Common Knowledge / Live-Action Films

Examples of Common Knowledge relating to Live-Action Films.

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Franchises with their own pages:

• Star Wars

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• 2001: A Space Odyssey:
  • The Sufficiently Advanced Aliens that manipulate human evolution don't look like giant black monoliths. Though the details about them are left very vague in the Stanley Kubrick film, Arthur C. Clarke's accompanying novel makes it clear that the monoliths are actually vessels used by aliens who have evolved beyond the need for their physical bodies. The aliens themselves are never actually seen.
  • Because he is one of the Trope Codifiers for A.I. Is a Crapshoot, everybody knows that HAL 9000 is an evil supercomputer who rebels against the human race and slaughters humans because he views them as inferior. Except he's not. Though he does cause the death of one of his handlers, and he does eventually refuse to obey his handlers' orders, he's not evil, and he doesn't hate humanity. The truth is that HAL goes insane because his commanders give him conflicting orders, asking him to obey the astronauts on the Discovery while keeping their true mission secret from them, thus forcing him into a situation where he might have to lie to them when they ask why they're being sent to Jupiter. The trouble with HAL starts, ironically, because he's too obedient, and doesn't know how to compromise, handle two contradictory commands, or perform any action that might jeopardize his primary mission. When he does kill one of the human protagonists, it's because he learns that they're planning to shut him down, and he believes that he has to defend himself; being a machine, he equates being shut down with death. This is the source of his famous line "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." HAL doesn't open the pod bay doors because he's genuinely incapable of doing so, believing that he would be violating his programming by allowing Dave Bowman to enter the ship to shut him down, putting the mission at risk.
• Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein: There's something of a tendency among people who have never seen the film to dismiss it as a self-parody that marked the nadir of the Universal Monster films. While the film features plenty of comedy from the titular duo, the monsters are played just as seriously as they were in their original films.
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence:
  • If you've heard the complaints about the ending, you've likely heard them centered around the sheer stupidity of "aliens showing up to fix everything at the last minute". Actually, the creatures in the final scene are never said to be aliens, and Word of God has repeatedly stated that they're just the highly evolved descendants of the mecha.
  • Also, their "fix" may actually be a happy Dying Dream they gave to the protagonist before shutting him down. Many people regard it as a Surprisingly Happy Ending, but it's really anything but. It's a tender moment for sure, but it's deliberately underscored with the knowledge that David will still be alone forever and he never achieved his goal of becoming human.
  • One major aspect surrounding the film's reputation comes from the meta-knowledge that the film was Steven Spielberg taking the helm of a film conceptualized by the late Stanley Kubrick, with many criticizing Spielberg for adding all of the soft, whimsical elements way out of Kubrick's artsier, darker stylistic wheelhouse. However, much of the lighter elements (including the aforementioned Bittersweet Ending) were in fact Kubrick's original ideas, with the darker elements (such as the Flesh Fair) being Spielberg's. The two were close friends in life, and Kubrick intended A.I. to be his own type-defying tribute to Spielberg's style, with Spielberg's contributions being his own tributes to honor Kubrick's final creative wishes.
• Everybody knows that Air Bud is the one about the Golden Retriever that inexplicably joins a middle school basketball team. Sort of. While Buddy is shown to be remarkably skilled at basketball (for a dog, anyway...), he spends the majority of the film as the Timberwolves' mascot, and doesn't actually become a player until the climactic championship game. Even then, he's a late-game replacement for an injured player, meaning that he never even plays a full game with the team.
• Alien:
  • "Xenomorph" is not supposed to be the proper species name of the creatures from Alien. "Xenomorph" is simply a scientific word meaning an alien lifeform, which they use because no one's seen such a creature before and don't know what to call it (i.e. it's the taxonomic equivalent of "UFO"). It doesn't actually have a name but a mere designation: "Xenomorph XX121". It has been given two separate binomial names though, refered to as Internecivus Raptus in some of the home video releases and Linguafoeda Acheronsis in some of the comic books, and the Yautja refer to it as "kiande amedha."
  • In the sequel, Aliens, everyone knows that the Weyland Yutani Corporation devised complicated plans to capture an alien specimen by deliberately infecting the colony of Hadley's Hope, right. However, this film does not explicitly blame the company for any of the incidents that take place within it; rather the blame is explicitly laid at Burke's feet for being responsible for ordering the search for the derelict ship, putting together the military rescue operation, accompanying it (potentially to salvage the mess he made or at least hide his tracks), and trying to kill/infect Ripley and Newt. When Ripley accuses Burke in front of the marines, the company is never mentioned and her pointed accusations and Burke's scared response makes it pretty clear he's the one at fault.
• Everybody knows that Amadeus is the one where the evil Antonio Salieri schemes to destroy his rival Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's career, and ultimately murders him out of jealousy. It's not. Salieri confesses to Mozart's murder in the opening scene, but the movie makes it pretty clear that he died of a random illness (partly brought about by overwork), and most of his career struggles were his own fault rather than Salieri's doing. Salieri doesn't cause his downfall, though not for lack of trying. Notably, this one is prevalent enough that the trope Driven by Envy used to be called "Salieri Syndrome".
• It's usually said that the pesticide that killed Sharon in Apaches was weed killer composed mainly of paraquat. In the film itself, it's never specified to be such, only described as a poison meant to kill the rats.
• Sony Pictures is known to have planned many bizarre-sounding Spider-Man spinoff films during the window of time when they had exclusive movie rights to the Spider-Man comics, but a prequel film about Aunt May as a spy in the 1960s was not one of them. That was just a rumor, and it likely started as a joke mocking Sony for planning weird spinoff movies that nobody asked for.^note Mixed in, perhaps, with the trivia footnote that in the comics Peter's parents were in fact spies who hung out in Nick Fury's wheelhouse. Sure, they did plan a Sinister Six movie, a Spider-Man 2099 movie, a Superior Spider Man movie, a Clone Saga movie, various solo villain movies starring Carnage and Kraven the Hunter (among others), and even a Silver Age throwback directed by a returning Sam Raimi—but no spy thriller starring Aunt May.
• Avatar:
  • Many people claim that the film has an anti-technology message, and that it strongly implies that humans should learn from the Na'vi and return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. In truth, while it has a strong pro-conservation message, it also has very strong Science Is Good themes: the scientist Grace Augustine is one of the most sympathetic characters in the movie, and Jake Sully is only able to save the Na'vi because of the Avatar Project—which utilizes advanced genetic engineering. This supplementary materials make this even more evident, making it clear that Earth is suffering from a massive environmental collapse that can only be fixed with science and technology.
  • The Na’vi do not actually have ponytail sex. Their queues allow them to mentally link with other Na’vi, animals, or even plant life, but they are not sexual organs. The Na’vi still have genitalia and reproduce similarly to humans. That being said, two Na’vi getting sexually intimate can connect their queues together to enhance their sexual pleasure. This is even shown in an extended version of the movie where Jake and Neytiri connect their queues and have some interesting reactions to having physically intimate contact with each other for the first time.
  • Avatar: The Way of Water: There are a surprising number of people who believe Rotxo (the Metkayina teen with the "mushroom cut") took part in bullying Kiri alongside Aonung and his friends. This teen is in fact, not Rotxo, but another Metkayina teen with a very similar design and hairstyle.
• The Back to the Future trilogy:
  • Crossing this with Fake Memories: In Part I, the terrorists drive a blue and white Volkswagen van. For some reason a lot of people misremember the vehicle as a brown or white Toyota van.
  • Marty never flew the DeLorean during the movies; only Doc and Old Biff were seen flying it, with Marty always being in the passenger’s seat whenever the car flew with him in it. However, Marty drove it around on the ground pretty frequently.^note Additionally, Marty did get to fly it once during the video game, and a bunch during the animated series.
  • Because Biff, Lorraine and Doc himself are present in both the past and present, and Biff and Lorraine even in the future, people tend to confuse which one they are, sometimes mistakenly believing that Doc and Marty travel together from the start, when in fact the only trips Doc and Marty take together are to 2015 and back, and then to 1955 a second time, and all those trips are from Part II. Every other time one of them travels in the films, they each do it alone (though they do travel together more times in spin off material). In fact, in the first movie, the version of Doc that gets the most screen time is the 1955 Doc who just met Marty and hasn't invented time travel yet, while the 1985 Doc who knew Marty for some time and invented the time machine was shot dead by the terrorists whom he ripped off to get the plutonium to power the Time Machine from, which leads to Marty accidentally traveling back in time while trying to escape. It's actually a subplot that Marty tries to warn the 1955 Doc, whom he seeks out to help fix the Time Machine, about his future demise, with Doc being too stubborn about not knowing about the future to listen. The 1985 Doc is not the most predominantly featured version until the sequels. Biff only time travels twice offscreen, when his elderly self in 2015 steals the DeLorean for a trip to and from 1955 to deliver the sports almanac to his past self.^note However, 1955 Biff gets to time travel a bunch during the events of the ride.
  • A lot of people confuse Biff and Griff, his grandson in 2015. Several also think that Biff is Marty's school bully, when he was actually Marty's father's school bully, with Biff being a middle aged man in Marty's present.
  • Lorraine never actually travels in time herself (and is completely unaware of the existence of time travel), and Jennifer only does so technically twice, going to the future (and back) with Marty (and being unconscious for the entire return trip). The confusion seems to derive from people getting Marty's mother and girlfriend's names confused.
  • There seems to be confusion on what Marty's goal is. It's often described as him going back in time to assure his parents meet (it's actually him going back by accident and causing them not to meet, then having to fix it). Others believe that his very act of traveling back in time caused him to start erasing his existence, and many have suggested it makes no sense that he doesn't disappear immediately instead of gradually fading, forgetting that it's his accidentally taking his father's place in history, causing his mother to fall for him instead, that threatens to wipe out Marty's existence, not doing so immediately because no one has yet taken an irreversible action.
  • John Mulaney has a routine that uses a bunch of these misconceptions, and creates some more, including the idea that Marty is interested in having sex with his mother (it's the other way around, as Marty’s mother originally fell for his father due to the Florence Nightingale Effect after her father hit him with his car. When Marty travelled back in time, without knowing what was meant to happen, he pushed his father out of the way of the car and got hit instead, with him taking his father’s place as the object of affection for his mother, who was unaware of their true relationship to each other. Marty himself is, quite understandably, very much Squicked out by this development) and that it has Marty "write" Johnny B. Goode (something that many claim is a Plot Hole due to its implication of a Stable Time Loop, which runs counter to how time travel is depicted as working in the films), which is really just Marty playing it based on his memories, and having Chuck Berry hear a snippet of it and evidently realize it's the "new sound" he was looking for. Chuck still writes the actual song himself, though.
    • In addition, by the time Chuck is able to hear what is playing, Marty has mostly shifted into his improvised Eddie Van Halen-esque rock solo, so Chuck wouldn’t have heard enough of the song from the performance, suggesting he still came up with it on his own.
  • Many cosplays of Marty include his iconic "life preserver" vest and jean jacket with the pink hoverboard as a prop. Marty only wore the vest and jacket in Part I, and the hoverboard only ever appeared in the sequels, meaning there was no crossover between the two.
  • One of the more iconic aspects of Marty, one that many will tell you is what starts the trouble with Biff once he is stranded in the past, is his overreaction to being called a "chicken", causing him to immediately try and prove that he isn't one. The problem is that this aspect of his character made its debut in the first sequel, and while it becomes a major plot point for him, both the trouble it gets him in and how his learning to overcome it affects his future, not once in Part I does anyone call Marty, or anyone else, a chicken. Marty gets on Biff's radar by sticking up for George and attracting Lorraine's attention.
  • It's been stated in several places that Marty's parents don't approve of his Intergenerational Friendship with Doc. In fact, aside from a scene when 1955 Lorraine briefly interacts with Doc when she asks Marty to the dance, Marty's parents never make any acknowledgment of Doc at all in the movies. Strickland is the one who tells Marty that Doc is a nutcase, while original 1985 Lorraine disapproves of Marty's relationship with Jennifer, so perhaps the misconception is the result of people conflating the two interactions.
• In Batman (1989), despite what many people think, Alfred doesn't just reveal that Bruce Wayne is Batman to Vicki Vale. She managed to figure it out on her own after discovering the article about Bruce's parents being killed in front of him when he was a child. However, he does let her into the Bat Cave without Bruce's permission, something that Bruce ribs him about in the next movie.
• We have no idea what the Blair Witch looks like, right? Actually, in the movie, the witch is in fact described as an ugly floating elderly woman with long hair. True, the descriptions given by different characters aren't consistent, but there's also a drawing that's close to it.
• Even if they've never seen it, everybody knows that Brokeback Mountain is "the gay cowboy movie". Even though they're shepherds, not cowboys. And their sexuality is left ambiguous enough to leave open the possibility that they're bisexual rather than outright closeted gays. It could even be a case of If It's You, It's Okay, considering that neither of them had any other homosexual relationships before each other, and never have any after. Jack could be gay or bi, considering he attempts to solicit a gay prostitute, but this could just be a case of missing Ennis, whereas Ennis never shows interest in any other man than Jack.
• Mistakes people make about Bruce Almighty are annoyingly common. Even worse, they're normally by people who've actually seen the movie! They include:
  • People thinking that Bruce only had God's powers for a week. This is never stated, and mid-way through God actually said "You've had my powers for a little over a week now", so this can't be right, as we know Bruce had his powers for several more days at minimum. Even the DVD cover and the TRAILERS make this mistake, as does the title of the Italian dub, "Una Settimana da Dio" (A week as God).
  • People thinking Bruce's powers only worked in Buffalo. This is wrong; Bruce only got PRAYERS from Buffalo, but he could use his powers anywhere. This is especially obvious when Bruce moves the moon.
  • People thinking that Bruce and Grace are married. This one is possibly the least forgivable, since it's a major plot point that Grace wants Bruce to propose to her. Anyone who makes this mistake clearly wasn't paying attention when they watched the film.
  • There are also several people who miss the point of the movie, by complaining that Bruce used his powers frivolously, not helping others, humiliating his rival, punishing some thugs that had beaten him up, (accidentally and unknowingly) killing thousands of people and *gasp* having pre-marital sex. They clearly missed the point of Bruce intentionally being an imperfect person, who can learn a lesson during the movie.
• Carry On... Series:
  • Carry On Jack: Kenneth Cope was believed to have played an uncredited sailor, but he himself confirmed he never went anywhere near the set.
  • Carry On Screaming!:
    • The theme tune wasn't actually performed by Jim Dale as many have claimed but by Ray Pilgrim.
    • Despite claims that Alexandra Dane appeared in this film in an Uncredited Role, Dane herself confirmed that she wasn't in it.
  • Carry On Up the Khyber: Many people claim that the famous dinner party scene was a One-Take Wonder, when according to actors in the film such as Angela Douglas and Julian Holloway, it took three days to complete the scene.
• Every once in awhile you'll come across a claim that either Casablanca or Citizen Kane was saved from obscurity by a cadre of film students. It's also claimed that both movies were Box Office Bombs and critical failures. In reality both were extremely successful movies (Casablanca making back many times its shoestring budget) which were loved by the critics and were regularly broadcast on TV until they were released on video (in fact, Casablanca was one of the first movies released on video tape in the early 1970s!). In fact it was a reoccurring joke in Peanuts during the 50s and 60s that Citizen Kane was their favorite movie. These rumors tend to date back to magazine articles written during the 50th anniversaries of both movies during the 1980s and are either exaggerations, poor research, or an example of living in a Small Reference Pools.
• Detractors of the 2004 Catwoman movie with Halle Berry often complain about the film reimagining Selina Kyle as a meek office worker named "Patience Phillips" who develops "cat powers" after dying and being resurrected by a magic Egyptian cat. While the movie is effectively an In Name Only adaptation of the Catwoman comics, it takes the time to establish that Selina Kyle and Patience Phillips are two different people: one scene makes it clear that Catwoman is a Legacy Character, and Selina Kyle (as played by Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns) was one of the people who previously took up the mantle. For what it's worth, many of the film's more egregious changes to the source material (like the idea of Catwoman being brought back from the dead with superpowers) were first introduced in Batman Returns—which also took quite a few liberties with the source material.
• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang:
  • The film is often mistaken for being a Disney production - it's not. It was made by United Artists. What doesn't help was that the Sherman Brothers and Dick Van Dyke were involved with this movie as well as Mary Poppins. Sometimes people even go so far as to mistake it and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Which was made by Disney and shares a Production Posse with Mary Poppins).
  • What also hasn't helped was that the Sherman Brothers also wrote music for the musical version and the film version. This has resulted in some people misattributing songs written for the musical to the film.
  • The "Vulgaria' section of the film is an imaginary tale within a tale, told by Caractacus to the children at the beach. Many people forget this and often assume that the titular vehicle actually takes the gang to Vulgaria. Adding to this misconception is the stage musical, which cuts the "tale within a tale" device and makes it all real.
• In A Christmas Story, Ralphie's father does not refuse to get Ralphie a Red Ryder BB gun for Christmas on the grounds that he'd "shoot [his] eye out". Though many adults in the movie tell Ralphie this, his father is not one of them (though his mother is). The Old Man is the one who ultimately does buy Ralphie a Red Ryder BB gun.
• Citizen Kane:
  • One of the most famous plot holes in cinematic history: supposedly, nobody actually heard Charles Foster Kane's last words, therefore the whole "Rosebud" mystery should never have happened. In reality, while the tight angles don't show anyone there during the actual death scene, Kane's butler Raymond later tells Thompson that he was there for his boss's death. It's a testament to the movie's Mainstream Obscurity that so easily-disproved a rumor was able to circulate to the extent that it did.
  • People assume Marion Davies had a bad career, as her expy in the film shows. In fact, Marion Davies was widely considered a talented actress and comedienne, independent of all the publicity Hearst arranged for her, best exemplified in what might be her best-known film, Show People. Hearst did push Davies towards melodramatic leading-lady roles, despite her performing better in light comedy. Welles became mortified at Kane's role in harming Davies' reputation, pointing out that not only was Davies talented, she and Hearst seemed to genuinely love each other, unlike Charles and Susan's loveless marriage in Kane.
  • The film is often regarded as a satire on Hearst and Hearst alone. In truth, the film was intended to be a general satire and tragedy of The American Dream and the resemblances to Hearst came about largely because screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz was a regular at Hearst's parties and knew him well. Both he and Welles included details from several American tycoons like Samuel Insull and Howard Hughes in addition to Hearst. Likewise, Welles claimed he never intended the film to be a Take That! on Hearst, though he had an obvious legal interest in downplaying the connection amidst the controversy. For what it's worth, the drafts of the screenplay credited to Welles show that it was he who made Kane more sympathetic and that the original screenplay was a good deal more anti-Hearst. Another major reason for the anti-Hearst interpretation is that Hearst himself interpreted the film that way, and went out of his way to sabotage the film's release.
  • There's also Kael's claim that Mankiewicz wrote the entire script himself, and that Welles unfairly took credit. Despite being thoroughly debunked by Robert L. Carringer, Peter Bogdanovich and others, this argument's still repeated by credulous film buffs.
  • Many see the Hearst controversy as really ending Welles' career and see the film's bad reception as single-handedly stifling a great talent a la Tall Poppy Syndrome. The truth is that Citizen Kane, while criticized and seen as attracting unwanted attention from a powerful man, was a highly respected production in Hollywood at the time. Yes it was booed at the Oscars, but it was also nominated for the awards, and Welles won an Oscar (with Mankiewicz) for his screenplay. The film was admired for its technical brilliance and Welles had enough admirers to balance out others who disliked him. It was The Magnificent Ambersons that truly tarnished his reputation, since unlike Kane (which had a smooth, competent production), Ambersons was a famous mess and more or less made sure that Welles would never have Auteur License again.
  • It's often noted how Welles ended up like Kane, dying alone and miserable. In reality, Welles was working right up until his death (literally, as he died while typing up a filming schedule) and he was living with a girlfriend and had a circle of friends who all claimed he was very happy.
  • The film is often summarized through some variant of "a guy who just wanted a sled", and most people assume that the sled is the most important part not only of the story but also of Kane's life. In reality, Kane owned Rosebud for decades; it's just that when he got it back, he realized that just owning the sled wouldn't make him a kid again. Likewise, while the sled is an important MacGuffin, most of the film is about Thompson learning the specifics of Kane's life from childhood to adulthood through the perspectives of Kane's peers, all of whom have Alternative Character Interpretations of Kane. At the end of the film, Thompson gives up on finding out the truth about Rosebud after realizing that Kane is too complex of a person to be summarized by his connection to Rosebud.
• Everyone "knows" The Conversation was made as a reaction to the then-current Watergate scandal. But in reality, the script for the movie had been written nearly a decade before; the fact that it happened to be shot as Watergate was big news was just coincidence.
• The Criterion Collection has a reputation for providing extremely lavish DVD and Blu-ray releases of famous, critically acclaimed and respected classic movies with hours and hours of bonus material, but many incorrectly assume that's all they do. In reality, Criterion releases a lot of movies, not all of which are well-known, old, or even acclaimed, and while certain high-profile releases get treated well in the extras department, most have only a few basic supplements such as a commentary track and a trailer. However, it is true that all Criterion releases get extensively restored and remastered, so you can expect consistently excellent video and audio quality even if it's a lesser-known film or a modest release overall.
• The Dark Knight Trilogy: A lot of people are under the impression that Jack Gleeson, who later played Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones, played Commissioner Gordon's son, leading to people joking that Batman should have let Two-Face kill him or calling it ironic since in the comics, James Gordon Jr. becomes a serial killer. However, Gleeson did not play Gordon's son, he played the unnamed kid in the Narrows in Batman Begins. Gordon's son in The Dark Knight was played by Nathan Gamble. It's likely that people conflated the two characters due to both being blonde boys who are saved by Batman.
• The DC Extended Universe:
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Everybody knows that Batman chooses to spare Superman's life at the climax of the movie because their mothers have the same name. Not quite. While that revelation leads to Batman sparing Superman's life, it's more because it triggers his memories of his parents' deaths ("Martha..." was the last thing that Thomas Wayne said before he died), leading him to the realization that he'll be no better than Joe Chill if he kills a man in cold blood. Fans and critics generally agree that this was a decent idea in theory; it's more the nonsensical execution of the scene that leads to it being mocked.^note  For starters: the fact that Superman just blurts out "SAVE MARTHA!" without bothering to explain who "Martha" is or how to "save" her, and that he instinctively refers to his own mother by her first name. (Although be fair, Superman had just been beaten half to death, and he had a metal boot on his throat at the time; he may not have been thinking clearly)
  • Everyone (starting with Bruce Wayne) knows that Superman callously "destroyed Metropolis" while figthing his enemies and made no attempt to minimise the casualties or try to lure the villains away from the population centers. Except, unlike Bruce, people who'd actually have the chance to see "Man of Steel" should know that, a) Supes was constantly trying to take the fight elsewhere, but was hindered by having to contend with and barely holding against several almost equally powerful and much better trained opponents; b) 99,9% of property damage was caused by the World Engine and by Zod personally (slicing the building in half, throwing the fuel tanker and the sattelite, punching Supes through buildings - that was all on him); c) luring Zod away was impossible, because the villain was hell-bent on killing as many humans as possible to hurt Superman and/or provoke him into killing Zod.
  • Everyone knows the DCEU is more violent and angsty than previous DC films, particularly when it comes to Superman having considerable self doubt about being a hero and Batman killing people. On the other hand, Christopher Reeve's Superman almost constantly questioned whether he should be Superman, even turning human in the second film. And the Tim Burton Batman is noticeably kills both mooks and major villains constantly and The Dark Knight is given that name for reason.
  • The DCEU has garnered a reputation for consistently putting out movies that are viewed as overly bleak and angsty, with later entries like Aquaman and SHAZAM! (2019) receiving positive early buzz for steering the franchise in a more colorful, fun and optimistic direction. The truth is, despite all the many, many jokes about the DCEU being "gritty and depressing", that really only describes the films where Zack Snyder had heavy involvement, namely Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. Wonder Woman (2017) was already moving away from the bleak tone and murky color palette of Snyder's movies (with director Patty Jenkins explicitly citing the aforementioned Christopher Reeve Superman movies as a major influence on her work), while both Suicide Squad (2016) and Justice League (2017) were subjected to extensive Executive Meddling to make them Lighter and Softer after Batman v. Superman was panned by critics and experienced negative word of mouth from audiences. Furthermore, James Wan and David F. Sandberg, the respective directors of Aquaman and Shazam only signed on to direct if they could make their movies light-hearted in tone. More shockingly, Zack Snyder's Justice League showcased that even Snyder can infuse heavy amounts of levity in his moviemaking (also taking into account the fact that writer Chris Terrio said from the get-go before principal photography began that this film would be lighter and more hopeful, like Return of the Jedi was to The Empire Strikes Back, nobody said all subsequent films were going to be like Batman v Superman).
• Most parodies of Deliverance often have banjo music heralding Black Comedy Rape at the hands of hillbillies. In the actual film, aside from rape being treated much less flippantly, the rape scene takes place quite a while after the "Dueling Banjos" scene, with the banjo-playing kid in the latter only appearing in that one scene and therefore having absolutely no involvement in the former.
• Disney:
  • Disney did not "fire" Jerry Bruckheimer after The Lone Ranger flopped, as he was never their employee to begin with. All they did was end their "first look" contract with him. Bruckheimer will still make movies with Disney but most of his newer films will be made for Paramount, who he has a new "first look" deal with.
  • The reason that Disney and Bruckheimer parted ways wasn't completely because of The Lone Ranger bombing either - it was because all of their non-Pirates of the Caribbean collaborations from 2008 to 2013 (Confessions of a Shopaholic, G-Force, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and The Sorcerer's Apprentice) were high-profile box office disappointments, and the timing of the contract ending in late 2013 just happened to match up with their latest collaboration The Lone Ranger flopping.
  • When Disney CEO Bob Iger announced at the 2015 shareholders meeting that depictions of characters smoking was more or less banned in future Disney-branded films, it was treated as big news. In reality Iger was just reiterating a policy that the studio had put in place in regards to depicting smoking back in 2007. It's apparently been loosened since then: the 2007 ban was for all movies and characters, but in 2015 Iger said that exceptions would be made for historical characters as well as for Disney distributed films that don't necessarily target kids.
  • Song of the South:
    • Many people believe that the film is about an old black man who finds Happiness in Slavery, to the point that Disney is reluctant to distribute it nowadays — except the story is set after the Civil War, meaning all the black characters in it are sharecroppers, not slaves. Given how scarcely-distributed this movie is, this misinterpretation about what the movie is actually about is something that's not easily corrected.
    • Even sympathetic viewers tend to think that the "Tar Baby" is supposed to be some kind of racial insult and that the storyline was changed for Splash Mountain precisely because of it. They apparently don't know that the basic folktale not only exists in many cultures around the world, but that it originated in Africa.
  • Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a collaboration and jointly owned effort between Disney, Warner Bros, and other animation studios right? Actually that's only partly true. While animators hailing from various studios did help work on the film, it's officially considered a Touchstone Pictures (alternate label of Disney) and Amblin Entertainment co-production and is owned by Disney. Many of the other studios only gave permission to use the characters and did not actively work on the film.
  • Disney Live-Action Remakes:
    • Rumors that Atlantis: The Lost Empire would be joining the live-action remake lineup started circulating the internet in 2019, with claims that Guillermo del Toro would direct and Tom Holland would star. While the rumors were debunked by del Toro himself, there's still people who believe them — or at the very least hold on to the hope that it could happen one day, if only because the concept of del Toro helming an Atlantis remake is a special effects buff's wet dream.
    • For a while,there was a popular claim that these remakes were based on Walt Disney — possibly as his Dying Wish — wanting all the films to be remade every ten years for a new generation of children. Never mind that this clearly wasn't something that the live-action remakes were actually doing, with the narrowest gap so far being 12 years between the two Mulans . It seems to have been a misinterpretation of a Disney marketing strategy, especially in the days before home video, to rerelease the films regularly for a new generation of children.
• Everyone knows the classic theme to the original Dracula (1931) is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, leading the piece to become permanently associated with classic horror movie monsters in the popular imagination. Except it doesn't appear anywhere in the movie; the actual theme is Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. ^note Toccata and Fugue in D Minor was used in horror and non-horror movies including Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Black Cat (1934), Fantasia (1940), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Phantom of the Opera (1962), and Rollerball (1975).
• People going on a trip by motorbike often reference Easy Rider, for the true spirit of the freedom-loving, all-American road-trip... forgetting the Diabolus ex Machina ending. Of course, that may be intentional, since the ending was tacked on to meet with censor approval, allowing them to make the rest of the film glorifying freedom-loving hippy bikers.
• Everyone knows about that (in)famous scene from Equilibrium, where our main protagonist John Preston kills an entire team of Sweepers in order to protect a puppy he recently found and decided to keep. Except that is not why he did it. In reality, his main motivation was far more simple and far less altruistic — said Sweepers just caught him red-handed in possession of an illegal, emotion-inducing item (aforementioned puppy), which is a crime punishable by death in Libria, and were about to arrest him for it and bring him to "justice". In other words, Preston fought these guys and killed them in self-defence, not protecting a puppy. In fact, said Sweepers quickly lost their interest in doggie itself once they've discovered it and were totally focused on detaining our main hero (to the point of aiming their guns straight at his head). And yet, in spite of that, many people over the internet (including this very wiki) keep insisting that Preston killed people over a puppy.
• One of the most popular ways of referencing the film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is to mimic the scene in which ET holds his index finger out toward Elliot as the tip of his finger glows and he says "ET phone home". The problem is that no such scene exists. There is a scene of him holding his finger up with a glowing tip, and a scene where he says "ET phone home", but they are two entirely different scenes. Elliot isn't even in the first scene where ET says "phone home"; he's talking to Elliot's younger sister Gertie, and only later says it to Elliot. Also, people seem to imitate him by saying it robotically: "Eee-Tee-Phone-Home!" when he actually says it slowly, with inflection implying that he finally can make the humans understand what he needs to do. As for the glowing finger, in that scene ET uses his healing ability to heal Elliot's cut, and what he says is "ouch". No phoning home mentioned in that scene.
• People frequently reference Kate Winslet's character in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as the classic modern example of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, forgetting (or unaware of) the movie's Twist Ending. The first scene of the movie, where a free-spirited woman with dyed hair randomly strikes up a conversation with a shy loner, isn't actually the couple's first meeting (it occurs after Joel and Clementine erased their memories of each other). In their real first meeting, Joel introduced himself to Clementine, he got a much more frosty reception, and the two actually had to work to make a romance feasible. Even aside from that, the trope is deconstructed pretty thoroughly - at one point, Clementine tells Joel in so many words that she's her own screwed-up person, not a plot device in his story, and Joel later expresses shame that even after that he still secretly expected her to "save" him.
• Those who have not seen it, and perhaps even those who have, often assume that The Exorcist's title refers to Father Merrin, played by Max von Sydow, and he is often remembered as the film's lead. This is likely due to the iconic image of the film's theatrical poster and home video cover; that of Father Merrin standing outside the MacNeil home. It can be jarring to watch the film and realize how little screen time he has, and that in large part it is Jason Miller's Father Karras who is the male lead, and ultimately, title character.
• Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore: No, the Qilin does not magically foretell or predestine the outcome of an election, which is what some critics have made it seem. All it does is judge whether a person is particularly virtuous or pure-hearted, which wizardkind used to rely on in the matter of choosing who would lead them. It is basically a high-profile endorsement.
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off: A lot of people, even on this website, are under the impression that the two parking attendants who took Cameron's dad's Ferrari for a joyride racked up a comically large mileage of over 2,000 miles, justifying Cameron's massive Freak Out. In actuality, the odometer started at 125, and ended at 301, so they only added 176 miles.
• In Forrest Gump, Jenny doesn't die of AIDS. She dies in 1982, when AIDS was first becoming well documented, so many people assume it was a given. There was in fact no distinct disease ever intended for her to die of, and it's never stated in the film. The sequel to the original book says that it was Hepatitis C that killed her.
• Frankenstein (1931):
  • While the movie is responsible for solidifying most people's image of Frankenstein's Monster, it didn't start the trend of portraying him with green skin. The movie was filmed in black and white, but there are several colorized publicity stills that clearly depict the monster with ordinary flesh-colored skin.
  • Similarly, the original Frankenstein monster never used the famous flailing gait with outstretched arms, and Boris Karloff certainly didn't. That was from the fourth film The Ghost of Frankenstein, after Ygor had his brain put in the monster and subsequently went blind, which is why he's flailing. The monster by that point was played by Lon Chaney Jr. after Karloff left the role after the previous film.
  • Henry Frankenstein's hunchbacked assistant is named Fritz, not Igor, and he doesn't speak with a lisp, nor is he devious. A character named Ygor (not spelled "Igor" in the movie) does appear in the third and fourth movies, which feature Henry's sons instead. However, Ygor is not a hunchback (though he has a crooked posture due to a failed hanging attempt), and he is not Frankenstein's henchman. Rather, he is a schemer who wants to reanimate the monster for his own personal gain. The idea that hunchbacked assistants are typically named Igor was made popular by Mel Brooks' Affectionate Parody Young Frankenstein. The Other Wiki proposes the non-hunchbacked assistant Igor from House of Wax (1953) as another possible influence.
    • While its obscurity makes it less likely to be a direct influence outside of Canada, the 1971 television show, The Hilarious House of Frightenstein featured a character named Igor, who was the assistant of Count Frightenstein. The Count's goal was to revive a Frankenstein's Monster type character, Brucie, and thus be allowed to return to Transylvania. However, this Igor is not a hunchback. The show predates Young Frankenstein.
  • Dr. Frankenstein does not live in a gigantic gothic castle up in the mountains where he conducts his experiments, his laboratory is in a watchtower outside of town where he is basically squatting. The third film Son of Frankenstein did have both the original experiments and the new experiment take place in a castle, but that film follows a Broad Strokes version of the first two films' events.
  • Dr. Frankenstein is also not a crazy recluse with only his assistant Igor for company whom the townsfolk shun, he's known by the townsfolk and his marriage to Elizabeth is a large public event.
  • The secret to bringing back the dead is not lightning. As Frankenstein explains to his professor, he found a new frequency on the electromagnetic spectrum and turned it into a ray which somehow brings the dead back to life, the lightning is to jumpstart the body. This would be more memorable if the ray was demonstrated like the lightning instead of just being mentioned.
  • Frankenstein is not the only member of his family, his father is a baron, the local Reasonable Authority Figure, and is most certainly not a scientist.
  • Most parodies feature an Angry Mob trying to storm Frankenstein's lair after learning about the monster. In the actual movie, Frankenstein leads the mob to find the monster after it goes missing.
• Friday the 13th:
  • The series revolves around Jason Voorhees, a hockey-masked, machete-wielding Serial Killer who murders carefree teenagers. However, Jason isn't in the first movie (the killer is his mother), and he doesn't wear a hockey mask until the third movie (the second movie has him wearing a burlap sack over his head) — this is famously used as a plot point in Scream, where a killer makes Drew Barrymore's character answer horror movie trivia, eventually killing her and her boyfriend because she incorrectly said that Jason was the villain of the first Friday The 13th movie. Furthermore, though parodies of the movies frequently depict Jason wielding a chainsaw, he never actually does this in the movies; the closest he ever comes is wielding a hedge trimmer in Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, and being attacked with one in Friday the 13th Part 2. Jason’s most well known weapon is actually a machete and even then he didn't start regularly using it until he was revived as a zombie in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. Before then, he often used an Improvised Weapon, which he still did on occasion afterwards. The confusion regarding chainsaws likely comes from the fact that those parodies don't just reference Jason, but also Leatherface from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Jason's also generally thought of as a guy who somehow manages to catch up to his victims despite an inability to move quickly, but he runs full-tilt on multiple occasions, especially in the early movies.
  • Everybody knows that Jason stalks and kills teenage counselors at Camp Crystal Lake, right? Sort of. In fact: in a series of twelve films (not counting the 2009 reboot, which is a loose remake of the first three movies), exactly three revolve around camp counselors, two take place at Camp Crystal Lake, and only one takes place at the camp while it's actually open and filled with campers. While nearly all of the films (with the exception of Jason X and Freddy vs. Jason) take place around Crystal Lake, Jason tends to menace residents of the surrounding towns more frequently than he stalks counselors at the summer camp—which is understandable, since Camp Crystal Lake is closed down after Pamela Voorhees murders most of the counselors in the first movie, and it doesn't reopen until the sixth movie. The second movie does take place in a summer camp near Crystal Lake, but it's a different summer camp near the abandoned site of the one in the first movie.
• Ghostbusters (1984):
  • That it had a lot of slapstick — the only slapstick scene was when Peter gets covered in ectoplasm at the hotel. Most of the comedy was dialogue-based with much of the movie, plot-included, being shot more like a traditional horror film.
  • That the proton packs worked similarly to a vacuum cleaner. What they actually do is send beams out to hold the ghost like a lasso, which is then sucked up by a second device, called a "trap".
  • The line "I ain't afraid of no ghosts" in the theme has led some viewers to think the Ghostbusters don't fear their enemies. They initially ran in fear from the librarian ghost, and they were clearly scared when battling Gozer; they just did it despite their fear.
  • When Peter Venkman drugs the possessed Dana with thorazine, some viewers were led to believe he brought it with him because he was going to rape her. Seeing as he refused to sleep with her while she was possessed despite being clearly tempted, this was almost certainly not true. He likely either found it in her apartment or was carrying it for self-defense.
• In The Godfather, "The Godfather" is not Vito Corleone's nickname, and it's not a title used for the head of the Corleone family. Whenever a character addresses Vito as "Godfather", they mean it literally: Vito and his wife Carmela actually are the godparents of most of the Italian characters in the movie. In Italian/Sicilian culture (as it's presented in the film, anyway), asking someone to be their child's godparent is one of the deepest gestures of respect that a person can make; hence, many of the local Italian-Americans in New York ask Vito to be their children's godfather as a sign of their loyalty to him.
• Godzilla:
  • Everybody knows that the title character is a big green lizard who breathes fire. Except that the original Toho version is a charcoal grey ^note  Not until Godzilla 2000 would Toho themselves make him green (and even then, a dark evergreen, rather than bright green, and it only followed through for one more film before returning to grey) — before that, only American advertising, The Godzilla Power Hour, Godzilland, the Dark Horse Comics adaptation, and the Marvel Comics incarnation made him green. In addition, the Heisei series character Godzilla Junior is green in his second and third appearances. mutated dinosaur who breathes "Atomic Breath" ^note  It was a superheated vapor in the earlier Showa films, and a beam of plasma later on, but it caused fires without actually being fire. But then again, it was because of atomic power.. Also, the first two films were in black and white. The 1998 film strengthened the confusion by making him a mutated iguana, though it was not green this time either but a combination of grey, blue and brown. Rather than an Atomic Breath, this version could exhale on cars to cause a fiery explosion, which can easily be mistaken for a fire breath.
  • Godzilla has never been exactly 400 feet tall.^note He does top out at over 600 feet in his Marvel Comics appearances (but like many large comic book characters, is strongly prone to the Your Size May Vary trope), and his anime incarnation is over 1000 feet tall. Depending on the film in question, for the first 28 films he's either 165, 262 or 330 feet tall, while his Monsterverse incarnation is either 355 or 393 feet tall (the closest he's ever been to 400 feet). This error comes from a line in the American dub of the first movie, where someone looks at a depiction of Godzilla and estimates he is "over 400 feet tall", despite the original version of the film explicitly saying he is 50 meters (about 165 feet) tall. Why they felt the need to change it in the American version is anyone's guess.
  • Everybody knows that Godzilla was originally a scary harbinger of destruction before he went through Villain Decay and became a hero. While it's true that the series got considerably Lighter and Softer after the first movie^note for the most part, that isn't because Godzilla got friendlier. Godzilla actually dies at the end of the original film; the character who repeatedly saves Earth from King Ghidorah in later films is a different mutated dinosaur also called "Godzilla". Even through the series' various reboots, that detail has more-or-less always stayed consistent; in nearly every version, the original Godzilla was killed (usually by Dr. Serizawa's oxygen destroyer) after he attacked Tokyo in 1954, but then another, more benevolent (or at least less malevolent) monster by the same name showed up years later.
  • Everybody knows that Gamera is one of Godzilla's most famous enemies. Except he comes from a completely separate series of Kaiju movies made by a different company than the Godzilla movies.
  • Destoroyah tends to be known as one of Godzilla's toughest foes that accomplished the rare feat of killing him. But in the actual movie, Godzilla had already begun to die due to causes unrelated to other monsters — people just tend to think that Destoroyah was the culprit due to its prominence in the film and its powers being based on the Oxygen Destroyer, the device which had killed the original Godzilla. Destoroyah did kill Godzilla's adopted son Godzilla Jr., though he's Back from the Dead by the end, and its attacks worsened Godzilla's state, but Godzilla actually defeated it. And while Destoroyah was tough, it is destroyed by the human military of all things as it tries to flee, a rare occasion of humans scoring a definite triumph over a monster in the series.
  • Also regarding Godzilla vs. Destoroyah, thanks in no part to James Rolfe's review of the movie, there are a number of kaiju fans on the internet (and even some major youtubers who have made videos on the subject) who believe Godzilla's burning form is capable of destroying the entire universe. Not only is something like that Beyond the Impossible even for a kaiju movie, but the movie quite clearly states that Godzilla's burning form will only destroy the Earth. This is likely due to Rolfe's tendency to exaggerate during his reviews though.
  • Toho Studios "bought" the American Godzilla from Godzilla (1998), changed its name to Zilla and had the original Godzilla demolish it under seconds in Godzilla: Final Wars as a clear show of their power differences. The real situation is more complicated because of legal matters. Toho did not "buy" the 1998 Godzilla, they had owned rights to its design to begin with. "Zilla", despite using mostly the same design, was not the same monster — legally, Toho still acknowledges the 1998 creature as Godzilla. They have simply stipulated that beginning from 2004, most portrayals of the '98 design not to be tied to its feature film have to be named Zilla. So in technical terms, the design is used by two characters: an American version of Godzilla and a Japanese copy thereof. As for the famous scene in Final Wars, it's not the "definitive" version of how a fight between any Japanese Godzilla and the '98 Godzilla might play out, nor was it intended to be this short. The director actually wanted a more elaborate fight, showing the '98 Godzilla as a more capable monster, but budget constraints forced him to cut the clash down to a few seconds. The decision to turn the scene into a short gag was a compromise, not the original intent. The Final Wars version of Godzilla also beats most of his other enemies with similar ease. In Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Godzilla barely managed to defeat his titular foe, suffering major injuries and needing help from humans. In Final Wars, Hedorah suffers an even more humiliating defeat than Zilla, yet the director harbored no hate against Hedorah. Clearly, any sort of "power levels" alternate depending on the story. Similarly, fans point to the dated CG used for Zilla compared to the Kaiju suits used for the other monsters as an intentional dig at the creature - ignoring firstly that the CG is on par with the other effects of the movie and secondly that as an all-CGI character Zilla never had a suit to use; commissioning one for what amounted to a cameo would have been prohibitively expensive for the already-stretched budget.
  • The supposed fact that Akira Kurosawa wanted to direct his own Godzilla film tends to crop up when people argue over the franchise's artistic merit. It's also said Toho rejected his offer fearing that he'd have gone over budget. Kurosawa's real life close friendship with Godzilla co-creator and director Ishir⁠ō Honda might partially explain where this legend came from, but no actual sources are ever given. Western Kurosawa scholars and film historians suggest it's just a misconception.
  • One of the most often cited bits of trivia from Godzilla vs. Hedorah is that suit actor Kenpachiro Satsuma had to have an appendix surgery on the film set, still inside the massive Hedorah costume, and that's where he learned painkillers had no effect on him. This is mentioned in countless books and articles, but an actual interview with Satsuma tells the event differently. Filming had wrapped and Satsuma was doing a publicity interview for a news article while only half-wearing the suit when pain hit him and he was rushed off to surgery, without the monster suit. The part about painkillers being ineffective on him was true though.
  • The anti-nuclear weapon theme of the original Godzilla was conceived when director Ishir⁠ō Honda walked across the ruins of Hiroshima during his return from military service. Seeing the ruins and lack of life inspired him to find a way to give a visible form to atomic energy. This story was repeated in numerous books, articles and even an episode of the series Legends of Tomorrow that gave a fictionalized account of Godzilla's origin as a film. In the mid-2010s, Honda's biographers Steve Rifle and Ed Godziszewski however revealed Honda hadn't been to Hiroshima, at least on his return from the war. He was merely riding a train that briefly stopped at the city's walled-off border and didn't get to see much, if anything, of the ruins.
  • Producer Tomoyuki Tanaka, co-creator of Godzilla alongside Honda, is said to have looked down at the sea during a plane flight, wondering what could lurk below, and that's how he came up with the idea for a giant undersea beast. Tanaka was actually flying home from a failed movie meeting, reading news reports of foreign films to come up with a new movie proposal, when he read about The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and realized the potential in a monster movie. Consequently, another false but commonly cited "fact" claims Godzilla was inspired by Beast's success at the Japanese box office. In truth, while Godzilla's creators were well aware of Beast, the movie was only released in Japan mere days before Godzilla.
  • Harking back to decade-old discredited Pop-Culture Urban Legends about unmade films like "Godzilla vs. the Devil", based on mistranslations and misinterpretations of Japanese texts, the "Robot Daughter" from the never produced "Bride of Godzilla?" film is a post-2000s example of such a misunderstanding. It's been commonly cited that this bizarre film proposal featured a giant naked robot woman made to look like the daughter of its inventor Dr. Yanai (hence the Fan Nickname), but various English databases also inconsistently refer to the robot's inspiration as a foster daughter, another robot foster daughter, a foster daughter resembling Yanai's former lover Riko, a robot named Eve resembling Riko, or an amalgamation of these. Given that Riko plays an actual role in the story as a past lover whom Dr. Yanai still obsesses over, robots made to resemble her are referred to at several points, and the giant robot has Riko's memories, the name "Robot Daughter" is just a misnomer as it has nothing to do with any actual daughters. Rather, it's a robot lookalike of Riko.
  • Many people understandably think Monster Island first appeared in Destroy All Monsters and became the de-facto home of many monsters in the later films, because the island is introduced as such in the movie. However, the island in DAM is named Monsterland, not Monster Island, and the film is set in the late 20th century (or specifically 1999 if you go by the English dub). The later films of the original Godzilla series are presumably still set in the 60s and 70s. Some also think Monster Island is just another name for Solgell Island from Son of Godzilla. Monster Island has a weirder origin, first being named in All Monsters Attack, existing only in the imagination of the kid Ichiro who daydreams of going there. The fact that AMA uses loads of Stock Footage from previous films explains most of the confusion between the islands. The later films of the series would incorporate the imaginary Monster Island into the actual world of Godzilla, but it's not stated to be the same place as Solgell Island or Monsterland.
  • King Kong vs. Godzilla: the rumor that Godzilla wins the fight at the end of the original Japanese version of the film and King Kong is the victor at the end of the American recut one still pops up every now and then. King Kong was always intended to be victorious in the end.
  • Godzilla vs. Gigan: It is often asserted that Gigan is the first monster to make Godzilla bleed, and while this would certainly seem to be the case given how much blood he makes Godzilla shed, that honour actually goes to Hedorah in Godzilla vs. Hedorah, as Godzilla begins bleeding from the top of his head after headbutting Hedorah away during their final battle.
  • Godzilla Minus One:
    • It was widely claimed that the movie had a 15 million USD budget, but the source for this was a passage from a review of the movie from Variety magazine which itself was unsourced, and was subsequently posted on Wikipedia. It became so prevalent that the director had to clarify that the budget was not that amount, and implied the true budget was significantly lower than that.
    • There's a minor one that Tachibana built an ejector seat into the Shinden. This isn't the case, under the fridge brilliance page it is feasible that Germany built ejector seats and sent components. However the fact that Tachibana brought it up and implored Shikishima to use it and survive is just as important as simply having the option.
• The Green Mile:
  • Detractors of the film often claim that John Coffey is docile to a fault, and never lifts a finger against any of the people who make his life hell over the course of the story. While John is definitely a Gentle Giant, people sometimes forget the climax of the film, where he uses his powers to drive an abusive prison guard insane and orchestrate the murder of a depraved child killer.
    • Not to mention, John clearly has people he likes and dislikes. In one scene, when Paul's wife gives him some homemade cornbread, John offers to share some with Del and Mr. Jingles. When Billy (the aforementioned depraved child killer) demands some of his own, Paul reminds John that it's his choice whom he shares with. John then decides "I think I'll keep the rest for myself."
  • Contrary to popular belief, John Coffey is not mentally impaired—he just doesn't have any formal education.
  • Everyone who gets touched by John Coffey's healing powers gets blessed with supernaturally long life, right? Actually, that just happens to a select few people whom John chooses to "share" a fraction of his soul with. At the end of the film, Paul outright says that it happened to Mr. Jingles the mouse by accident when John was holding him during Del's execution. Paul also states that Melinda Moores (who was one of the people healed by John) died many years before he began narrating the story, presumably meaning that she had a normal lifespan.
• Halloween:
  • Halloween III: Season of the Witch: People often say Michael Myers doesn't appear in this film, even on This Very Wiki. But he actually does, albeit only for The Cameo. A trailer for the original 1978 film briefly plays on television in the film, featuring a scene including Michael Myers. He isn't part of the main plot, however, and is seemingly only a fictional character in this continuity.
  • Halloween: Resurrection: Busta Rhymes' character, Freddie, has taken a lot of flack for supposedly effortlessly defeating Michael Myers with his martial arts skills. In reality, things weren't quite so one-sided; Myers was actually winning the fight up until Freddie managed to electrocute him and turn the tables.
• Heathers is often talked about as if it were a gigantic hit in The '80s and "couldn't be made today", likely to take a shot at political correctness. In actuality, the film was a Box Office flop, since the distributor went bankrupt right before its release, and critics were only lukewarm to it. It only acquired its cult fan base from being shown on television so many times. Director Michael Lehmann refutes the above quote with "it couldn't be made then either", as its dark subject matter made people reluctant to invest (Winona Ryder's agent literally got down on her knees and begged her not to take the role of Veronica, out of fear that it was career suicide).
• Hobbs & Shaw: Keanu Reeves being initially announced as part of the cast, only for his character not to appear physically on the film, caused many rumors and speculations. Some news sites claimed he really joined production and shot scenes that were all deleted, while others said he was still in the final cut voicing the unseen character. In reality, he was never cast, and his role was voiced by Ryan Reynolds Acting for Two instead.
• If These Walls Could Talk is comprised of three segments, each about a woman who becomes unexpectedly pregnant and seeks out an abortion. The women are played respectively by Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek and Cher, the three women billed on the poster. Or so one might be inclined to think. Cher actually plays the doctor who performs the procedure in the third segment, but since she was a bigger name than Anne Heche, she's on the poster. Also of note is that only Heche's character has a successful abortion. Moore's character's procedure is botched and ends up killing her (it's the 1950s), and Spacek's character opts not to have an abortion despite support from her daughter.
• Because of a popular bit of Memetic Mutation spawned by Inception (jokingly referring to anything that can be described as "A [thing] within a [thing]" as "[thing]ception"), many people seem to be under the impression that the title of the film refers to the technique of building one dream inside another, or that said technique is used specifically for the process of inception. Inception refers only to planting an idea in the target's mind. The opening sequence of the film outright shows the main characters using a nested dream for the exact opposite — stealing information from the target's dream, known as an "extraction".
• Indiana Jones:
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark:
    • George Lucas has been known to use the phrase "pointer scene" on DVD Commentary when comparing an Infodump in another film to the scene where Jones explains the history of the Ark to the government men. The closest thing to a pointer in the scene is Jones drawing on a blackboard with chalk, but so many parodies of the film include presentation pointers that fans tend to (think they) remember seeing one in the original film.
    • Most people assume the shifty guy on the plane hiding behind a copy of Life magazine is Toht, due to being dressed identically and having his face hidden. He isn't, this guy is actually played by the movie's special effects artist Dennis Muren, not Toht's actor Ronald Lacey.
    • The notion that Indiana Jones is inconsequential to the story, since the Nazis after the Ark all get wiped out once they open it. Apart from all the work he puts in towards finding the Ark, if Indy hadn't been there to collect the Ark after the Nazis were all killed, the Nazis would have just sent another expeditionary force to retrieve it and likely figured out, if they hadn't already, that opening it was not a good idea.
  • Since in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indy and his father both drink from the Holy Grail, which grants eternal life, many people regard it as a plot hole that Henry was shown to have died in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Many also point to the immortality granted by the Grail as an explanation for how Indy survived the infamous "nuking the fridge" scene, some jokingly and some seriously. However, the Grail Knight says "the Grail cannot pass beyond the Great Seal, for that is the boundry, and the price, of immortality." Given that it's also mentioned that the knight's two brothers both left the temple after 150 years and both later died of extreme old age, that suggests that the immortality granted by the Grail is only present if one stays in the temple, of which the Great Seal is in the entrance. Since Indy and Henry both crossed the Seal to escape the collapsing temple, they both lost immortality.
  • Contrary to popular belief, the beings in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are not aliens; they are inter-dimensional beings. This distinction is reinforced by Harold Oxley crucially mentioning the "space between spaces," highlighting their existence beyond conventional dimensions.
• It's a Wonderful Life:
  • A minor example. Viewers very often mistake the homeowner whose tree George runs his car into as being played by William Frawley of I Love Lucy. The character was actually portrayed by an uncredited J. Farrell MacDonald. It is an easy mistake to make, since the two actors do look and sound very similar and the character's only appearances in the film come in a pair of dimly-lit nighttime scenes.
  • A more major example is the general pop-cultural perception that the film is a corny, diabetes-inducing schlockfest that only young children and old people stuck in the '40s would be able to stomach. Those who believe this are frequently surprised to learn that the film contains Black Comedy, sex jokes, discussions of economics and banking that are difficult to understand without prior knowledge of the subjects, and copious Realism-Induced Horror and Nightmare Fuel even before the Bad Future sequence kicks in.
  • People who only know the film from having seen the It's a Wonderful Plot trope in other works are often surprised to discover that the Trope Namer plot only occurs in the film's last act.
• The James Bond series is the one where Bond always manages to seduce the beautiful lady working for the baddies into helping him? This has happened precisely ONCE, in Goldfinger. Most of the time, the main Bond girl is either on his side from the start (Moonraker, For Your Eyes Only, Tomorrow Never Dies), an innocent caught up in the adventure (Dr. No, A View to a Kill, Goldeneye) or working with the villains but unaware of their true plans (From Russia with Love, Octopussy). Or they don't turn at all. Octopussy is the nearest example in that the title girl is a criminal, but while in league with the villains she is ignorant of their evil scheme, and is actually a target of it. She is also kindly disposed to Bond already, as he saved her father from the ignominy of a court martial and so didn't really need seducing to help him. A View to a Kill has May Day, who does sleep with Bond and turn against her employer, but these are unrelated events - her Heel–Face Turn was inspired by Zorin being a psychopath who murdered all her coworkers. The Man with the Golden Gun inverts it, as Scaramanga's lover Andrea Anders turns out to be the one who reached out to Bond to seduce him, wanting Bond (and MI6) to protect her from Scaramanga.
  • And even in Goldfinger she didn't turn because Bond seduced her, but because the villain lied to her. He hired her to use a "knock-out" gas on thousands of people, but it was actually lethal nerve gas. She turned when she found out the truth that she was being tricked into murdering thousands.
  • The series is also well known for always starting with an Action Prologue that has nothing to do with the main plot of the film. This is actually very rare, occurring maybe three times over 25 films. The vast, vast majority of the time the pre-credit sequences are plot relevent. This is probably because one of the few films that does this is Goldfinger, which became the most famous film in the series and was the main Trope Codifier for the franchise.
  • Despite popular belief, not every James Bond has a famous theme song named after the title of the film. While it is true for a lot of them, even a majority, there are still several films where this is not the case. Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and On Her Majesty's Secret Service don't even have proper title songs at all (Russia has a song, but it is over the end credits rather than the beginning) but instrumental medleys instead. The Spy Who Loved Me, Octopussy, Casino Royale (2006), and Quantum of Solace do have title songs, but aren't named after the title of the film.
  • Quantum of Solace is frequently described as being the first true direct sequel in the entire franchise. But it isn't true. Several films reference previous films, but most notably From Russia with Love is an immediate follow up to Dr. No with the plot being about SPECTRE explictly seeking revenge against Bond personally for his actions in the previous film. Bond's girlfriend from the previous film, Sylvia Trench, also returns.
• The shark's name is Jaws, right? Everyone knows that! Actually the shark canonically has no name. The dummy shark used for filming was nicknamed "Bruce" by the crew which is commonly considered to be the name of the shark in the first movie, while fans have nicknamed the sharks in the following movies to be Brucette or Scarface, Brucetta or Mommy, and Vengeance. Averted in the 1987 NES game, which actually does call the shark "Jaws".
• Jurassic Park movies:
  • Everyone knows that the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) were brought to life primarily through incredibly photorealistic CGI that still somehow surpasses the digital effects found in films made today. However, most of the dinosaurs were actually created using old-school practical effects such as puppets, animatronics, and even men in suits. Groundbreaking CGI was used, but there's far less of it than people remember. In general, if you're looking at a full shot of a dinosaur, it's CGI. If only part of the dinosaur's body is visible(like the head), it's a practical effect. How good the effects look today is up to the viewer, but the CGI was more limited than most people remember.
  • The notion that the film's dinosaurs were scientifically up-to-date for 1993 is commonly brought up when discussing how later discoveries changed our view of dinosaurs, especially that many dinosaur families, including "raptors" would have been feathered in real life. However, the dinosaurs in the film were never meant to be scientific, they were more of a mishmash of relatively grounded reconstructions, wild speculation and plain made-up sensationalism. The film's "Velociraptors" aren't accurate to any raptors known at the time even ignoring their lack of feathers. No one truly believed that T. rex's vision was based on movement or that Dilophosaurus could spit venom either — these were carryovers from the original novel which explains that the Park's dinosaurs are mere artificial lookalikes of actual prehistoric animals (this point would be alluded to, though not fully elaborated in some of the franchise's later films). The T. rex in the novel shares is vision-impairment with other botched dinosaur clones as well, while in the movie this is handled as a natural trait. The film further embellished Dilophosaurus with its iconic frill, which it had lacked both in the novel and in real life. Feathered dinosaurs were in no way a "recent" discovery, and in fact the Crichton's sequel novel The Lost World had a baby tyrannosaur with feathers. Most of the book's, and by extension the film's science was based on the works of paleontologist Gregory S. Paul. Paul had illustrated raptors with feathers as far back as the '80s, though for various reasons this detail was not included in the novel or film.
  • Most dinosaur fans will tell you that the Velociraptors are bigger than the real animal because they’re actually meant to be Deinonychus. Except that’s not true. While it is true Greg Paul did consider Deinonychus and Velociraptor to be the same genus, with the latter name taking precedence, the raptors in the book are explicitly called Velociraptor mongoliensis and said to come from China. Their size comes from a different mistake— namely, Paul believing a large Mongolian raptor toe bone was actually from a giant Velociraptor. The bone actually may have come from Achillobator, which was not named until 1999.
  • Everyone knows that Nedry was so greedy he was ready to kill Dr. Grant and the other tourists by shutting down the park so he could steal the embryos. Except that wasn't his plan - he was waiting until after everyone got back from the tour and left. It was only after the hurricane rolled in that he shut everything down much earlier than he intended so his boat off the island didn't leave without him.
  • The Jurassic Park franchise is often said to overplay the Herbivores Are Friendly trope, when herbivorous animals in Real Life can be very dangerous. This really only applies to the first film, as The Lost World: Jurassic Park features Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Pachycephalosaurus and Parasaurolophus being a danger to humans, Jurassic Park III has the main characters caught in a stampede of Corythosaurus and Parasaurolophus, in Jurassic World Ankylosaurus attacks the Gyrosphere with Claire's nephews still inside, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom has Sinoceratops and the Triceratops trampling anyone in their path as they make their way into the wild, and Jurassic World Dominion features a Therizinosaurus as a dangerous threat. The Franchise does use the Gentle Giant Sauropod trope a lot, but this doesn't apply to all the herbivorous dinosaurs.
• The Karate Kid:
  • The Training Montage set to "You're The Best" by Joe Esposito is so iconic that it has become the default music for training montages. There is only one problem with this; the song does not appear during any training montage in the movie. During the montage the song being played is "Moment of Truth" by Survivor. "You’re the Best" appears later in the film accompanying a montage of Daniel and Johnny competing in the tournament.
  • It is common knowledge that Miyagi-do is a pacifist, defense-focused school. This is in spite of the fact that Mr. Miyagi has at least one Big Damn Heroes moment per film, doesn't hesitate to dish out a Groin Attack or a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, has no problem tricking Kreese into punching out car windows and cutting up his hands, and is in general a spectacularly dirty fighter when the situation calls for it. This misconception actually inspired a plot point in Cobra Kai where Daniel has only mastered and taught the defensive aspects of Miyagi-do, meaning his martial art is entirely reactive and stands no chance of winning against Cobra Kai now that they've figured out they can control the pace of the battle and use feints to bait reactions for easy blows. Over the course of Season 4 Daniel actually accepts that his students have to learn Johnny's offensive tactics as well, and indeed Samantha only stands a chance against Tori by using Eagle Fang karate, and the season ends with Daniel enlisting the help of Chozen to teach him the offensive arts of Miyagi-do.
• King Kong:
  • Due to hyperbolic marketing, it's widely thought that Kong is 50 feet tall in the original 1933 film. While his height does vary in the film due to differently-scaled puppets being used, he ranges from around 18 feet to about 40.
  • It's also a common misconception that Kong is simply an oversized gorilla, but he was actually designed to be an entirely unique species, with a far more human posture and face than any living ape, and both the Japanese Kong films of the '60s and the 1976 remake followed suit. Peter Jackson's 2005 remake was the first film to go for the upscaled gorilla look and is the only incarnation to be primarily quadrupedal. Kong: Skull Island returns him to the more humanoid design & stance and upright posture of the original film.
  • Kong lives on Skull Island, right? Not exactly when it comes to the original film. He lives on Skull Mountain, a large rock feature on an unnamed island in the original film. The direct sequel Son Of Kong only refers to it as Kong's Island and the novelization called it Skull Mountain Island. It is RKO's marketing material, as well as the remakes made decades later, that specifically refer to it by the name Skull Island. Similarly, it is frequently believed that the island itself is shaped like a skull, but when it is shown on a map in the original film this is not even close to being the case. It is the mountain at the center of the island that resembles a skull, not the island itself.
  • The Hollywood Natives on Skull Island/the island are Scary Black Men from Darkest Africa, right? Actually, the island in the original film is located at approximately 12°S 78°E – 2000 miles west from the coast of Periuk, Indonesia. Meaning the Hollywood Natives are actually Melanesians played by Black Americans, in a case of Fake Nationality. This was kept in the later incarnations of the franchise, where the island that Kong comes from is in always in the South Pacific.
• There are some who believe that The Last Duels use of three different perspectives intentionally leaves it ambiguous as to whether Marguerite was actually raped and that she can be interpreted as a false accuser. In the film itself, all the narratives clearly present Jacques as guilty; even during Jacques' segment it's made clear that he raped Marguerite (she runs from him, hits him and repeatedly tells him "No") and that his supposed romance with her is delusional, with his POV merely serving to explain why he thinks he's 'innocent', while also trying to deconstruct the attitudes towards women and sex that are often used to excuse or downplay rape (i.e. "She said no but I could tell she actually wanted it", "I thought she was playing hard-to-get" etc). The film also heavily implies that Marguerite's account is the most accurate, something both Ridley Scott and Jodie Comer confirmed. It's worth noting that in real life, the rape was described as brutal to the point there was no ambiguity as to whether it was consensual and it got toned down for the film; other changes the movie made to the historical account potentially contributed to the perception that it was supposed to be ambiguous when this wasn't the intention.
• You will often hear that Abigail Breslin played the title role in Little Miss Sunshine. While one can interpret the title to have a double meaning to the viewer, within the context of the film, Little Miss Sunshine is a children's beauty pageant, not a character, and Violet, Breslin's character, competes but does not win. If she can be called the title character at all, it's only under the interpretation that she's a ray of sunshine herself.
• Love Actually: Many viewers and critics have mistaken the characters John and Judy for porn stars as their scenes have them naked and miming sexual acts. The characters are actually supposed to be stand-ins/body doubles for a mainstream movie that just happens to involve a lot of sex scenes. During their first scene John mentions he once doubled for Brad Pitt but audiences appear to have missed that line.
• Mad Max
  • Due to Early-Installment Weirdness, people aren't often aware of the fact that the first film was not set After the End. Australia has become more crime-ravaged, and it's clear that law and order have dwindled considerably, but there's no hint of an impending nuclear apocalypse, and people still live normal lives with functioning infrastructure.
  • Everyone knows that Max went mad because his wife and child were killed by the motorcycle gang in the first film, prompting his Roaring Rampage of Revenge at the end of that film. Except Max's wife doesn't actually die in the first film. The last we hear, a doctor says that she'll probably survive her wounds. The opening narration of the second film heavily implies that she died, saying, "In the roar of an engine, he lost everything," but never explicitly says she died.
• Nelson Mandela does not appear As Himself in Malcolm X, as many people assume. While he does appear in the film, the credits indicate that his character is supposed to be a schoolteacher.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man 2, Black Widow has a Three-Point Landing. Except she doesn't. Iron Man himself does it often, but in this publicity image, Agent Romanov actually getting up from a slide along the ground, not landing from a fall (to be fair, the trope page does include such slides). This misconception somehow persists even in people who have actually seen the movie and the scene in question.
  • A common grievance with the MCU by fans is that it apparently has no magic, and they try to explain everything away with science. While it's true that they attempt to explain the nature of magic more than in the comics, the magic of the universe is still exactly that. The two examples that get cited as proof are the Thor and the Asgardians becoming super advanced aliens rather than gods, and Doctor Strange using otherworldly energy of scientific origin to emulate magic. Both of which have little, if any, basis in the narrative of the MCU.
    • For the former, it's true that the Thor movies do downplay the prominence of it (because at the time the really comic book stuff wasn't "cool"), but they are still of magical origin. Mjölnir, for example, only works for those who are worthy to wield, with no scientific explanation given. Other Asgardians use powers that are very clearly spells, such as Loki shapeshifting and having mentioned turning Thor into a frog once. Also, Tony Stark tries to explain the nature of Mjölnir in scientific terms, but Thor simply says they're not worthy and that's proven to be the true requirement, yet the former tends to get remembered more than the latter.
    • As for Doctor Strange, it's made very, very clear that the Masters of the Mystic Arts are true sorcerers, with all that it entails, both in the movie and by the director Scott Derrickson and producer Kevin Feige. Strange uses magical spells of origins that are stressed in-universe as not being explainable by science. Yet, some fans still think he's not truly using magic, due to a scene where The Ancient One explains it to Strange in terms easier to understand — again, that isn't to explain away the magic, but to explain how magic works to a Strange that (at the time) was very much science-oriented because he had only recently discovered it.
    • Considering that the Infinity Stones are explicitly magical MacGuffins with vast power that goes beyond science, that the Celestials are of otherworldly origin and not mere aliens, that the Black Panthers visit another world to meet their ancestors via mystical herbs when they take the title, and that soon enough the MCU will have vampires and Doctor Doom, it's rather silly to argue that the MCU has no such thing as magic.
    • Even Jane Foster calling the Bifrost an Einsten-Rosen bridge, which seems to be the main "smoking gun" here, is just a scientific explanation of what it is, not how Heimdall actually makes it happen. A frog can be scientifically defined as an amphibian of the genus Rana, but that doesn't mean turning Thor into one isn't magic.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy is often praised for its soundtrack, with people particularly noting how well the songs from the seventies and eighties mix with the story. This is actually only half-true, as there are no songs from the 1980s featured in the film. The most recent song that plays in the movie, Rupert Holmes' "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)", was released in 1979. While the in-universe mixtape's owner, Peter Quill, did leave Earth in the 1980s as a child and he in many ways exemplifies traits of that decade due to often trying to emulate 80s action heroes, the tape was a gift from his mother consisting of songs she grew up with.
  • In Captain America: Civil War, Vision blasts Rhodey's suit by accident, and Rhodey falls out of the sky and gets seriously injured. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, we learn the suit Tony built for spider-Man has a wingsuit and parachute. Many fans believe that this is another example of Tony being Taught by Experience. Except the suit already had those features. It debuts in the battle where Rhodey gets injured and the film makes it clear that Tony hasn’t directly interacted with Peter in the months between films, so there was no opportunity for him to add new features. It's a lot more likely those features are in the suit because of Tony's own experiences with falling in Iron Man.
    • Also in Homecoming: Peter's gym teacher says Captain America is a "war criminal or something", as a joke. A lot of fans took that literally, even though there's literally no evidence for it in the films. He did break the Sokovia Accords and he is a wanted criminal, but not a war criminal.
  • It's oddly common to describe Wakanda as depicted in Black Panther (2018) as an ethnostate, often for the purposes of claiming the film in some way validates ideas of a "racially pure" society being utopian. In fact, one of the first things we see of Wakanda is that it isn't dedicated to a single ethnic group, with the viewer being introduced to a number of tribes that have different clothing styles and varying skin tones and that even speak different languages (said tribes are based on groups all across Africa). Contrary to that claim, Wakanda's society within its borders is deeply multicultural, and the conflict between those cultures is a major part of its politics—it just isn't keen on letting other people in. For the most part, this seems to arise from the belief that because all the ethnicities within Wakanda are based on African ethnicities, they must all be the same one. And even if all of that weren't true, the conclusion of the film is that Wakanda's isolationism is a bad thing, and T'Challa chooses to start opening the country up to outsiders.
  • Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. It is commonly thought and even reported in major film review websites that all those that were blipped away were not in fact killed but rather safely transported inside the Soul Stone to a 'Soul World'. Not only was this is stated nowhere, or even implied in either of the two films or any MCU film before or after. The misconception appears to originate from a mistaken belief that was the case in the original The Infinity Gauntlet comic (It isn't. Those that were snapped away in the original comic are explicitly stated to have been killed and made 'a part of Death.' It does happen in Infinity Wars, sort of, which came out the same year as the film.) That even appears to be the case in Endgame when Bruce Banner accuses Thanos of 'murdering trillions.'
  • One common criticism of both WandaVision and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is that they both absolve Wanda of her wrongdoings in the end. In the former, precisely one person, Monica Rambeau, sympathizes with Wanda's grief. And it's bookended by the entire town of Westview glaring at Wanda for what she did to them (which makes her hide her face in shame) and SWORD pulling up. In the latter, Wanda realizes that she is "a monster", collapses in grief and shame, and then Universe 838 Wanda says 838's kids will be loved to comfort Wanda, without actually excusing her actions. Wanda goes back home, and sacrifices herself to destroy the Darkhold in every universe and to try and atone for the damage she did.
• Every Marvel Comics movie adaptation produced by Marvel Studios is part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with only a few movies produced by other studios (like the X-Men and Fantastic Four films) existing in separate continuities due to Marvel Studios not owning the characters' film rights.^note This would eventually change when Sony and Marvel agreed to share the Spider-Man franchise in 2015 — with a few limitations in favor of Sony — and Fox would eventually opt to sell their entertainment assets between 2017 and 2018. That being said, Sony is still releasing Spider-Man spin-offs that have nothing to do with the MCU, as are Disney's Fox division with regards to X-Men and Deadpool. While this is mostly true, there are a few exceptions: Punisher: War Zone and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance were both produced by Marvel Studios after the Marvel Cinematic Universe began, but neither of them are actually part of the MCU's continuity.^note They were both made under the short-lived "Marvel Knights" movie imprint, which was going to be a separate continuity for Marvel Comics adaptations aimed primarily at adults.
• Zeppo Marx is known as the fourth member of the Marx Brothers who added little to their movies besides singing sappy love songs. Actually, the only love song Zeppo sings in the Marx Brothers movies, not counting the Maurice Chevalier impersonation in Monkey Business, is "Everyone Says I Love You" in Horse Feathers. They're probably getting him mixed up with Alan Jones, who played the romantic leads in a few of the movies the brothers made after Zeppo retired from acting, and sang plenty of love songs.
• Everybody knows that M. Night Shyamalan loves to appear in his own films so that he can have an excuse to play saintly or heroic characters who are thinly veiled portrayals of himself. Actually, that's just in Lady in the Water (where his character is a writer who's revealed to be responsible for the future salvation of humanity), and people never stopped making fun of him for it. It's often forgotten that he plays incidental background characters much more frequently, and sometimes even plays blatantly unsympathetic characters. Case in point: in Signs, he plays the man responsible for the death of the protagonist's wife.
• Everybody knows that Morgan Freeman is famous for playing "Magical Negro" characters, to the point that he's sometimes blamed for inventing the trope. In reality...not so much. While a few of his roles arguably fit the definition of the trope, they're a very small portion of his filmography, and he much more frequently plays commanding authority figures (e.g. Se7en, Deep Impact, Lean on Me, Glory, Invictus), loyal friends and sidekicks (e.g. Unforgiven, The Shawshank Redemption, The Bucket List, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves), or wise sages (e.g. Bruce Almighty, The LEGO Movie, Wanted). On the rare occasions when he does play humble service workers who dispense folksy advice to white protagonists, his roles tend to subvert or deconstruct the trope much more often than they play it straight. Case in point: Driving Miss Daisy is all about his character forcing his racist employer to see him as a human being, and his character in Million Dollar Baby is a former prizefighter who's forced to become a simple handyman after a Career-Ending Injury costs him his shot at fame and fortune. However, the Mentor Archetype can and often does overlap with "Magical Negro" characters, so this misconception is understandable.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street:
  • Many fans will tell you Freddy Krueger was a child molester in life. Speaking strictly about the original film, it never explicitly says this, only says he was a child murderer, without further detail. The writers had considered making him a molester but decided against it, fearing that it would appear in bad taste so soon after a recent and highly-publicized child abuse case. Most likely, people just assume this from context. The 2010 remake, however, explicitly says he was a child molester, making this something of an Ascended Fanon.
  • Freddy's motive for coming Back from the Dead being that he wants revenge on his killers (for instance, The Simpsons Halloween Nightmare spoof explicitly had Willy the Groundskeeper vow revenge on the parents of Springfield for their part in his death). While Nancy's mother admits that she and the other parents killed Freddy to prevent him from getting away with his crimes, Freddy himself never brings this up as a reason for originally targeting Nancy and her friends, and later starts targeting unrelated groups of teens. If anything, he just seems to be continuing where he left off, rather than doing what he does as some sort of outrage over his vigilante execution.
• Nosferatu:
  • Nosferatu wasn't the first adaptation of Dracula; a now-lost Hungarian film, Karoly Lajthay's Dracula's Death, came out a year earlier. From surviving descriptions, Lajthay took far greater liberties with the source material than Murnau.
  • Max Schreck was a prolific stage and screen actor; Nosferatu was far from his only role, though it was only his third movie and is certainly his most well-known today. This myth remains strangely persistent even in the Internet era, due to a variety of conflicting information dating back to the film's initial release. The German press spread a rumor that Schreck was actually a pseudonym for Alfred Abel, who had previously worked with F. W. Murnau on Phantom and later starred in Metropolis, a claim repeated in some books into the 1980s;^note this despite Schreck costarring with Abel in Murnau's The Grand Duke's Finances other sources went further, claiming that Orlok was an unknown actor using Schreck's name. Greek film historian Adonis Kyru joked in an essay on the movie that Schreck's performance was so convincing that Murnau must have cast a real vampire as Orlok, an idea which later inspired the film Shadow of the Vampire. Schreck's reputation an eccentric loner who rarely granted interviews or socialized with collaborators did nothing to dispel the rumors, even though by many accounts he was friendly on the set and he did take part in several promotional events during the film's release.
• The 1995 adaptation of Othello is one of the many Shakesprare adaptations both directed by and starring Kenneth Branagh.... except he only plays Iago here, and he didn't direct this one, that honour going to Oliver Parker.
• Detractors of Oz the Great and Powerful often complain about the film "revealing" that the Wicked Witch of the West became evil because her crush rejected her. While that may have begun the chain of events that eventually led to her becoming evil, it wasn't the reason she became evil: she became evil because her sister tricked her into eating a magic apple that caused her heart to disappear.
• Pacific Rim: Coyote Tango is widely believed to be the only Jaeger with a single-pilot cockpit, but in reality, it's a 2-man Jaeger like all the others. This is an easy mistake, however, since in the movie itself we never see Stacker Pentecost's copilot during the flashback that features Coyote Tango. According to supplementary material, her name is Tamsin Sevier and she had blacked out during the fight.
• Parasite (2019): Many analyses of the film work under the assumption that the Kims are intergenerationally poor, hence their conflict with the wealthy Park family. This is wrong, however, as it's explicitly stated early on that they did formerly have a small business to support themselves with, hence why they live in a business district that they are able to steal wifi from. While they were obviously never on the same level of social standing as the Parks, they were still (formerly) middle-class.
• The Pink Panther film series has little to nothing to do with an anthropomorphic panther with pink fur, though the character is used in the animated title sequences and became popular enough to earn a series of cartoon spin-offs to star in. The title also is not a nickname for the lead character, bumbling Inspector Jacques Clouseau, though the films themselves confuse people by using that title as if it does refer to the Inspector. The second film in the franchise, A Shot in the Dark, is the only one not to use the Pink Panther name, as it isn't about the diamond at all, but about Clouseau solving an escalating murder case. The third official film features the return of the diamond, and is thus called The Return of the Pink Panther. As audiences were already calling it "The Pink Panther series", the future titles just ran with it, using the Pink Panther name even if the diamond never makes an appearance, rendering the Panther himself an Artifact Title. The worst offender is Son of the Pink Panther, which openly suggests that Clouseau is in fact the title character.
• The flying saucers in Plan 9 from Outer Space are commonly believed to have been pie tins or paper plates, to the point that it's tradition to throw paper plates around during screenings of it. In fact, they are children's flying saucer toys.
• Poltergeist (1982):
  • That the scene where Dianne falls in the pool and is surrounded by dead bodies was filmed with real corpses. This is in fact only half-true as while the bodies were indeed real, they were originally medical skeletons, like the ones found in biology classrooms, that were then given makeup and painted to look like dug up bodies.
  • "The Freelings' house was haunted because it was built on an Indian Burial Ground." Except it wasn't, it was built on a cemetery which was the site of a doomsday cult and had the headstones moved but the bodies left.
• Popeye:
  • One big problem fans had with the film is the idea of Popeye not liking spinach, initially. That makes no sense! Actually, It Makes Sense in Context. When the character was introduced in the original comic strip (way back in 1929) it was the same story, he claims he doesn't like it until he tries it.
  • Also, the film was a Box Office Bomb... actually, it earned around $50 million, putting in the top 15 grossing films for 1980. The perception that it flopped was due to the budget bloating to $20 million, meaning that the profit was far more modest than had been forecasted.
• Many fans of the The Purge franchise claim that the in-universe claims that the benefits of the titular policy of a night where all crime is legal - a thriving economy and nonexistent crime the rest of the year - are mere government propaganda. The franchise's relationship with its own worldbuilding is actually more complicated, but in short; the purge really does boost the economy, and was implied to eliminate crime until a major retcon in the series. With the first film viewers assumed that the discussed benefits of the Purge had to be government propaganda, since logically, a night where all crime is legal would destroy the country's economy and do little to effect crimes rates the rest of the year, and the government in the film was called the "New Founding Fathers of America," implying the United States had fundamentally changed. But despite the first film having a central Aesop about how the Purge (and the ruthless capitalism it serves an an allegory for), are bad, the film itself never brings up the possibility that the Purge doesn't work as intended, nor actually shows the New Founding Fathers to be a tyrrannical government with the total control of the media it would take to pull off such a grand lie. Subsequent films would go on to show that, while the New Founding Fathers are very evil, the United States they rule still has largely free press and even elections, and even police and politicians opposed to the Purge acknowledge its benefits. Not to mention, the damage the Purge would realistically do to the economy would likely be too devastating for all but the most Orwellian governments to cover up, let alone claim to be improving. It would not be until the release of The Series that the franchise would reveal that the New Founding Fathers cover up all extra-purge crime, even letting multiple-murderers go free. Nothing new is revealed about the Purge's economic impacts.
• Rambo:
  • The first movie is often thought to be called Rambo and is referred to as such by name. The actual name is First Blood. It is sometimes called Rambo: First Blood, due to the sequel being called Rambo: First Blood, Part II, but generally people refer to the titles simply as Rambo, Rambo II and Rambo III (the last of which is actually accurate). The fourth film actually being officially titled Rambo confused matters quit a bit.
  • Rambo is thought of as the ultimate Invincible Hero who can shoot anything in sight and never be shot at without strategy, to the point where "going Rambo" is a colloquialism for such types of fighting. This is true for the later movies, but not for the first nor is it how he was originally written in the novel the movie was based on. In First Blood, Rambo is not an Invincible Hero, and heavily uses stealth and tactics to elude his foes rather than fighting them outright. It wasn't until later movies did the "shoot everything in sight" get established, which is through Actionized Sequels where that idea went into place. It's like how John McClane would also become a more standardized action hero when the first movie portrayed him as the opposite of invincible.
  • First Blood also contains an inverted example of the above. It's common knowledge that, in contrast to the later Rambo movies, Rambo only kills a single person in First Blood, and it's accidental...well, unless you count the police car he blows up while someone is driving it; while the fate of the driver technically isn't shown, people don't usually survive their car exploding into a fireball.
  • Rambo III's dedication has always been "This film is dedicated to the gallant people of Afghanistan." It was not changed from "This film is dedicated to the brave Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan" after 9/11, as is sometimes claimed. Contemporary reviews such as this one show that it was always dedicated to the Afghan people as a whole.
• Rashomon:
  • Everyone knows that the film is an In Name Only adaptation of the story of the same name, since it's a dramatization of Akutagawa's "In A Grove", but it uses the title of an unrelated Akutagawa story because it sounded better—much like what happened with Blade Runner. ^note  Blade Runner is an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, but uses the title of Alan E. Nourse's The Bladerunner (a completely separate novel). However, this isn't actually the case. The framing narrative of the film Rashomon is a loose interpretation of the story "Rashomon", which is also about several characters meeting at the Rashomon Gate during a time of crisis and ruminating on morality versus the necessity of survival. Much like in the film, one character in the story references the events of "In A Grove" to justify his immoral actions. Therefore, the movie is actually an amalgamation of the two separate stories, both of which are more-or-less intact.
  • Also, everyone who's heard of the movie knows that it's about the unreliability of memory and how different people can view the same event from different perspectives. Except that it's not. While it's true all of the four characters who describe the murder tell radically different stories of how it happened, this isn't because they can't remember what actually happened, but because they're all deliberately lying in order to paint themselves in the most sympathetic possible light.
• Rebel Without a Cause: James Dean's character Jim Stark is often assumed to ride a motorcycle and/or wear a black leather jacket, like a stereotypical '50s greaser. But while Dean sometimes rode motorcycles in Real Life and his character Cal Trask in East of Eden is part of a motorcycle gang, Jim Stark never rides a motorcycle, and his iconic jacket is a red nylon windbreaker.
• Red Dawn (1984) is known as a jingoistic action movie about heroic American teens gleefully killing commie invaders. In fact, the main theme of the film is that War Is Hell. A great deal of emphasis is put on the grinding psychological impacts and moral corrosion that inevitably accompany guerilla warfare, especially for young people called on to fight. The main antagonist is just a soldier doing his job, and is sick of fighting and wants to retire. In the end, most of the heroes die in vain, and even the two survivors only live because said main antagonist decides he can't kill the two injured and broken kids he has at gunpoint and lets them go, rather than owing to any skill or heroic victories on their part. The epilogue was added at the last minute so viewers would know that America eventually won the war.
• Red Dawn (2012): Due to the change of Chinese invaders being switched to North Korean for a multitude of reasons, the movie is assumed to have the plot of the DPRK taking over the entire United States which gets it trashed as unrealistic and absurd. In actuality they are only providing assistance to the off-screen Chinese holding the west coast and Russian forces holding the east coast by being assigned the Pacific Northwest to occupy. While still an arguably far fetched premise, it does become less jarring once it's clear it's still China and Russia doing the brunt of the work while North Korea is only taking on a relatively smaller slice.
• Rocky:
  • Rocky's signature colors are black and gold, not red, white, and blue. Apollo lent him the American flag trunks for his rematch with Clubber, and Rocky wore them against Drago because he was representing his country. Even in the first film, for the final fight, while Rocky wore American themed shorts, they were white with red stripes. This led to some people being confused when Rocky showed up at the fight in Balboa wearing black and gold instead of "his normal colors", when in fact, aside from the aforementioned exceptions, he had worn them in all his other fights, including the climatic fight in the second movie where he won the title. As it happens, the American flag trunks weren't even Apollo's regular colors. While he wore them for the Bicentennial in the first film and the Drago fight in the fourth, his regular colors were red with white stripes, as shown in the fight in the second film.
  • In Rocky III, “Eye of the Tiger” is commonly thought of as a Training Montage song. In fact, the song doesn’t appear during a training montage. It appears during the opening montage depicting Rocky’s continued fame and Clubber Lang’s rise and later during the end credits. The actual training montage uses “Gonna Fly Now”, just as the previous two films did.
• Saving Private Ryan: Many people who saw the film were under the impression that the German soldier that kills Corporal Mellish is also "Steamboat Willie." They are in fact, different soldiers. The soldier that kills Mellish has Waffen SS lapel insignia, while "Steamboat Willie" has the lapel insignia of an enlisted soldier in the Wehrmacht Heer. Part of the reason this confusion exists is because a number of viewers find the killer of Mellish being Steamboat Willie as adding an extra layer of emotion to Upham's vendetta and reasoning for shooting Willie at the end.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: It's widely "known" that Ramona Flowers is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, to the point that she's practically become the poster-child for the trope... even though she's not actually an example. This misconception probably comes from a joke where Scott describes her as "fickle, impulsive [and] spontaneous", even though the whole point of the joke is that Scott is jumping to wildly inaccurate conclusions based on Insane Troll Logic. The movie's dynamic is actually closer to an inversion of the trope, as Ramona is the brooding, emotionally distant partner in the relationship, while Scott is the hyperactive, childish one whose obsession with her leads her to open up and start enjoying life more.
• Today, everyone knows that the Scream movies all start with a scene in which a big-name celebrity is killed off, and that the first of these is Drew Barrymore, who, being the one of the biggest names on the bill, is set up as a Decoy Protagonist. This is all true, but many don't realize that Barrymore's character is actually the second person to die on-screen. Every movie begins with the death of not only a celebrity, but a couple (well, until the fourth, but that opening is atypical for a lot of reasons). It's interesting to note that one of the movie's more famous moments is Drew Barrymore citing Common Knowledge about Friday the 13th and getting a trivia question wrong, with grave consequences.
• The Shape of Water is commonly assumed to be an unofficial prequel/spinoff of the Hellboy films focused on Abe Sapien, due to being directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Doug Jones. In fact: it actually started as a reimagining of Creature from the Black Lagoon; Del Toro originally pitched the film to Universal Pictures as an installment in their short-lived Dark Universe franchise, which was going to be a Shared Universe for rebooted versions of classic Universal Horror movies.
• In The Shining Jack's wife does not lock him up in the meat freezer after he goes crazy. The room she actually locks him up in is the pantry.
• One frequent point of mockery in Signs is that the aliens can't open doors. Except they actually can. There are many scenes in which the characters board, block and wedge the doors shut just to keep them from getting through.
• The Silence of the Lambs is all about Hannibal Lecter using his psychological expertise to help the FBI find and unmask a serial killer. Except it's not. While Lecter does help the FBI bring "Buffalo Bill" to justice, he doesn't actually solve the mystery of his identity—because he knows it from the beginning, and it isn't a mystery to him. ^note  Thanks to a Contrived Coincidence, it turns out that one of Bill's very first victims (a troubled young man named Benjamin Raspail) was one of Lecter's patients during his days as a psychologist. Lecter also isn't the one who deduces Bill's whereabouts: Clarice stumbles upon his hideout by accident after visiting a victim's home to look for clues.
  • Those who are aware of the film, and the character of Lecter, but have not seen it, often assume him to be the film's principal antagonist, perhaps the very man Jodie Foster is tracking down. This may be due to how often he shows up on "greatest film villains of all time" lists.
  • There's a widely circulated bit of film trivia that Hannibal never blinks in the entire film. This is untrue. In fact, during what is probably the most iconic moment in the whole movie ("A census taker once tried to test me..."), he blinks multiple times.
  • The film has suffered some backlash in recent years due to its portrayal of a transgender woman as being driven to murder due to her status as a transgender person, not to mention how the film constantly refers to the character by male pronouns. The movie actually makes it clear that serial killer Jame Gumb (aka "Buffalo Bill") is not a trans woman at all, but a psychotic who is racked with self-loathing from years of abuse and has tried to change his identity many times. The book is more clear, including a scene where a surgeon takes Jack Crawford to task over the misunderstanding of who and what transgender people really are, and expresses concern that the hunt for "Buffalo Bill" will cause further harm to the trans community if they use that term to describe him, as well as a lengthy talk from Lecter himself explaining what makes Gumb different from an actual transgender person. The film cuts this down to a single line that could be just as insulting; that "all" transgender people are passive and harmless, and this is the reason Buffalo Bill doesn't count as one.
• Singin' in the Rain:
  • Some fans believe that Lina Lamont's white coat she wears in the first scene is made out of monkey fur. While it is evidently fur, since faux fur was not invented until two years after the year the film was set, there's no reference to what sort of pelt it is. One woman did wear monkey fur in Singin' in the Rain, but a.) she was a nameless bit character model, not Lina, and b.) it was not a white coat, but rather black trim on a dress.
  • There's also the idea that they used milk for the rain. Nope, they used water. The reason it looks white is because they shone a light through it.
• Spider-Man: One misconception about Peter's origin story in this movie, that a lot of people seem to have is that Peter got bit by the Super-Spider during a field trip to Oscorp. While that does happen in various different incarnations of Spider-Man, including Ultimate Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man, in this movie, Peter and his class are on a field trip to Columbia University. The goof up seems to occur because Peter and Norman Osborn meet during the field trip and because after Peter is bit by the spider, the narrative then shifts to Norman Osborn's origin story, which does take place in Oscorp. The reason Norman and Peter meet at Columbia University is specifically because Norman was there to drop Harry, not because he works there.
• Stalker (1979): Many analyses of the movie claim that the ending leaves it open to interpretation whether the glasses on the table are being moved by Monkey's telekinesis or by vibrations from a passing train. However, in the actual scene, there are clearly no vibrations until after the glasses have stopped moving; the glasses move in totally fluid straight lines, never shaking as they would if moved by vibrations. Also, since the glasses are so similar in size and close together, vibrations from a train would cause them to move approximately simultaneously, yet in the movie none of the glasses start moving until the previous glass has stopped completely.
• Star Trek films:
  • Everybody knows that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is the one where Ricardo Montalbán used a fake plastic chest to make himself look more muscular than he really was. Actually, that's just an urban legend: Montalban worked out rigorously for the film, and he really did get buff in preparation for reprising his role as Khan.
  • An oft-referred to bit of What Could Have Been trivia that Trekkies love to bring up is that Tom Hanks was the original choice for the role of Zephrame Cochrane in Star Trek: First Contact, but he turned it down. According to screenwriter Ron Moore, it never went further than a "wish list" of actors he would have liked to get, but Hanks himself was never approached.
  • Star Trek: Insurrection:
    • The blue panels used in the collector set have resulted in the misconception that they were supposed to be keyed out and replaced by starfield backgrounds, but for whatever reason were left in. As behind-the-scenes footage (including from the deleted ending) demonstrates, however, the film used greenscreen rather than bluescreen, indicating that the blue panels were a deliberate design choice.
    • It is not expected that all Sona will die before the normal exposure to the radiation can heal them. Dougherty only says that some won't. The rest will return to immortality as expected, and it's unclear exactly how self-serving the Sona's medical assessments actually are.
    • There are no direct benefits to the war effort from a cure for ageing - for however many people can receive the benefits of radiation harvested from a single planet. When Dougherty is talking about giving the Federation new life, and recovering the losses from the war with the dominion, he is being entirely metaphorical. But it is common to treat the radiation as a needed panacea... and ignore the already astounding healing technology the Federation has access to at will.
  • Everyone knows the film Star Trek (2009) features all the characters meeting as teenage cadets. Except it doesn't. Only Kirk, McCoy, Uhura and Chekov are expressly cadets; Spock is an Academy instructor, Scotty is a long-serving officer who was Reassigned to Antarctica due to an unfortunate transporter accident, and Sulu is either a cadet or a recent Academy graduate (it's never stated). Also: Chekhov (who's portrayed as a teenage prodigy) is the only character who's a teenager in the movie; most of the others are young adults in their twenties, while McCoy is a middle-aged man who enlisted in Starfleet late in life and Scotty, who as mentioned above was already an officer, is of similar age.
  • Many people who dislike Star Trek Into Darkness have been known to complain about the idiotic opening sequence, where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy intervene to save some primitive aliens from a volcanic eruption by luring them away from it, and where the entire planet's population is depicted as a single village at the foot of an active volcano. Except... not really. They aren't just trying to save that village from the volcano, they're trying to neutralize the volcano before its eruption destroys the planet's atmosphere and renders it uninhabitable; their "distraction" is just to get the villagers out of the blast radius of the "cold fusion reactor" that they use to neutralize the eruption. ^note Moreover, the idea of a volcanic eruption rendering a planet uninhabitable actually isn't that unrealistic; in fact, some paleontologists think that's what really wiped out the dinosaurs in the K-T extinction event (although it's not as widely accepted a hypothesis as the "space impact" explanation).
• It's a common assumption that all movies based on Stephen King books are critically-trashed disappointments. While this category has definitely seen some infamous duds (Maximum Overdrive), it also includes some very well-regarded classics, including Carrie (1976), The Shining (one of Stanley Kubrick's masterpieces), Stand by Me, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption (voted by IMDb users as the greatest film ever made), and The Green Mile, and many others that received mixed reviews rather than outright negative ones.
  • King's works are generally heavy on internal monologue, lengthy backstory and implications of more going on than is being said. These ideas do not transfer well to film without a skilled hand at the helm, such as Rob Reiner, Frank Darabont or Mike Flanagan. Unfortunately, for many years, King's works were adapted as TV-miniseries due to their length, meaning that they had to be edited to meet broadcasting standards of propriety (thus prohibiting them from being as gruesome as the books) and were directed by TV directors with little sense of scope or atmosphere, such as Tommy Lee Wallace and Mick Garris. If they were made as theatrical films, typically the studios saw them as throwaway fair ripe for Halloween or January releases, and thus did not provide much budget or promotion.
  • The common reply to the above is that often King was involved in the projects himself, and surely that being the case, they should have been as good as his books. The problem there was manifold; first, King is a novelist, not a screenwriter, which is a very different skill set that not all authors can manage (although many others have done so, like Michael Crichton), and King is definitely better at the first than the second. There is the fact that King is too close to his material, and less willing to cut out elements of his books that don't translate well to film (see his remake of The Shining as a great example of a story that was faithful to a fault). Third is the fact that when King was most heavily involved in filmmaking, such as when he tried his hand at directing one of his own movies, he was also a rampant drug abuser who was barely coherent. It did not help that Maximum Overdrive was based on a science-fiction story of his, not horror, and was filmed as a sci-fi comedy, yet promoted as a terrifying horror "from the master of horror himself".
• In Sucker Punch, the second level of reality has the girls as burlesque dancers at a theatre; the prostitution is a side-business run by Blue, not the main focus. Yet many people claim the girls are meant to be prostitutes or even sex slaves, when that is not the business' primary (or at least public) industry. This is more clear in the Extended Cut, which adds the dance scene back in to the main narrative.
• Everyone knows Schwarzenegger's character, in both The Terminator and Terminator 2, first takes a badass pose while holding a gun, says "I'll be back" or "Hasta la vista, baby", then delivers some serious ass-whooping to whoever is about to be terminated. In the films, the T-800 isn't delivering those lines while posing like on the poster/cover as if ready to start a gunfight, but most parodies imitate it like this anyway, leaving out the part about driving a vehicle through the front door of a building. "I'll be back" is said nonchalantly to the police in the first film, and informatively to Sarah Connor in the second: "Stay here, I'll be back." In Terminator 2, "Hasta la vista, baby" isn't delivered this way at first; the T-800 has to learn it from John Connor, and simply repeats what John Connor has said. The next time, "Hasta la vista, baby" is delivered as a Pre-Mortem One-Liner against the T-1000, but not successfully; the T-1000 reconstitutes itself and still has to be dealt with.
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) is thought of by many people to be a movie where people are killed with chainsaws. In actuality, only one person is killed with a chainsaw. The most common weapon used is actually a hammer.
  • Another off-quoted “fact” about this movie is that it contains not a drop of blood. This is expressly untrue, though the only scene featuring blood isn’t a murder scene. Despite that, it is a rather prominent scene, and happens early in the film. What is true is that the murders themselves contain little to no blood.
• Titanic (1997):
  • It's often claimed that Jack and Rose unintentionally kept the lookouts from seeing the iceberg in time by accidentally distracting them with a kiss. Except in reality, they did nothing of the sort; while the lookouts do see and comment on the pair, the iceberg only came into view after the lookouts got back to their job.
  • Everybody knows that Rose survives the sinking of the ship by floating on a big wooden door. Except she doesn't: it wasn't a door, it was a piece of wooden paneling. According to a few accounts, though, that prop was modeled on an actual piece of recovered debris from the Titanic that likely came from the frame above a door—so it's likely that she floated on a doorframe.
  • Another common claim is that there was room for Jack on the floating wood panel that Rose clings to as the ship sinks, meaning that Jack would have lived if Rose had scooched over and made room for him. While he probably could have fit on it, the movie makes it fairly clear that it wasn't strong enough to support the weight of two people. If both of them had tried to climb onto it, it wouldn't have floated—and both of them would have died of hypothermia.
• Top Gun:
  • Everybody knows that Top Gun is the one about sexy Air Force pilots. Except it isn't: Maverick and his pals are Navy pilots, which is why they're stationed on an aircraft carrier in the opening sequence. ^note  The characters also all have naval ranks, and the opening text openly states that the titular aerial combat school was founded by the United States Navy. Even avid fans of the movie sometimes get this one wrong.
  • Everybody knows that the film ends with the pilots (in all likelihood) starting World War III after shooting down four foreign fighter planes, which the film tries to play off as no big deal. Except it doesn't: the film clearly states that the (unnamed) enemy country denied that the incident happened, meaning that they probably aren't in a hurry to get revenge on America.
  • Many people believe that Iceman is responsible for the accident that results in Goose's death, partially due to the court martial ruling that Maverick wasn't responsible for it (leading some viewers to conclude that Iceman must have been at fault instead). But this is never stated in the film—and if you pay attention, there's ample evidence suggesting that Maverick really was responsible for it. The accident happens because Maverick flies way too close to Iceman during the training exercise and orders him to break off so that he can take a shot at the instructor's plane, resulting in his plane spinning out after he flies through Iceman's jet wash. While Goose's death is ultimately due to a faulty ejection mechanism that prevents him from safely bailing out, it's only due to Maverick's recklessness that he needs to bail out in the first place.
  • Many people tend to celebrate the anniversary date of this movie on May 13th. That is incorrect: the movie was actually released on the 16th. This is due to an error made by a longtime fan.
• Trackman: It is frequently claimed that the creepy nursery song "Tili Tili Bom" is a traditional Russian lullaby. It was actually made up for the film.
• Trading Places is often said to be about stockbrokers. The characters are actually commodities brokers.
• Patrick Cargill is often claimed to have been in Twice Round the Daffodils, yet the British Film Institute's records don't hold a contract for him.
• V for Vendetta does not take place in an alternate timeline where the Nazis won World War II. It takes place 20 Minutes into the Future, and the fascist political party that rules Britain is quite pointedly not the Nazi Party, ^note Shortly before the film was released, many major movie websites claimed this in their plot synopses when they posted the trailer, and the misconception still occasionally pops up in conversations about the movie today. though they are basically just British Nazis, different name be damned. One of the main themes in the movie is that History Repeats; most of the British characters in the film are persuaded to support the new generation of fascists, despite remembering how Hitler's reign turned out.
• W. C. Fields built up such a reputation for playing Child Haters in his later movies that it's commonly forgotten that some characters he played in earlier movies are friendly father figures.
• Classic cowboy movies are often said to have heroes that wore white hats and villains that wore black hats. This is in fact a Dead Unicorn Trope and it never happened in old cowboy movies.
• The myth that lemmings commit suicide comes from White Wilderness, right? Actually, no. While the final scene of lemmings killing themselves really was staged, the movie didn't actually create the misconception. It was just trying to re-create an already entrenched story. This myth dates back to at least 1908, fifty years before the movie was made.
• A lot of views think that in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory the bratty kids all died due to what happens to them (a big part of this is probably due to them never appearing again after they get in their assorted predicaments). In fact, there is a line late in the film (when only Charlie is left) where he asks Wonka what will happen to the other kids and he says they will be restored and be fine, though hopefully will be wiser this time. The kids fates being shown was something from the book that was actually cut from this film, with the 2005 movie, a more faithful adaptation, having the scene.
• The Wizard of Oz:
  • During the "We're Off To See The Wizard" number, it's been claimed that you can see one of the munchkins (or in some versions, a stagehand) hanging himself in the background - an actual on-set suicide that somehow made it into the final cut of a major motion picture. Needless to say, this is not true. See this Snopes article for more details.
  • A common misconception is that the film was initially panned by critics upon its release, only to be Vindicated by History decades later. In fact, the vast majority of contemporary reviews of Oz were positive, often overwhelmingly so.^note  This myth can be traced back to Aljean Harmetz's 1977 book The Making of The Wizard of Oz, which cherrypicked the only negative reviews from 1939 to present this false narrative. This misconception may stem (in part) from the similarly common claim that it was initially a Box Office Bomb before eventually becoming one of the most popular American films of all time—but that's not entirely true either. It failed to make a profit during its initial American release (partly due to being one of the most expensive American films in history up to that point), but it was a major international hit, and made considerably more money during subsequent rereleases in the 1940s.
  • People who have not read the original books presume just from seeing the film there are only three witches of Oz, but there are originally four. In the film, Glinda is the Good Witch of the North, but in L. Frank Baum's original version, Glinda is the name of the Good Witch of the South. In the film, the two characters were combined as one character. In the original version, the Good Witch of the South does not appear until the second to last chapter.
  • On the flip side of the above, it's sometimes talked about as though it were the Star-Making Role for Judy Garland. In actuality, she had been appearing in musicals with Mickey Rooney at MGM for a couple of years beforehand and previously was quite well known for her vaudeville career performing alongside her sisters. While The Wizard of Oz did lead to her getting a special Juvenile Academy Award, that was equally for her work in Babes in Arms (the award recognised all her roles in 1939). Because the public perception of her is Dorothy Gale, likely due to the film being shown on TV so much across decades, it's forgotten that she was actually a huge star in her own right and a top draw at MGM consistently until the flopping of The Pirate in 1948. She had several other hits to her name such as Meet Me in St. Louis, The Harvey Girls and her Oscar-nominated performance in A Star is Born. She also received an Oscar nomination for Judgment at Nuremberg. Even her 2019 biopic Judy seemed to frame her as a One-Hit Wonder only remembered for The Wizard of Oz.
• Nowhere in X-Men: First Class—or the supplemental materials—is it ever stated that the film version of Havok is Cyclops' father. That's just a very widespread bit of Fanon that was mistaken for Canon by many fans, who found it improbable that Cyclops could have been in his late 20s in the 2000s if he had a sibling who was a teenager in 1962. It wasn't officially disproven until X-Men: Apocalypse established that Scott and Alex are indeed brothers, just like in the comics.
• The word Blücher (as in Frau Blücher, the housekeeper in Young Frankenstein) is not German for "glue."^note That would be Leim (the type made from animal bones) or Klebstoff (industrial). The faux-definition is merely a Fanon explanation of the Running Gag in which mention of her name causes the estate horses to whinny in fear. "Blücher" is simply a common German surname, and Brooks states in the DVD Commentary that the gag with the horses was simply meant to show the housekeeper is ominous.^note  As an added bonus, the historically most famous Blücher (a Prussian Four-Star Badass who turned the battle of Waterloo) is famous for having his horse shot out from under him charging the French Old Guard in a desperate - and successful - attempt to buy his infantry some time to withdraw at the battle of Ligny.
• Zombie Apocalypse movies in general:
  • Everybody 'knows' that zombies eat brains. This only happens in one series of films, Return of the Living Dead. In every single non-parody portrayal of a Zombie Apocalypse, zombies merely want your flesh, not your brain. They also tend to not groan "braaaaaaaaaains" (again, outside of Return of the Living Dead, where they are actually capable of normal human speech as well), or much of anything resembling words.
  • Also, Zombies move slowly, shuffling as if drunk, and the only way they manage to catch anyone is when they're not seen, or by sheer numbers, and the idea that "fast zombies" are strictly a 21st Century innovation. This isn't strictly true; zombies who could run have been around since at least the early '80s, if not before. It's mainly George A. Romero's films (or someone imitating him) that keep them slow.
  • While Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the Trope Codifier for a great many Zombie Tropes, the "Zombie Virus" is not one of them. In that film, zombification is not spread as a disease, but it's rather said to be (maybe) the result of cosmic radiation brought back to Earth by a space probe, which causes all recently deceased human bodies to reanimate as zombies. The misconception likely started with the sequel, Dawn of the Dead (1978), where a character comes back as a zombie after being bitten by one and slowly dying from the resulting bacterial infection; in later works (including that film's own sequel, Day of the Dead (1985)), it's assumed that simply being bitten by a zombie is enough to turn a human into one.
  • For that matter, it's common knowledge the film was the Trope Maker for Tropes of the Living Dead. It's not. Romero himself admitted his zombies were hugely based off the lesser vampires (which are technically living dead) from Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, though Romero's films certainly played a huge role in codifying those tropes in the eyes of pop culture.