Voodoo Shark / Live-Action Films

• While this trope almost always creates a schism between creators and their fans, the famous "watermelon scene" from The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension is a rare case of it playing out in total good humor. The scene is never mentioned again, and was actually only put in as a Writer Revolt against some of the restrictions placed on the production by its studio liaison, who vocally hated the project. When fans pressed for the promised explanation, Word of God said that the Banzai Institute was developing products that could be airdropped fresh into African villages or other such impoverished, politically volatile areas. When fans pointed out that any fruit or vegetable that could survive impact would have to be so dense that it would be rendered inedible, Word of God responded (in mock exasperation), "Look, what do you want from me?!"
• The chain of events that open Alien³, in which a facehugger egg ostensibly laid by the Alien Queen during the short time she was on the Sulaco infected one of the survivors, have been given varying explanations by subsequent creative teams in different Expanded Universe entries over the years — which have only fueled further plot holes and confusion about the whole issue to begin with.
  • The film shows that the egg was placed in an area of the ship that appears to be in a closed area, near a strut, with the word "SULACO" positioned near it, and a further shot that shows the facehugger's legs extending underneath floor grating. As shown in Aliens, at least one character (Ripley and Newt as the Queen exits the dropship, Newt and Bishop up until the point where Ripley emerges from the nearby hangar with the powered exosuit, and all three of them until the Queen is dropped out of the docking bay) is shown watching the Queen, making it highly unlikely that it could have planted the egg without at least one of the surviving crew noticing.
  • The Alien Anthology Blu-Ray release shows in the interactive menus for the film that the egg was planted onboard the dropship itself... which doesn't make sense, considering that both the film and supplemental material refer to the specific Cheyenne-class dropship seen in the film as "Bug Stomper", as seen on its logo, with no indication that it was part of the ship or had a location that needed to be stamped with the name of the parent ship it's travelling on.
  • Aliens: Colonial Marines pulls a Retcon and shows the location of the egg as being in the cryopod room, a location that the Queen never visits in Aliens, looks nothing like the location in the film and is never given a suitable explanation. It is suggested that Weyland-Yutani mercs planted the egg at an undetermined time between the end of the previous film and the beginning of the game, but there is never any rationale given for it, nor does it make sense within the context of the game given that W-Y had access to a colony ship (the Legato) at the same time, as seen in the Stasis Interrupted DLC, and a horde of test subjects to draw from.
  • A common explanation given by fans is that Bishop (the android assigned to the Sulaco) somehow obtained eggs and planted them within the ship. Besides the fact that the timeframe of the climactic escape in the atmosphere processor in Aliens makes no sense if this theory is utilized (Bishop would have had to wait until Ripley left the docking platform, sedated Hicks, flew down to the lowest levels of the processor, landed, extracted an egg/eggs without the remaining xenomorphs or Queen noticing, get back to the ship and fly back up within 15 minutes), Bishop is never shown to be outside of Ripley's view from the point in which they escape LV-426. Additionally, fan explanations fail to mention that Bishop is property of the Colonial Marines, not W-Y, and would have no reason to lie to her, even after he's damaged beyond repair and Ripley is questioning him in the third film. The Mathematician's Answer Bishop gives when asked if the egg was on the ship or the EEV ("It was with us the whole way.") has only added additional fuel to the fire.
  • The novelization of the third film suggests that there were two eggs planted: one which infected Newt, and the other which infected (depending on which version of the film is being viewed) a dog or an ox. In the final product, the plot remains murky regarding whether there were one or two facehuggers onboard — the Assembly Cut of the film implies there were two (a normal and oversized "Super" facehugger that can birth a Queen embryo), while the theatrical cut implies that the regular facehugger is somehow capable of planting two embryos, thereby violating the established set up in the series up to this point.
  • The first act of the film is motivated by Ripley requesting an autopsy on Newt to find out if she had a chestburster inside her, ostensibly because Newt's cryotube was burned by acid blood. The script and comic book adaptation included a scene which would have justified Ripley's suspicions — Newt would be shown drowning in her cryopod, before the Queen Chestburster exits her mouth, swims over to Ripley in the EEV and forcibly enters her mouth. This explanation somehow ignores the fact that a fully-formed chestburster, seemingly laid minutes beforehand, has the ability to not only exit its host voluntarily (unlike the film, where it's shown to be growing inside Ripley's chest, near her heart, but that it can voluntarily enter a host at will.
• Annihilation (2018) goes through a lot of convolutions to keep the protagonists (and thus the audience) ignorant of what is on the other side of the Shimmer:
  • The government has sent over a dozen groups of people and various animals and electronic devices into the Shimmer, but none have returned to report on what's on the other side (save Kane, who is comatose). After the protagonists venture into the Shimmer for several days, experience some of its horrors, and discover the reason for the communication and physiology problems, most of them want to escape and report on what they found — but the leader shoots them down by saying without going all of the way to the end and discovering the full truth, "any information they report would just cause further confusion". Apparently all of the previous groups also decided that making partial reports was worthless. To use the film's cancer analogy, this is like every single cancer research scientist deciding never to communicate or publish any of their test findings until they discovered the cure. Every subsequent scientist would have to start from square one. At least the leader has the excuse that she is driven to get to the Shimmer's origin point to see it with her own eyes come hell or high water because she is Secretly Dying to deliver such a blatant piece of B.S. that even the other people on the team point out. The teams that came before her have no such excuse.
  • The outside world apparently knows nothing about the Shimmer because "the people in the area were evacuated and told there was a chemical spill". This would require people to evacuate their homes in a very large area (the team takes about a week to travel to the center of the Shimmer) for three years without asking questions, and for no news teams to investigate the very large visual disturbance caused by the Shimmer — a cover-up that would be harder than trying to conceal Mt. Vesuvius destroying Pompeii.
• The Syfy Channel Original Movie Attack of the Sabertooth justifies why the titular cats keep hunting people long after they'd realistically be full by explaining that they're bulimic and keep regurgitating everything they eat, so they're always hungry. How and why a bunch of prehistoric big cats have psychological eating disorders, and that they all have it, is never explained.
• Battlefield Earth: The explanation for why the Psychlos still haven't mined all the gold off the planet after 1000 years is that the gas they breathe explodes on contact with radiation. The problem being that any planet orbiting a star will have radiation from said star fall on it, meaning their planet should have blown up shortly after being formed. There's also the question of why they can't just wear hazmat suits, or, better yet, use robots to do the mining (as we know they already have robots in the form of the "gas drones"). This plot hole was even worse in the book, where it was eventually established that they do have mining robots (which they use on planets incapable of supporting life) - yet somehow they still think enslaving other sapients is better.
• Beauty and the Beast (2017) seems to really want to explain some things that the original animated film never bothered to mention, only to raise a lot of strange questions:
  • The original never explained why the servants were punished along with the prince. Since the original was animated, they were all silly dancing household items who didn't seem to mind much, and nobody thought much about it. At most, you could say the fairy who did it was just being a bit of a jerk, as fairies in old folklore are wont to do. The film saw the need to address it by saying they did kind of deserve it — they felt guilty for not raising him better. This raises the following issues: First, this cannot apply to everyone who was cursed (such as Chip, who's just a child); second, the prince is a monarch and shouldn't be his servants' responsibility (and should in fact have other people specifically there to raise him); and third, it's even more Disproportionate Retribution, as the curse is changed to turning them into fully inanimate objects and keeping them conscious.
  • The film seems to think that audiences wouldn't get why Gaston is so popular with the townsfolk when he's such a Jerkass, something the original film implied was due to his charisma and contributions to the town. So they show him paying off the townsfolk to sing with him — which is unnecessary, because he had enough genuine charisma in the original that no one questioned why he was so popular. If anything, you'd think the fact he has to pay people off to get them to like him would make him unpopular, especially in a small provincial town where gossip travels fast. It also raises a confusing point about why anyone would listen to him if he was paying them off, since if they were being paid to help kill the Beast, you would expect they would be hesitant to go do so even if paid. And they also gave him the Freudian Excuse of war trauma, but a war hero would logically be very popular among the townsfolk. It makes Gaston far less realistic than the film intended him to be.
  • The change to the nature of the curse changes the Beast letting Belle go look for her father at the start of the third act from self-sacrifice (the only person who really suffers is himself) to effectively dooming a few dozen people to death for the sake of Belle's father.
• The Director's Cut of Blade Runner famous re-inserts a deleted scene that apparently explains the meaning of the origami unicorn that Gaff leaves in Deckard's apartment at the end of the movie: Deckard may or may not be a replicant himself, and the unicorn may or may not be a warning that Gaff knows his secret.^note  The deleted scene features Deckard having a dream about a unicorn—possibly meaning that Gaff leaves the origami unicorn to indicate that he's seen Deckard's implanted memories, and knows about his dream (echoing the scene where Deckard reveals to Rachael that she's a replicant). Assuming this is actually how Ridley Scott intended that scene to be interpreted (he's always played it coy), this creates about a dozen additional plot holes. Most glaringly, a replicant gets a job hunting down other replicants for the LAPD when replicants aren't even supposed to be allowed on Earth.
• The original Cats stage show is famously vague about its story and setting, generally preferring to let the audience fill in the gaps with their imaginations. Hence, it's left intentionally unexplained who (or what) the Jellicles are supposed to be, what "the Heaviside layer" is, why the Jellicles hate Grizzabella so much, why Macavity kidnaps Old Deuteronomy, and where the story actually takes place. The 2019 film adaptation attempts to answer some of those questions in the name of realism, but most of its answers just raise even more questions, and they make some of the show's more far-fetched moments even more inexplicable. To elaborate:
  • It's confirmed that the Jellicles really are just common domesticated cats roaming the streets of London.^note  Among other things: we learn that Jennyanydots is a housecat owned by a middle-class family, and that Victoria is a stray who was abandoned by her human owners But that just raises the question of how a bunch of ordinary domesticated cats can perform magic spells, magically teleport, and travel to another dimension in a hot air balloon.
  • We learn that Macavity is determined to ascend to the Heaviside Layer himself, and he wants to kidnap the Jellicles in order to eliminate his competition and become the Jellicle Choice by default. But that raises the question of why he's so obsessed with getting a new life (since he's a wealthy and feared crime boss in his current life), and why he's so convinced that kidnapping the Jellicles will make it easier for him to make it to the Heaviside Layer—since Old Deuteronomy still has to actually choose him.
  • We learn that Grizzabella is an outcast because she was previously aligned with Macavity, but we never actually learn why she willingly abandoned the other Jellicles to live with a known crime boss, nor do we ever learn why she abandoned him and tried to return to her old life.
• The DC Extended Universe, in an attempt to differ itself from the Marvel Cinematic Universe aimed to be a "realistic" take on superheroes. However, being that the DC Universe is a very fantastical setting, this requires trying to explain or remove elements that are highly unrealistic, which results in this a lot. Among them:
  • The extended version of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice causes a few problems like this:
    • It addresses one of the original cut's most nagging plot holes: How did Superman not detect the bomb that blew up the Congressional hearing? The bomb was encased in lead, which Superman's x-ray vision can't penetrate. This unfortunately creates new plot holes: Since nobody knew the extent of Superman's powers, Luthor shouldn't even know that Superman can't see through lead. Maybe Luthor's smart enough to puzzle that out, perhaps with the assistance of the Kryptonian databases on the downed ship, but that's a heck of a logical leap. In addition, Superman should have heard the bomb’s internal mechanisms prime to go off. He can hear things like Lois falling or his mother in danger while in orbit, but he can't hear the small sounds of a bomb when it's almost right in front of him.
    • Superman is accused of a massacre that Luthor's mercenaries staged, which is the scene shown at the start of the film after the flashback. In the original film, all the victims were gunned down, which should in theory exonerate Superman, who Doesn't Like Guns and has enough physical strength to make weapons utterly unnecessary. The extended version shows the mercenaries piling the bodies together and torching them with a flamethrower, apparently to replicate the results of Superman's Eye Beams. While this does at least make more sense why people would confuse it for him than bullets, Superman has heat-vision that many have seen is capable of annihilating buildings with ease, meaning if Superman was the cause, he'd have to be lowering his heat vision to the point it kills them but leaves them just burned, for no apparent reason. And it also raises the question of why nobody could tell the bodies had been shot, or notice that the bodies are covered in burnt flamethrower fuel.
    • The accusations are reinforced by a witness, who testifies and then disappears from the movie. In the extended edition, it's revealed that Luthor blackmailed her into doing it, but then she has a change of heart and comes clean to a Senator. But if so, Luthor should have silenced her right away, before she could confess, and the Senator should have immediately taken her into protected custody for when Luthor eventually does go after her. Also, even though the senator believes her, she seems to act like Superman is still guilty in the hearing when she should now think Superman is being framed.
  • Justice League (2017):
    • One rather commonly nit-picked moment in the film is the 'underwater talking' scene, where in order to communicate with Arthur, Mera creates an air pocket by pulling the water around them away so that they can talk. Putting aside the fact there's no explanation where the air comes from for her to do this, but this either assumes that all Atlanteans have the ability to conjure these bubbles in order to talk, or they just...don't talk to each other. This one was so bad that they purposely retconned it away in Aquaman (2018), choosing to instead depict them just talking underwater with no problem.
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League:
    • Pre-release, Word of God confirmed that one of the changes between this and the theatrical release is they were removing any scenes of Barry Allen using his Super-Speed to pull and/or move people. The explanation Snyder gave is that realistically, moving people at that speed would kill them (which is true, and is why the comics have long adopted a series of Required Secondary Power handwaves to explain these sort of issues, most commonly in recent years being the Speed Force), which is also likely why he had Barry Allen wear a suit made of heat shield metal plates. The problem with this is that Snyder seems to have forgotten that in earlier films like Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, he had Superman use his own Super-Speed to move people with no ill-effect; while one can assume that the Flash is just much faster than Superman, Superman still demonstrates speeds that would realistically tear others apart. In the final product, there is also a scene of Barry saving Iris West from a car crash where his shoes get ruined, but his clothing besides that is fine and he briefly even touches her face, which going off of Snyder's own logic should result in both his clothes being ripped apart, and Barry unwittingly hurting her due to how fast he is moving, but he has no issues with that, making it unclear just how his speed is supposed to work.
    • Prior to the release of the film, it was revealed that Martian Manhunter would be in the film, having been revealed to be a minor character from Man Of Steel, Calvin Swanwick played by Harry Lennix. The Voodoo Shark comes in from the fact that this makes no sense with the character established in Man Of Steel, as Swanwick was shown to be skeptical of aliens, had a dismissive attitude about Superman, and was worried about if Superman was on the side of Earth, meaning if he was really Martian Manhunter, he would need to be a Hypocrite since he is an alien acting like a human for an unknown reason. Plus it raises the question of why he never helped with past threats like Zod, Doomsday, or help the Justice League fight Steppenwolf . Out of universe, it was confirmed to have been a Retcon by Snyder, as he had originally said Swanwick wasn't Martian Manhunter, with Harry Lennix confirming it as such, only for Snyder to change it when doing reshoots for the film, with Lennix outright stating he was not told of this change.
    • During the film, it is explained that Darkseid attacked Earth looking for the Anti-Life Equation, but was beaten and retreated for several thousand years. Some viewers were confused why Darkseid waited so long to return, and why Steppenwolf is shocked that Earth has the Anti-Life Equation when on paper they should know already. Snyder explained in a statement after the movies release that when Darkseid retreated back to Apokolips, a coup was launched to overthrow him, and so he became focused on dealing with that while taking the time to recover from his wounds. By the time it was done, he had killed everyone who knew and had forgotten. The issue is that this doesn't really make sense; how did he just forget when something should logically still exist that informs him Earth has the Anti-Life Equitation. Even if he doesn't, he and Steppenwolf are able to learn Earth has Mother Boxes, so they obviously have ways of keeping tabs on the planet even if if it through their own Mother Boxes, and yet Darkseid somehow forgets for thousands of years which planet he lost on, when the movie itself makes a big deal about Earth being "the one that fought back", meaning that even if Darkseid forgot, killed everyone who knew, and had no way of tracking or finding Earth again, somehow his failure is still remember enough that Steppenwolf can figure out that Earth is said location.
• Eternals: To explain why the Eternals never tried to stop Thanos during the events of Avengers: Infinity War, it's revealed that the Eternals are explicitly forbidden by the Celestials from interfering with catastrophes in the mortal world that don't involve stopping the Deviants^note Ironically, Thanos in the comics is a Deviant, but the films left this out. However, it's later revealed that the main reason that the Celestials want to stop the Deviants is because they'll reduce a planet's population, and planets need to be fully populated in order for new Celestials to be born. Not only would Thanos' goal of killing half the universe negatively affect this process on a universal scale, the film explicitly states that the Emergence on Earth was only made possible because everyone who disappeared during the Blip returned—meaning that the Celestials benefited tremendously from Thanos' defeat, and had every reason to want to stop him. Had the Eternals been allowed to interfere, Tiamut would've been born a lot sooner, and the Emergence probably would've been completely successful.
• The Exorcist: In the original film the exact identity of the being possessing Regan is deliberately kept vague: at one point it claims to be the Devil himself, while other times it's implied there are multiple demons inside her. The sequel openly declared the demon to be Pazuzu, an evil god from Mesopotamian mythology associated with plagues and vermin. ^note  The original novel does mention Pazuzu, and much visual emphasis is placed on Father Merrin's discovery of a statue of Pazuzu in Iraq at the beginning, but the script never says outright that Pazuzu is the one possessing her. This raises a bunch of theological questions, as the first film strongly implies the Judeo-Christan god exists, as otherwise holy water and exorcism shouldn't work on Pazuzu. So, if they both exist in the films' universe, it should be a case of All Myths Are True, yet we never see any other gods. Besides, a Mesopotamian god has no logical reason to be working for the Christian Satan in the first place. This may be because, as Christianity is monotheistic, if we assume it to be true, any other "gods" shown to exist, particularly evil ones such as Pazuzu, are actually demons and thus Satan's subordinates. However, this isn't definitively discussed in the film.
• Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald explains that Jacob didn't lose his memories from the mass-Laser-Guided Amnesia spell at the end of the prior film because the spell only erased bad memories. The problem with this is threefold: first, Jacob clearly had lost his memory from the spell in the prior film, so unless he somehow was able to regain them over time, it doesn't make sense. Secondly, this is the only time in the series that memory charms work like this when they are supposed to last a person's lifetime and withstand even outside influence. In fact, it's shown in the series that undoing a memory charm is extremely difficult, and attempting to undo one can actively cause psychological damage. Lastly, this nullifies the whole part of the charm. Surely, there would be quite a few Muggles among the hundreds who saw the incident, realized that magic is real, and didn't consider it a bad memory—and if that's the case, no one should bother with the charm in the first place. Worse, Jacob says this under a charm himself, so the film could have played this as him coming up with a bad lie as directed by Queenie, or by Queenie having undone it herself, but instead the film confirms that he really did regain his memories.
• The visions in Final Destination that mess with Death's plans are caused by Death. Death screws with his own plans and has to correct them, because of what he did. That's not You Can't Fight Fate. That's fate being an idiot, or a Jerkass that likes screwing with people for no reason. Either way, it makes the plot of the movies seem kind of pointless. This was later retconned at the end of Final Destination 4, which reveals that it was all part of the plan. And yes, probably with some For the Evulz thrown in for good measure.
• In the film serial Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, the heroes befriend a tribe of rock creatures on the planet Mongo. Professor Zarkoff happens to know their language. How? Because the aliens colonized part of Earth, but died out there, while their counterparts who stayed on Mongo degenerated into superstitious primitives. But before the rock creatures died out on Earth, a tribe in Central America adopted their language. That tribe also died out, but Zarkoff happened to study their written records (we can only guess how the pronunciations are known, and how it could be translated at all, or why the modern rock aliens would still speak the same language as members of their species who left their planet thousands of years ago). After the professor gives this explanation, no aspect of it is ever mentioned again.
• In Ghost in the Shell (2017), this is the rationale for the true nature of the Major Motoko Kusanagi, who turns out to be an actual young woman who was captured by Hanka Robotics and experimented on and eventually christened as "Mira Killian". The film explicitly points out that this is still Motoko's mind in a cybernetic body, seemingly entirely to justify the Race Lift of her character. There are several problems with this:
  • Hanka Robotics has no reason to kidnap people off the street to experiment with. The film outright shows they're a large company with contracts with the military and the police, meaning they had access to plenty of potential candidates (and a horde of dead bodies they could use to perfect their process).
  • The Major is awfully ambivalent about finding out her entire life is a lie. This also extends to the villain Kuze, a.k.a. Hideo, who has a similar reaction despite the toll that Hanka's experiments took on him.
  • Mrs. Kusanagi just accepts the fact that she no longer needs to come to her daughter's grave after the Major tells her the truth.
  • Even her title of "the Major" makes no sense in light of this. In the original manga and animated adaptations, Motoko is a military veteran who served in at least two World Wars and a few other operations besides, depending on the adaptation. Additionally, her nickname is just that; a nickname, with nobody knowing her actual rank. But "Mira Killian" is never stated to be a military veteran, nor is she given any false memories of being such, but people still refer to her as "the Major." And for that matter, if this is her actual rank, her absurdly rapid promotion to a high-level officer rank should have raised red flags earlier with anyone in the government, especially the Properly Paranoid Aramaki.
• Godzilla (1998) ran into some problems when trying to justify the drastic changes made to Godzilla's design. The reason behind the horizontal, raptor-like design for the monster was in order to make it more "realistic". We'll ignore the improbability of such a lanky, precarious, and front-heavy design being better-suited for a giant lizard than the heavy, pillar-legged, mountain-shaped original. They decided to continue making it more realistic by turning it from a dinosaur to a mutated iguana, thereby completely negating the entire point behind the raptor shape in the first place. And the Square-Cube Law is being completely ignored either way.
• Halloween:
  • Halloween II (1981) famously introduced the revelation that Laurie Strode is Michael Myers' long-lost younger sister, ostensibly to explain why Michael returned to his hometown after escaping from Smith's Grove Sanitarium in the original film. But if you actually watch the first movie with this in mind, it creates more plot holes than it fixes. First and foremost: Michael returns home specifically to kill his sister, yet he wastes time and effort murdering all of her friends before making a move on her. ^note While it's easy to believe that Michael would be evil enough to murder his sister's friends, this would presumably increase the risk of him getting apprehended or killed by the authorities before he could kill the person he really wanted to kill, so he really should have just targeted Laurie first. Secondly: according to the series' official timeline, Laurie would have been around two years old when Michael killed his older sister Judith. So if Michael really wanted to kill his younger sister so badly, he should have done it when she was a helpless toddler. Fans have come up with a few theories for this one however, ranging from Michael not finding any sport in killing a helpless baby (he does it once or twice elsewhere in the franchise), or Laurie not being in the house at the time and perhaps with her parents or another older, more responsible babysitter.
  • Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, by the admission of its screenwriter Daniel Farrands, was written to explore and connect all of the seemingly disparate plot points from the previous films, including Michael and Laurie's relationship and the implication that his seeming indestructibility may be related to the occult. The result was the Curse of Thorn, an ancient Celtic curse that compelled Michael to murder his entire family and granted him Super-Strength and invincibility so that he could do the job, along with a druidic cult comprised of many residents of Haddonfield that uses the curse to carry out a Human Sacrifice. (It was even worse in the original theatrical cut of the film, where it turned out that they also harvested Michael's DNA at Smith's Grove Sanitarium, using it to carry out experiments on patients so that they could learn how the curse relates to biology.) Prior films always left it up in the air whether Michael was supernaturally evil or just really damn tough, and this film not only definitively settled on the former explanation, it did so with a backstory that stripped away his "boogeyman" mystique. The result met such a bad reception that the next film, Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, scrubbed every movie after the second one from continuity.
  • In Halloween: Resurrection, we find out a man Laurie decapitated at the end of Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later wasn't Michael, but a paramedic he switched clothes with. That doesn't explain why Michael would want to switch clothes in the first place or why "the paramedic" was clearly trying to attack Laurie. It's asked at one point why the paramedic didn't just say he wasn't Michael, and that's apparently because Michael crushed his throat, rendering him unable to talk. That doesn't cover up why he didn't just take the mask off. Needless to say, after a detour with the remake, the franchise got another reboot after this one.
• Happy Death Day 2U revealed that the "Groundhog Day" Loop main character Tree experienced in Happy Death Day was the result of a failed science experiment in the lab of the college she goes to. But all that does is bring up the question of why the experiment is only affecting her, especially since she has no connection to the lab, why the loop resets upon her death, and what the experiment is suppose to do normally.
• Harry Potter: The movies removed a two-way mirror Sirius gave to Harry, which created a glaring plot hole in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, where Harry (who's imprisoned in Malfoy Manor's cellar at the time) inexplicably taking a piece of broken glass that was never before established out of his sock and asking it for help, which somehow summons Dobby. Part 2 tries to patch up this plot hole by showing that the shard was a piece of a mirror Aberforth Dumbledore purchased from Mundungus Fletcher, but not only does this fail to answer some crucial questions (how Harry got the shard in the first place, why he decided to keep it on him, why he thought asking it for help would accomplish anything), it also raises the question of why Aberforth would buy a broken mirror and keep it in his house.
• Highlander:
  • Highlander II: The Quickening changed one of the key tenets of the original film (that the Immortals are individuals blessed with extraordinary durability and long age, at the cost of a Fatal Flaw, with their origins deliberately left unexplained/unknowable) into the explanation that the Immortals were actually a race of alien political exiles, which raises the following questions:
    • When Connor MacLeod asks Ramirez why certain people are immortal and others aren't, the latter shouldn't have said "Why does the sun come up?" if he already knew that he was part of / descended from a race of aliens.
    • Apparently, aliens have the power to exile people to other planets, grant immortality to them, and then make rules concerning holy ground and being "Only One."
    • Aliens shouldn't care this much about human religions to begin with.
    • If the Big Bad is worried about being overthrown, he could have just moved his base of operations to Earth, where he could be immortal and banish any upstarts to places where they'd die of old age.
    • There is no reason why anyone would give political exiles the chance to obtain the "Prize" — i.e., to become a Physical God.
    • Ramirez and McCloud are exiled to Earth at the same time, but in the first film, Ramirez has clearly been around a lot longer than MacLeod.
    • It's never explained whether the Kurgan and the other immortals seen in the first film were political exiles as well.
    • The alien explanation was quickly retconned into Canon Discontinuity, but in a way that created further plotholes. The villain can see into the future, yet he doesn't realize that Connor poses no threat to him (other than that there would be no movie otherwise). One of his minions even points this out to him, only to be ignored. Later installments just gave up and ignore Highlander II outright.
  • In Highlander: Endgame, a group of Immortals lives in voluntary stasis in the "Sanctuary", which is located in a large cathedral — until they are murdered by an Immortal named Kell. In the original theatrical version, the Sanctuary is referred to as being holy ground. This annoyed fans of the series, as it had been established that Immortals are not allowed to kill one another on holy ground, and even the worst villains followed this rule. So the line was excised from the DVD version. But this didn't solve the problem; it's not on holy ground, yet it's in a large cathedral. The Immortals have no reason to willingly go into stasis in an unsafe place, and the Watchers have no reason to establish the Sanctuary in such a place.
• The Trope Namer is the So Bad, It's Good Jaws sequel, Jaws: The Revenge — or more specifically, the novelization (the film's writers were prescient enough to make it ambiguous). The book claims that the repeated shark attacks are the result of Michael being cursed by a voodoo priest, who apparently had a "score to settle". It only serves to make things more confusing.
• The Jungle Book (2016) decided to give the character King Louie an Adaptation Species Change from the 1967 original, turning him from an orangutan into a Gigantopithecus (a extinct genus of ape that lived in Southeast Asia during the Pleistocene). According to Word of God, the change was done to correct a bit of Misplaced Wildlife from the original, as orangutans aren't actually native to India. But the movie still features Mowgli—a modern human boy—which means that it takes place at least 100,000 years after Gigantopithecus went extinct. For some reason, the filmmakers thought having an extinct primate in the movie was less inexplicable than having a non-Indian one. Particularly glaring, since they easily could have explained Louie as an escaped captive orangutan brought to India by the English (what with the original book being written just a few decades after the rise of the British Raj). It would be much simpler to just call Rule of Cool.
• The Last Airbender: In the the original series, the Earthbenders were imprisoned on an abandoned oil rig by the Fire Nation. The idea was that the rig is made of metal and out at sea, making it impossible (at the time) to do any earthbending, therefore, making it nigh-impossible for any prisoners to escape. In the film, the oil rig is replaced by a quarry, a place surrounded by earth, yet none of the Earthbenders have escaped. The closest thing we have to an "explanation" is that the Earthbenders have been imprisoned for so long, their spirits were broken and they've lost the will to fight back, something they only regain when Aang gives his Rousing Speech. The problem is that in order for their spirits to be broken, they would have had to have had no obvious means of, or no successful attempts at, escaping in the first place. There's no way they could have just given up hope seconds after being tossed in prison, without at least some attempts to fight back and break out. Surely they could have just used their earthbending the first moment they got.
• The Matrix Reloaded rather infamously ends with Neo using his powers to short out two Sentinel robots in the real world (even though his powers supposedly only work inside the Matrix), leaving most of the audience scratching their heads. In the next movie, the Oracle takes some time to explain what happened in that scene: because Neo actually got his powers from the Machines, he has an empathic connection to the Machines' central computing core "The Source". But even if Neo has an empathic connection to the Source, he would presumably still need to have some sort of superhuman extrasensory abilities in order to use that connection to forcibly shut Machines down. And if anything, the fact that Neo got his abilities from the Machines just makes it less plausible that he could use those abilities to fry Sentinels. After all, this would mean the Machines gave their Unwitting Pawn the ability to destroy their foot-soldiers just by looking at them really hard.
• In The Neverending Story III Escape From Fantasia, Bastian's supporting cast gets wished out of Fantasia into the real world in an attempt to justify why he can't just wish Fantasia back to normal. However, Bastian himself questions why he can't just wish the supporting cast back into Fantasia first, then wish Fantasia back to normal. Bastian is never really given an answer; he's just told he can't do that, with no explanation as to why he can't.
• Pacific Rim: Uprising explains the purpose of the Kaiju arriving on Earth is that they want to submerge themselves in the Ring of Fire because their exotic matter blood will trigger a mass volcanic eruption that will terraform the Earth. This creates some large plot holes retroactively:
  • The kaiju should have immediately dunked themselves into a remote volcano when they first appeared in modern times instead of mindlessly attacking major cities nowhere near volcanoes. They also didn't do this when they appeared during the Cretaceous Period (since the geology/geography of the Earth hasn't changed much since then).
  • The movie shows it is possible to open a portal anywhere in the world, so they could have opened an inter-dimensional Breach closer to a volcano instead of the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
  • Apparently this was an obvious pattern right from the very first incursion, which ends up begging the question how nobody noticed the Kaiju were doing this until one was at the base of Mt. Fuji on the eleventh hour, since dozens of Kaiju had appeared over a period of decades at this point.
• Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters introduces one regarding the Mist, a magical effect that in the books was omnipresent and caused most mortal humans to see mythological beings, creatures, objects, and sites as something mundane, or not see it at all. The first film had not brought it up whatsoever, leaving it hard to understand how the Greek gods want to keep a low profile in the modern day yet the very first scene of the film has Poseidon rise out of the sea in his giant god form and make eye contact with a fisherman before taking human form. Sea of Monsters introduces the Mist as a sprayed-on product similar to a cologne, and mentions that it's very hard to get. In addition to bringing up the question of how many bottles of this stuff Poseidon would need to hide himself in the aforementioned scene, Sea of Monsters has a scene shortly after the introduction of the Mist in which a human in a coffee shop cannot see that the barista has eight arms. The movie just told us that the Mist is incredibly hard to get your hands on, yet this random barista can apparently afford to use it all day every day.
• In Pixels, during the real-life game of Pac-Man, Fireblaster's car is stated to be going faster than it should be able to. It's later revealed that Fireblaster was using the cheat codes for super-speed in Pac-Man, and he also used cheat codes to beat Sam in the tournament at the start of the movie. There are numerous problems with this:
  • Fireblaster somehow gets away with using a cheat code in a tournament, with thousands of people watching his every move.
  • If there was a cheat code for super-speed in Pac-Man (there isn't), it would logically give Pac-Man super speed, not his enemies.^note Pac-Man does have DIP switches that can indeed do both. But those are physical switches inside the cabinet, which Fireblaster would have an even harder time getting to.
  • It's never explained why the scientists who built the cars would program them with cheat codes, nor how Fireblaster entered a cheat code into a car. It is shown that he used the gear shift, but how this worked was never explained.
  • And most egregiously, a cheat code for super-speed in a video game shouldn't make a real car go faster.
• Pinocchio (2002): All of the "children" are played by adults. The movie HandWaves this by saying the movie takes place in a world where "A child can look like a grown-up, and very often grown-ups can act like children". While this explains most of the characters, there's no explanation for why Pinocchio (who is played by Roberto Benigni himself) is twice as old as the other "kids" (indeed, he looks almost the same age as Gepetto), or why no one else finds this unusual.
• The Predator (2018) has several examples of this, not helped by a Troubled Production:
  • The reason why the "Ultimate Predator" is able to find and track its missing equipment to Quinn McKenna's house (where it's being held in possession by his son, Rory) is due to the fact that Rory inadvertently allowed said Predator to "see" through the equipment Quinn had sent to his son — specifically, a device that was initially used to remote-control said Predator's ship for a brief period of time. This ignores the obvious problem that if such a device exists, and was previously in possession of the "rogue Predator" being chased by another one (in a much larger ship), why the rogue entity didn't use this device at any point to stop it from chasing (and eventually, shooting down) his ship over Earth.
  • The film establishes that the U.S. government has discovered and obtained the original Predator's mask from 1987 during the South American operation Dutch Schaffer and his team encountered it in. The problem is that said mask not only has sensitive technology (tech that the government has either never realized or never bothered to utilize, given it's sitting in a trophy case when the rogue Predator finds it), but that it somehow has the ability to access the masks of other Predators, despite nothing in the film showing that this should be possible. (And nevermind how this is the same mask that was seemingly left behind in an area that would be vaporized a few minutes later by said Predator in 1987.) Even more strangely, the Ultimate Predator somehow accesses the rogue Predator's mask (when it's at Rory's house), which opens up a can of worms regarding which Predators can see through the perspectives of other masks (the rogue Predator likely wouldn't have gone to Rory's school if it knew that the Ultimate Predator was tracking him there, for instance).
  • It's discovered late in the film that the rogue Predator who came to Earth initially was intending to help humanity, as it brought a gift that is later revealed in The Stinger. However, the first thing it does upon arriving on Earth (crashing in the jungle) is massacre Quinn's team, with no attempt at communication. It would have killed him as well, had he not discovered the gauntlet (which reacted in self-defense to the rogue Predator). Later, he goes on a rampage and massacres most of the inhabitants of a research facility, making no attempt to talk to them or give some information upon waking up. Even after its escape, it massacres a group of soldiers on a truck and would have killed McKenna had the Ultimate Predator not intervened.
  • Midway through the film, it's revealed that the reason why the Yautja have been coming to Earth is due to the fact that they are capturing and extracting spinal fluid from their victims, which they subsequently use to splice into their own biology and improve themselves. However, this makes little sense with what we've seen in the franchise (and a character expressly pointing out that the 1987 and 1997 incidents happened in this universe). Specifically, the Expanded Universe has repeatedly made it a point to mention that the Yautja hated genetic modification, as it diluted their own bloodlines and went against the "purest hunt" aspect of their species. It also makes the ending of Predator 2 suspect, as the Yautja clan that appears and surrounds Harrigan don't kill him for his "superior survival traits" — instead, they hand him a gun hinting that they've allied with humans before and then leave Earth.
  • The Stinger reveals that the "ultimate weapon" the rogue Predator was trying to deliver to humanity is... a suit dubbed "the Predator-Killer", an advanced suit of technology that is armored, deploys around the wearer and has upgraded armaments. However, nowhere in the scene is it adequately addressed or explained how a suit of armor is going to help them defeat a heat wave that will render the Earth inhospitable, which is the motivation behind the rogue Predator's reason for coming to Earth in the first place.^note Early ideas for the ending indicate that the pod would have had an occupant who would have gone on to help the heroes in a potential sequel, including Ellen Ripley, Rebecca 'Newt' Jordan or Dutch Schaffer.
• The 2005 film adaptation of A Sound of Thunder:
  • Needlessly handwaves the Time Safari's existence by stating in a throwaway scene (that is promptly never brought up again) that by 2055, all wild animals are dead. (Compare with the short story, where it is simply a means for bored big game hunters to feel the thrill of hunting extinct beasts like the T-Rex.) Not even touching the movie's other bizarrely glaring problems, as The Agony Booth points out, this only works to make the humans of the near future seem like utterly bloodthirsty assholes. Once the last wild animal died (in 2017, apparently, only 12 years after the film was made), poachers started raiding zoos, and as soon as time travel was invented — at a time when many people had never seen a live animal — it instantly defaulted into being a dinosaur killing venture, instead of being for sightseeing past animals, cloning them, stealing them, anything really.
  • Adds a minor sub-plot about how the Butterfly of Doom that is important to the plot would not have affected the timeline because the Time Machine has a "bio-filter" to prevent it… that the Corrupt Corporate Executive in charge of the time safari company shut down to save on electrical bill money. The question of how the heck a filter that is extremely heavily implied is meant to prevent bio-hazardous material from the past to travel to the future is supposed to prevent the changes to the timeline from stepping on a butterfly in the past (or the fact the butterfly is in an area that is about to be immolated by a volcanic eruption within a minute or so every time the travelers arrive, which means it does not matter what kills it) remains unexplained.
• As noted in a series critique and retrospective by Youtuber Macabre Storytelling, the James Bond installment Spectre causes this problem when attempting to canon-weld the various films from the Daniel Craig continuity:
  • After rescuing Madeleine from Mr. Hinx and his goons, Q tells both Bond and Madeleine that he ran a toxicology report on a ring obtained by Bond in the opening sequence of the film, which reveals that it has traces of an element that was also found in the blood of all of the previous villains in the continuity up to this point (Le Chiffre, Mr. White, Raoul Silva and Dominic Greene, among others). This is despite the fact that several of those characters (namely, Le Chiffre and Greene) were never shown to have worn rings, nor did the connection ever get mentioned up to this point. Even worse, the report Q pulls up clearly indicates that MI6 already knows that all of the preceding villains in the continuity were linked by the same mineral, and they already had the Big Bad's connection on file, so for neither Q nor M (who, according to Spectre, knew of the connection but never said anything besides recording it on video and sending it to Bond before she died) to not reveal any of this beforehand is patently absurd.
  • Franz Oberhauser (actually Ernst Stavro Blofeld) claims that he is the "architect of (James') pain" and that he has organized a decades-long revenge plot to get back at Bond for his father being more fond of the agent than him, going all the way back to Vesper's betrayal in Casino Royale. This is despite (a) the whole reason Bond pursued Le Chiffre being due to the MI6 ordering it after he pursued and killed a bombmaker; (b) Silva initially tried to recruit Bond to work for him as an associate because they were not so different (Silva believing Bond had been sold out by M); (c) Vesper's betrayal occurred long before Bond met her, and the reason why she died is due to her making a deal to spare Bond's life in exchange for her own (and subsequently deciding to end her own life to spare him further reprisal). And this is before the Contrived Coincidence of Oberhauser organizing a revenge plot against an orphan who was recruited by MI6, seemingly independent of any machinations on his end, using associates he would have never met otherwise.
• In Spider-Man 3, Harry Osborn undergoes a Heel–Face Turn and runs off to help Peter fight Sandman and Venom, when his butler tells him that he examined Norman's corpse and noticed the wound came from his own glider — meaning he died by his own hand, and Spider-Man didn't kill him. (Not that this is conclusive evidence either way — Spider-Man could theoretically have killed him with his own glider — but let's roll with that for now.) No explanation is given for why he didn't tell him this in an earlier film — when he could have stopped him from pursuing his self-destructive vendetta against Spider-Man. Word of God claimed that the butler was actually a hallucination representing Harry's "good side", meaning Harry knew all along but couldn't face the facts. However, there's a scene earlier in the movie where Harry talks to the butler in Peter's presence, and Peter doesn't react as if his friend was talking to the wall. He also appeared in the previous two films, implying the butler is real and just occasionally appears to Harry as a vision. It's more complicated than it needs to be.
• In Stargate, Ra has a human host but occasionally can be seen with a body of The Greys. Most notably in his death, in a This Was His True Form kind of way. When the series was created, the The Greys were portrayed as a benevolent species, the Asgard. Supplementary material explained Ra's appearance in that his previous host was an Asgard, and given their technological superiority, this also handily explains why he was the top Goa'uld (the new name for their species). However, this then means that those times we saw Ra as an Asgard, we were seeing his previous host, which makes even less sense.
• In Superman II Superman reveals to Lois his identity as Clark. This ends up being a bad idea as it changes their relationship for the worse (mainly because she now worries about him all the time). So they fix this by having him cause her Laser-Guided Amnesia with a kiss, which he does again in the fourth film when she accidentally finds out his identity. Aside from coming across as an Ass Pull and raising questions of how such a power even works, it also counts as a voodoo shark, as you have to wonder why he doesn't just try smooching the villains and make them forget their evil plans. (Superman is traditionally depicted as straight, but him kissing a man to save the world is hardly out of character. More out of character but debatable: Superman committing even the minor sexual assault of kissing someone against their will even to end the plans of his major villains.)^note  You'd think if beating the crap out of villains (an act which is normally considered aggravated assault or even attempted murder) is justified, just kissing them would be OK, but who knows.
• Superman IV: The Quest for Peace has Superman suddenly use a new power you'd think he'd have used before: When Nuclear Man blows a hole in the Great Wall Of China, Superman just sort of stares at the wall and it magically rebuilds itself. Some have tried to Hand Wave this as him using telekinesis, but this doesn't really work as the bricks of the wall don't reform and float into place but just magically fade back into existence, complete with a silly noise. Which raises the obvious question of why he doesn't just do this every time a villain ravages a city or otherwise destroys something important, as, to name just one benefit, it would likely save millions in repair costs. (Indeed, the very same movie has the Statue of Liberty ripped off its base at one point. While Superman saves it and puts it back, it would still need to be reattached to the pedestal somehow, yet he apparently doesn't deem this worth using his repair vision on.)
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The notoriously surreal Coming Out Of Our Shells mockumentary tried to give a lot of explanations for how it was that the Turtles could play music onstage in front of large crowds. One of the stranger ones was how it explained the hole of how the Turtles can play musical instruments despite their hands only having two fingers and a thumb: the instruments had been modified to compensate, such as creating guitars missing a few strings. However, this opens up the much bigger hole of how anyone can play these instruments—in particular, Leonardo's bass is stated to have one string, which should make it impossible for it to produce more than one note in a performance.
• The Terminator franchise has a rule for time travel that inorganic matter can't go back unless it's covered in living tissue, which is the reason why you Can't Take Anything with You. However, Terminator 2: Judgment Day seemingly broke this rule with the T-1000, which is made of "mimetic polyalloy" (liquid metal that can change shape) and yet it can go back just fine. The novelization tried to solve this by claiming that the T-1000 was sent back with a "flesh sac" that worked similarly to the T-800's skin but was discarded upon arrival. This does plug the hole, but in the process, kind of nullifies the original rule—now Skynet can send back all-inorganic objects if it bothers to build a good carrying case for them, but for some reason it's content to have its assassins wasting valuable time robbing gun stores and policemen instead of just sending them back with weapons. Later supplementary material gives a somewhat shakier but less plotholey reason—that is, the T-1000's liquid metal is pretty good at pretending to be organic.
• The Time Machine (2002) attempts to explain why people 800,000 years in the future still speak English by saying that they learned the ancient language from debris that was lying around. This just changes the question into how they can read English. Another issue is that they still wouldn't have learned how English grammar works just from picking up vocabulary.
• The Transformers Film Series has its justification for still having a Masquerade in the second movie: military combat robots went rogue and trashed a major city. Why the government would think, "Yes, we not only spent trillions of dollars building giant robots with sophisticated combat AI, concealing this information from taxpayers, but we are so staggeringly incompetent that they not only malfunctioned and started killing people, but when they did we had no way to stop them but to send in more giant robots to fight them" is somehow better than admitting they're aliens is anyone's guess.
• While Us generally received positive reviews, one of the most contentious aspects of the film was the reveal that the Tethered are the result of a failed cloning experiment by the U.S. government. Several reviewers have pointed out that the attempt to provide a rational explanation not only falls completely flat due to the sheer implausibility of the logistics required to create clones of an entire country's population in complete secrecy, but also makes the Tethered much less scary than they could have been if their origins had been kept completely in the dark.
• In X-Men: Apocalypse, Moira suggests that Apocalypse and his minions "The Four Horsemen" weren't really inspired by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from The Bible; rather, he was the inspiration for them. The X-Men comics don't go out of their way to explain why an ancient Egyptian would adopt Biblical theme naming, but Apocalypse being the inspiration for them doesn't explain much of anything either. For starters, the Four Horsemen are from the Book of Revelation, which is one of the most recently written books of the Bible, and was probably written late in the first century AD; assuming Apocalypse was born during the reign of the New Kingdom of Egypt, he would have been sealed in his coffin well over a thousand years before that.

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