has Charlie Chaplin break character to deliver a moving speech on the state of the world and go on an Author Tract on the evil, stupid, and cowardly nature of the Nazis, before America had entered war with them and before the atrocities committed in The Holocaust had come to light.
• The Green Berets is basically one giant "Take That" to Americans that were opposed to The Vietnam War, but it also contains one of the more stunning examples of this trope in action. When he was writing the book that the film was based on, Robin Moore accompanied a special forces unit into action in Vietnam, and wrote an often critical account of his experiences in the field. In the film however, David Janssen plays a very obvious stand-in for Moore, and his character, a journalist who is initially highly critical of the war, gradually learns to become a good, patriotic, war-supporting American over the course of the movie. Needless to say, Moore was not involved in the making of the movie, and didn't speak too highly of it afterwards.
• Harrison Bergeron: Administrator Klaxon scoffs when Harrison suggests high politicians have to be very smart and go without handicaps to do the job, saying a person of average or below average is easily capable. We later see that the President is certainly not particularly smart, and such positions are filled by lottery, with random citizens chosen instead of having elections (too much opportunity to envy others).
• Help!: Scotland Yard gets one.
  Chief Superintendent: So, this is the famous ring? And this is the famous Beatles.
  John: So, this is the famous Scotland Yard.
  Chief Superintendent: And how long do you think you'll last?
  John: Can't say fairer than that — Great Train Robbery, eh, how's that going?
• The Hong Kong movie High Risk had the character Frankie Lone, an overt Take That! by the director at Jackie Chan's expense — portraying him as a boozing, womanizing fraud whose stunts were really done by the main character, played by Jet Li. However, Jet Li did publicly apologize for his involvement later.
• It's never been confirmed as such, but Chief Orman, Peter Boyle's Marlon Brando-esque character in Honeymoon In Vegas is commonly perceived as a take that to Brando himself. Writer / director Andrew Begrman would have reason for throwing such a take that in: His previous film, The Freshman, starred Brando, who later trashed the film in an interview.
• Idiocracy manages to do a Take That! against many of the companies that appear in the movie by firmly associating them with, well, idiots: Fuddruckers evolves into "Buttfuckers", Carl's Jr. becomes Darker and Edgier ("Fuck you, I'm eating."), Starbucks serves cappuccino and prostitutes, Crocs are the shoes of choice, a Gatorade-esque drink replaces all piped water except in toilets, and CostCo. becomes a fortress city the size of Kansas with its own subway system. Mike Judge wanted to use actual Gatorade, but was forced to come up with Brawndo because PepsiCo refused permission. Notice how Luke Wilson's character goes out of his way to compare the drink to Gatorade...
• Independence Day featured a frustrated Sat TV customer care employee saying to angry customer: "Yeah, I love The X-Files too..."
• Two Indian examples of films taking pot shots at brands:
  • In Delhi Belly, the lead actor trio walk towards a compact car owned by one of them. One of them tells the one who owns that car that it's a really ugly vehicle, and is born when a donkey has intercourse with a rickshaw (three-wheeled minicab in India). This vehicle was a hideously modified Hyundai Santro (known as Atos abroad)- and truly looked like a product of some such incident. Hyundai did not take it lying down and got after the film's producers, in court.
  • In Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Life Doesn't Come Again), one of the actors says he's invested a lot of money to buy a Ferrari. He says if the investment doesn't work out, he'll be forced to settle with a Ford Fiesta. Ford did nothing.
• James Bond:
  • The death of Blofeld at the beginning of For Your Eyes Only was a Take That! to Kevin McClory, the screenwriter who created the character and had tried to create a rival James Bond series.
  • Q from Skyfall delivers one of these to GoldenEye involving the exploding pen from the latter film. "We don't really go in for that anymore."
  • Goldfinger: Auric Goldfinger is named after Erno Goldfinger, an architect whose buildings Ian Fleming hated. Apparently, Erno threatened to sue Fleming for unauthorised use of his name. In that event, Fleming would have changed the name to Goldprick.
• Jurassic Park:
  • In Jurassic Park III, when asked about character Ian Malcolm's book, a young boy comments that he didn't like it, saying it spent way too much on Chaos Theory and used big words. This is probably a dig at the original book's author, Michael Crichton, who likes to Author Filibuster on his theories, and used Malcolm for this purpose - the novel was one long discussion on Chaos Theory.
  • The Lost World: Jurassic Park features a notable diss against paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, who was a rival of the film's paleontological consultant, Dr. Jack Horner. In the film, Dr. Bakker is given his very own Captain Ersatz, a bumbling poser who gets scared out of hiding by a snake, and into the jaws of a T-Rex. Dr. Bakker surprisingly loved the scene, and even called Horner after watching the movie and told him "See? I told you it was a predator!" (Horner is the oldest- and practically, the only- defender of the theory of T-Rex as a giant, slow-moving full-time scavenger, whereas Bakker always defended the idea of T-Rex as a fast, ferocious killer).
  • Jurassic World
    • The film issues its own take that to JP III after the Spinosaurus battle went over poorly with fans, who took to the dinosaur as The Scrappy because of that. Not only is the dinosaur left off the list of attractions, its only appearance in the film is a skeleton that ends up getting destroyed by the Tyrannosaurus Rex, satisfying a large number of fans dissatisfied with the above-mentioned Curb-Stomp Battle in that film.
    • Owen and Claire find that Gray and Zach have escaped the I-Rex by jumping over the waterfall. Claire begins to frantically call their names, and Owen immediately shuts her up and reminds her that if she keeps doing that, they're going to wind up dead. The whole situation is a nod to the other Scrappy of JPIII, Amanda Kirby, a Dumb Blonde who lacked the sense to realise that shouting her son's name at the top of her lungs in a jungle infested with vicious predators is a stupid idea.
• The Kentucky Fried Movie:
  • In a segment parodying morning news programs, where a zookeeper brings out a gorilla named "Dino". "Dino" is said to be impotent, leading to him going on a rampage. Rick Baker, who designed the gorilla suit and played "Dino", had just come off Dino De Laurentiis's much-maligned remake of King Kong (1976), which he has referred to as one of the worst jobs in his career.
  • In "A Fistful of Yen", the CIA spy is utterly frightened of his ultimate torture: Detroit.
    NO!! NO, NOT DETROIT!! NO! NO, PLEASE!! ANYTHING BUT THAT!! NO! NO!"
• Kingsman: The Secret Service: Harry's home is plastered with copies of The Sun. For each inane, worthless, bigoted headline published, he had saved the world or done something major prior to that.
  • It's strongly suggested that the vast majority of world leaders went along with Valentine's insane plan to kill most of the world's population with a Hate Plague. It's also suggested that they all died when Merlin set their implants to blow up and the only known remaining head of state left is a sexy Swedish princess who didn't want to go along with the plot.
  • Galahad mentions he once foiled a plot to assassinate Margaret Thatcher, to which Eggsy replies that not many people will thank him for that.
• In Kung Fu Hustle, Stephen Chow stops a child's stray soccer ball... and stomps it flat, shouting "NO MORE SOCCER!". This is generally interpreted as Chow's response to the frequent requests he got for a sequel to Shaolin Soccer.
• B-movie Laserblast, about a white trash teenager who gets a laser gun that works like the One Ring, featured the main character randomly blowing up a Star Wars billboard and laughing about it. Everybody saw Laserblast, right? Ya know, outside of Mystery Science Theater 3000... At the time Laserblast first came out, people actually compared it to Star Wars and discussed which film was better. For a brief time it looked like a serious rival. Hard to believe....
• Another equally sad example Hales from The Giant Spider Invasion, when the Sheriff remarks that the giant-est spider makes the shark from Jaws "look like a goldfish!" Crow's reply: "Yeah, the better movie."
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen managed to pull an unintentional Take That! against series creator Alan Moore, by casting Sean Connery as Allan Quartermain. Moore hates James Bond.
• Leprechaun:
  • Leprechaun takes a number of shots at Lucky Charms, most likely for refusing to enter into a Product Placement deal. The first has the titular Leprechaun eat some Lucky Clovers and promptly spit them out in disgust, and of course there's Alex's surprisingly bad-ass Pre-Mortem One-Liner before killing the little gremlin off for good (Well, at least until the sequels showed up):
    Alex: Fuck you, Lucky Charms!
  • Leprechaun Returns:
    • Lubdan retains his shoe cleaning compulsion from the original movie. Except if said shoes are Crocs, in which case he'll put them straight in the trash bin.
      Lubdan: Probably doin' fashion a favor killing that one.
    • Lubdan sees the gang try to get away in a rather slow electric car (the sorority girls are shown to be avid about the environment) and has this reaction:
      Lubdan: That's the car of the future? Shit...
• Lights of New York: A Take That from the first talkie to all the silent movies (that weren't actually silent: while lacking speech, they were accompanied by music). The first scene starts with a closeup of a playing radio, then a bootlegger walks in and tells his partner to "shut up that music".
• A take-that to Brooklyn from the film The Mad Miss Manton:
  Lt. Mike Brent: Look, lady, it's been ten minutes since you called us. The murderer, that is if there is a murderer, could be in Brooklyn by now - that is, if anybody wants to be in Brooklyn.
• Megiddo: The Omega Code 2 was, in large part, TBN's take-that to the mainstream media, which they constantly believed to be conspiring against them. In the film, the Antichrist is the owner of a major media outlet.
  Antichrist: This is TELEVISION! People believe whatever they see on television!
• A scene in Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie features Big Bad Ivan Ooze—as he is trashing the Command Center—lamenting the terrible things he missed out on while sealed away for a couple thousand years: "The Black Plague! The Spanish Inquisition! The Brady Bunch Reunion!" Made even funnier by the grave emphasis he puts on the latter, as if it's the worst of the three.
• According to the DVD commentary of the cast of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the scene where a monk reads the instructions of the Holy Hand Grenade was revenge against being forced to go to church as children. They described their experience during service as having to listen to someone reading a nonsensical repetitive bible verse in an annoying high pitched voice, which is exactly what happens in the scene.
• Eric Idle delivers one to English beer during the "Bruces" sketch from Monty Python Live (Mostly): One Down, Five to Go:
  Head Bruce: We find, over here, your English beer is a little like making love in a canoe. It's fucking close to water!
  • He'd earlier made that joke about American beer during Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl.
• Muppets Most Wanted's opening musical number "We're Doing a Sequel" features the following lyrics (that were cut from the theatrical version but remain in the soundtrack as well as the film's extended cut) as they lampshade how sequels are never quite as good as the original film:
  Muppets: We're doing a sequel! How hard can it be?
  Rowlf: We can't do any worse than The Godfather III.
• Early on in Mystery Men, The Shoveler pulls in to his driveway and runs over a plush purple T-Rex, then rips its head off for good measure. It's a little less out of nowhere than it sounds, because he then comes in complaining about his kids leaving their toys out, but still an obvious take that.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984): Freddy Krueger is named after a kid who bullied Craven at school. Craven's earlier film, The Last House on the Left, features a rapist named Krug, also after that same bully.
• The Russian film Night Watch became the highest-grossing film in Russia. Afterwards, several films beat that record. The sequel, Day Watch had the lead character jump through and destroy posters of the previous highest grossing Russian films. The Take That! proved to be accurate — Day Watch outgrossed all of those films.
• In No Kidding, Dandy Big warns Dandy Little to get away from Catherine before she starts singing "Getting to Know You".
• Nope:
  • The TMZ photographer who shows up late in the film is a total idiot who is completely out of his element, with Emerald and OJ being totally exasperated when they realize where he's from. He isn't even given the dignity of having his face seen, he is under a very concealing motorcycle helmet from his first appearance to getting eaten by Jean Jacket. His only contribution is leaving his motorcycle behind for Emerald to use during the climax of the story. This ties neatly into the film's stance against mindless spectacle.
  • Celebrities who try to capitalize on personal infamy for fame. Despite witnessing as a child two of his co-stars killed and a third completely disfigured, Ricky tries to cash-grab on this later in life, through his theme park, an informal tour for inquiring minds about his time on Gordy's Home, and a reality show that incorporates his family. The fame-chasing hubris regarding Jean Jacket winds up getting the entire family and their paying audience killed.
  • The only way Ricky "Jupe" Park can process his trauma is describing the Saturday Night Live skit portraying the Gordy incident, and there was also apparently a MAD Magazine parody of what happened as well. This calls out how satirical platforms frequently try to make comedy out of real tragedies where real people were hurt or even killed. (Antlers Holst briefly mentions the tiger mauling that happened to Siegfried & Roy, and SNL did indeed parody this incident shortly after it happened, with Alec Baldwin as victim Roy Horn.) Ricky, who is Asian, also mentions that he himself was played in the sketch by guest host Scott Wolf (who is White) — something else true to life, as SNL has had a long track record of blackface, brownface, and especially yellowface, and has often faced criticism for being insensitive to the races of the people that they're portraying. ^note Jordan Peele himself is a former MADtv (1995) cast member, and was slated to play Barack Obama on SNL before contract disputes prevented him from doing so. Obama was eventually portrayed that season by Fred Armisen (who is of German, Asian, and Venezuelan descent), which offended Peele so much he later felt he dodged a bullet.
• Not Okay: Lena Dunham is not overly subtly called tone-deaf.
  Danni's editor: You don't want to be like Lena Dunham.
• Office Space did this with a character named Michael Bolton. When Samir asks Bolton why he doesn't change his name if he's dissatisfied with sharing a name with the singer-songwriter, Bolton says that the other guy should change his name because he makes such bad music (the real Bolton supposedly thought the exchange was Actually Pretty Funny):
  Samir: "You know, why don't you just go by 'Mike', or 'Mikey' or something?"
  Michael: "No way, why should I change? He's the one who sucks!"
• In the B-Movie Orca: The Killer Whale, which is about a killer whale that actually kills people, there's a scene where the titular orca kills and devours a great white. Gee, I wonder what that could refer to... Jaws 2 fires right back as one of the shark's early victims is none other than... you guessed it, a killer whale.
• Paparazzi, from Icon Productions (Mel Gibson's company), depicts photographers as amoral assholes who would cause a manslaughter if it meant getting pictures, and requires Cole Hauser to kill them one by one. When writing about the director's DVD Commentary for The Onion's "Commentary Tracks Of The Damned," Nathan Rabin quipped that he was surprised to see the deleted scenes didn't include "footage of (paparazzi) clubbing baby seals or strangling nuns."
• Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides: (Apparently) in-universe example regarding a dilapidated lighthouse with its whale-oil reservoir intact:
  Blackbeard: "Can you make it work?"
  Salesman: "Made by the English! Let's not get our hopes up."
• A couple in Pixels:
  • A harmless dancing Smurf is shot by Violet for creeping her out.
  • Both Q*bert and Sam state that modern video games are too brutal and simple to be fun. Matty disagrees, though.
• Uwe Boll has been accused of making deliberate flops to make use of a tax loophole, which would explain a lot. His cameo in his own Postal movie is probably a reaction to the rumours, since he keeps insisting his movies are awesome.
  Boll: "Because, you know, there are all these rumours out that my movies are funded with Nazi-gold. And what should I say? It's true. But somebody has to do something with the money."
• The marketing of The Purge: Election Year takes multiple shots at Donald Trump. The film's tagline, "Keep America Great," is a clear jab at Trump's 2016 campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again." A later trailer says that this Purge trumps them all.
• Robin Hood: Men in Tights: "Because, unlike some other Robin Hoods, I can speak with an English accent."
• The Hallmark Channel made-for-TV movie The Santa Incident is just one big take that at Homeland Security.
• When Wes Craven read Kevin Williamson's script for Scream (1996), he was worried that the line about how the first A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) was good, "but the rest sucked" could be mistakenly seen as a Take That! from him to people who made the sequels. But then he realized that "the rest" would include his own New Nightmare as well, and left it in.
• Smosh: The Movie:
  • Steve YouTube, implied to be allegorical to the titular website, is shown to be a petty, manipulative Jerkass who traps content-creators unlucky enough get his attention in his website, forcing them to churn out content to make him more money.
  • Everyone reacts with disgust when they find themselves in a Furry Party video.
    Steve YouTube: Why was this video in your viewer history? Sickos.
  • One of Anthony's pet peeves is buffering. When buffering grinds the climax to a halt, he takes their brief moment being frozen to complain about it while Steve weakly explains that it's due to a bandwidth issue outside of his control.
• In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Sonic views a planet covered in mushrooms with disdain, stating "I hate mushrooms" which has been confirmed by writer Patrick Casey to be a jab at a certain other video game franchise which used a lot of mushroom imagery and served as the Sonic games' main rival for a long time.
• Space Jam:
  • Daffy Duck suggests that they call their basketball team "The Ducks". Bugs' response: "What kind of Mickey Mouse organization would call their team the Ducks?" Besides using "Mickey Mouse" as a pejorative term, this could be considered a slam against the Disney Pictures film series The Mighty Ducks, their cartoon Mighty Ducks: The Animated Series, and the then Disney-owned NHL hockey team The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim.
  • The movie also includes an alien theme park called "Moron Mountain" — possibly a self-parody of one of the Time-Warner owned Six Flags amusement parks, Magic Mountain.
• Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Steve Martin does a bit near the climax where he unzips various disguises, one of them being Michael Jordan quoting "Let's do some drills" from Space Jam. "This doesn't make a lick of sense," muses Daffy.
• Space Jam: A New Legacy has one moment towards the trend of 2D characters becoming CGI (with some hints of Self-Deprecation). The Looney Tunes are actually offended when Al-G "upgrades" them (except for Daffy). Considering that they are hand-drawn 2D characters that have been around for years, they wouldn't be all too keen at being updated.
• The CBS Made-for-TV Movie Spring Break Shark Attack began with thin analogues of the entire cast of Desperate Housewives being eaten by a shark. Just in case the viewers still didn't get it, a newspaper headline read "Desperate Search For Missing Housewives Continues." The film first aired opposite that show.
• In Star Trek Into Darkness, when Harrison is being led to the brig, he is bound with his hands in front of him as he walks. Later, McCoy learns of the beat-down Kirk tried to give him and makes a comment about Harrison being a superman. What's the name of that movie set to open a few weeks later?
• From the Star Wars prequel trilogy, Nute Gunray, the villainous leader of the Trade Federation, is named after former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich as well as a reversal of Ronald Reagan, to get back at Project Star Wars. From The Phantom Menace, the Neimoidian senator is Lott Dodd, named after U.S. Senators Trent Lott and Chris Dodd.
• In Sudden Impact Dirty Harry crashes a wedding in which the bride is the granddaughter of a very powerful gangster. He quickly causes the elderly don to suffer a fatal heart attack, subtly implying that if Don Vito Corleone, or Michael, had been in San Francisco instead of Long Island, he would have answered to Harry Callahan.
• In the comedy-western Support Your Local Sheriff, the town's brothel-owner is named "Madam Orr". There's the obvious "whore" pun, but the star of the film, James Garner, had also recently been involved in a bitter legal clash with a Warner Brothers executive named William Orr.
• Sylvester Stallone did a Take That at himself in Tango & Cash. When a fellow cop compares his character to Rambo, Stallone declares "Rambo is a pussy" and shoots a tanker truck full of gasoline.
• In Twins (1988), Arnold Schwarzenegger's character compares his bicep to a poster for Rambo and smirks in triumph.
• The notorious Andy Warhol film Taylor Mead's Ass was made in direct response to a snipe by Peter Emmanuel Goldman, a director who also served as film critic for the Village Voice, about Warhol's films being nothing but "[a camera] focusing on Taylor Mead's ass for two hours." The film that resulted was exactly that.
• In the second trailer for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), Vernon asks if the Turtles are aliens, only for April to reply, "No, that's stupid. They're turtles." This is poking fun at an old draft of the script where the Turtles were aliens from outer-space, but was scrapped due to a massive backlash from fans.
• Allegedly, Raúl Juliá's rant against Mel Gibson in Tequila Sunrise near the end is Robert Towne's Take That! against Jack Nicholson. Originally, Towne was supposed to direct Nicholson in the sequel to Chinatown, but when Nicholson took over, the friendship fell apart. When Julia thinks he's been betrayed by Gibson in the film, his character says the following:
  Carlos: Friendship is all we have! WE CHOSE EACH OTHER! How could you fuck it up? How could you make us look so bad?
• Torque:
  • The hilariously over-the-top biker movie Torque featured an opening scene in which two cars are engaged in a drag race using camera cuts and CGI effects in an obvious reference to The Fast and the Furious... only for the lead character, on a motorcycle, to swoop in and easily outrun both of them. A few minutes later, he beats them both up at a gas station, quipping about the obvious inferiority of guys who drive cars. Yeah....
  • There's the scene where the main character repeats the line from Fast And The Furious-"I live my life a quarter-mile at a time" to which Shane replies-"That's the stupidest thing i've ever heard!"
• Transformers Film Series:
  • The Product Placement robots that appear in the first Transformers movie are also Always Chaotic Evil due to the fact that all human technology since the 1930s is reverse-engineered from Megatron.
  • Before the debut of Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen, some of the dozens of new toys released depicted a new Decepticon, Sideways, touted as the deadly adversary to Sideswipe. The toys never state what make of car he is (while nearly everyone else's does), but he bears a close resemblance to the Audi R8, made famous by Iron Man. Now look how Sideways winds up in the movie. Or the opening of the movie, at least. It's worth noting here that Audi is a German company and the Autobots always transform into American (General Motors) vehicles.
  • Revenge of the Fallen features an Obstructive Bureaucrat whose desire to leave open the possibility of diplomatic talks with the Decepticons serves as a Take That against Barack Obama's foreign policy.
  • In the first movie, when Sam and his Dad are car-shopping, the salesman sits behind the wheel of a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, which is promptly slammed by the Autobot Bumblebee (disguised as a yellow Camaro). Word of God is that this was a Take That! against the original Transformers: Generation 1 Bumblebee character. Hilarious in Hindsight now that a standalone Bumblebee movie is being made, starring a yellow Volkswagen.
  • At one point in Bumblebee, Charlie inserts a music cassette into Bumblebee, which is Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up". Bumblebee immediately spits it out toward a wall, breaking it.
  • One of the boats that Charlie knocks down in the climax of Bumblebee had a "Bayliner" name on it.
• Time Bandits contains an unusual Take That!, the song playing over the closing credits ‘Only a Dream Away’ is a Take That! aimed at the film’s director Terry Gilliam. Producer George Harrison got so frustrated with Gilliam’s uncompromising attitude during the filming that he wrote the song containing lines like ‘greedy feeling, wheeling dealing, losing what you’ve won’ as an attack on his attitudes.
• In Trick 'r Treat, Steven Wilkins tells his son to go inside and watch Charlie Brown, presumably in reference to the Peanuts Halloween Special. You know, the thing with the Great Pumpkin.
  Charlie Brown's an asshole!
• Tropic Thunder had the "never go full retard" speech, which is an obvious jab at pretty much every actor who played a mentally disabled character for Oscar Bait.
• The View Askewniverse movies have varying levels of this in each movie.
  • It reached fever pitch in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, taking shots at pop culture, themselves, their audience, and everything in-between.
  • The character of Elias in Clerks II essentially exists so Kevin Smith can insist that Star Wars is better than The Lord of the Rings and Transformers (2007). He's an unlikable mama's boy and fan of Transformers and LotR, while Randall is a mean yet likable guy and a Star Wars fan, and even copies Smith's statement that "Lord of the Rings is just a bunch of people walking". They have a fight over which is better. Guess who "wins" and makes the other vomit.
• Vamps: At one point, Goody and Stacy call Sookie the stupidest character on TV.
• Warriors of Virtue, a Mystical Kung-Fu adventure from the mid-90's, features a scene early on in which the movie's protagonist Ryan is told by an Asian chef about a magical world he winds up travelling to later on. The chef describes this place as "a world beyond anything you've ever seen...no guns, no lasers, no Morphing...", a rather obvious Take That! at Power Rangers.
• Within Our Gates is considered a response to The Birth of a Nation. It is one of the earliest known films directed by an African-American and is a "race film" (an early film by black people for black audiences). The film focuses on racism and contains a lynching scene.
• After a night of drinking, Mulder urinates on a poster for Independence Day in The X-Files: Fight the Future.
• The start of xXx (the Vin Diesel spy thing, not the porn genre) features a tuxedo-wearing spy finding himself in a club, looking very out of place amongst the hip young kids, before getting himself shot several times.
• In X2: X-Men United, Logan desperately tries to change the radio on the car when *NSYNC's "Bye Bye Bye" plays after Pyro turns it on.
• In X-Men: Apocalypse, after seeing Return of the Jedi, Jean says, "Well, at least we can all agree that the third one is always the worst." Not only is that a jab against Return of the Jedi, it's also one against the third movie in the original trilogy, and, perhaps unintentionally, also applies to X-Men Apocalypse, which had the lowest critical ratings of the reboots until Dark Phoenix came out.

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