Film / Teen Wolf The Movie

Teen Wolf: The Movie is a 2023 sequel to the MTV series Teen Wolf on Paramount+.Per the IMDb description: “A terrifying evil has emerged. The wolves howl once again, but only a werewolf like Scott McCall, can gather both new allies and reunite trusted friends to fight back against what could be the most powerful and deadliest enemy.” Eleven years after the events of the final season, Scott and his scattered pack return to Beacon Hills to rescue Allison, who is stuck in the veil. Meanwhile, their old nemesis the Nogitsune has been reawakened by their presumed-dead chemistry teacher and is terrorizing the town. When Allison is resurrected, she has no episodic memory but still remembers being a werewolf hunter and tries to kill Derek and his son Eli, who despite being a werewolf still hasn’t learned how to shift. Also, they play lacrosse and they can swear now. See the main page for tropes it has in common with the rest of the series, this page focuses on things specific to the movie.

Not to be confused with the original movie that began the franchise.

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This movie has examples of:

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• Adults Dressed as Children: Scott poses as a high schooler so he can play in the lacrosse game.
  Other Team’s Coach: Where did this kid come from? Is he even in high school? […] He looks like he’s 30.
• Alpha and Beta Wolves: Teen Wolf uses the Alpha/Beta/Omega system rather particularly. Scott’s eyes are red because he’s an Alpha, whereas Derek and Eli’s aren’t because they’re betas.
• Amnesiac Lover: Allison doesn’t remember anyone in the Pack, including her ex Scott or her own father.
• Another Dimension: The Nogitsune holds everyone hostage in a dimension superposed onto the lacrosse field.
• Arrow Catch: Liam catches Allison’s arrow.
• Ask a Stupid Question...:
  Derek: Eli did you see that? Did you see your eyes?
  Eli: How the hell am I supposed to see my eyes, they’re the things I use to see?
• Author Vocabulary Calendar: Wistful.
• "Awkward Silence" Entrance: The hooded figure enters the bar and all the patrons turn to look at them.
• Bar Slide: Hikari slides a bowl of ramen down the bar to Liam.
• Battle in the Rain: Pretty much every fight scene in the movie is in the rain.
• Being Watched: Scott knows Eli is following them to the Nemeton.
• Bedlam House: Harris gets taken to Eichen House
• The Benchwarmer: Eli, to the extent Derek convinces Finstock to let him play.
• The Blade Always Lands Pointy End In: Allison manages to lodge a pair of medical scissors into the wall next to Scott’s head.
• Blatant Lies:
  Lydia: Ohh, I missed you.
  Malia: I missed you too.
  Lydia: No you didn’t.
  Malia: Okay but I wanted to.
  Lydia: Now that I believe.
• Bridal Carry: Derek carries Eli when he twists his ankle.
• Buffy Speak: Jackson:
  Jackson: What do detectives do, anyway? Do they, like, go to the scene of the crime and... detect something?
• Call-Back: so many
  • The first shot is of the triskelion jar used to capture the Nogitsune, which is inexplicably on a shelf in a bar.
  • The Nogitsune in general was the major villain of Season 3B
  • The pack resurrects Allison, who died fighting the Nogitsune the last time the pack fought it.
  • Harris leaves a silver bullet with a fleur-de-lys as a calling card to implicate Chris Argent.
  • One of the minor plots in the film deals with why Eli keeps stealing Stiles’s Jeep from Derek’s auto shop.
  • Deaton exposes the Nogitsune by throwing mistletoe at it.
  • Allison heals Scott’s wound with a road flare.
  • When Scott joins the lacrosse match, Finstock covers for him by claiming he’s Greenberg.
• Came Back Wrong: Allison doesn’t remember Scott or her father and still thinks Derek’s the alpha. She seems to have reverted to her season 2 villain phase when she was a ruthless hunter.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • Kira, especially noticeable because she was introduced at the same time as the Nogitsune and was the character who told them about the concept of Bardo in the first place.
  • Stiles gets this to an extent; Eli claims that Derek told him Scott almost had to cut off his arm once, but that was Stiles.
• Closed Door Rapport: Derek talks to Eli through his bedroom door.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: The rooms Scott, Derek, and Eli find themselves in during their battle with the Nogitsune are colour-coded based on their wolf eye colour: Scott’s room is red (Alpha), Derek’s is blue (Beta/Omega who has spilled innocent blood), Eli’s is yellow (Beta/Omega who has not killed).
• Continuity Lock-Out: It makes some (clunky and often inaccurate) attempts to catch the audience up, but for the most part it assumes familiarity with Teen Wolf canon.
• Continuity Nod: several
  • The Oak Creek fence refers back to the internment camp that used to stand there and that occasioned the Nogitsune coming to Beacon Hills in the first place.
  • Harris encircles the lacrosse stadium with mountain ash in a visual callback to Stiles doing the same thing.
  • Jackson still has a tail from when he was a kanima
    Jackson: Whoa whoa whoa, I have a tail. No one’s planning on stealing my tail, right?
  • Peter brings up the time Derek killed him.
  • Derek tells Eli ‘s door he was more into basketball than lacrosse (itself a nod to the original movie).
• Dark Shepherd: After Derek leaves the room, Noah threatens to give Eli jail time the next time he steals the Jeep. Rendered moot when Noah gives Eli the Jeep after Derek dies.
• Deadpan Snarker: Eli. Remind you of anyone?
  Nogitsune: Tell me Eli, do you like riddles?
  Eli: I’m more of a limerick guy, y’know, I like the rhyming.
• Death Amnesia: Allison doesn’t remember her death.
• Death by Irony: Lampshaded and Averted:
  Scott: Because that’s what the Nogitsune wants: he wants me to die in your arms this time.
• Delinquents: Eli keeps stealing Stiles’s Jeep because he knows it pisses his dad off.
  Noah: He still seems pretty intent on leaving high school with a grand theft auto charge.
• Demoted to Extra: Stiles is only ever mentioned; his dad doesn’t want to call him because he claims Stiles has his own problems to worry about.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight:
  • The Nogitsune wants Scott to die at Allison’s hand just like she died in his arms for poetic symmetry.
  • Derek doesn’t die yet, but when he gets shot in the neck Scott cradles him while he bleeds out.
• Distracted by the Sexy:
  Jordan: It’s more of a “you look really hot holding a tactical tomahawk” look.
• Dramatic Thunder: Throughout the film but especially in the scene where Scott and Chris reunite it happens after practically every sentence.
• Emerging from the Shadows:
  • Chris does this to Scott when he breaks into the Animal Clinic
  • The Nogitsune does this several times.
  • Harris does this when Lydia and Jackson arrive.
• Exit Stage Window: Eli snuck out of his room through the window.
• Evil Gloating: Harris. Also the Nogitsune to an extent.
• Faction Motto: We know Allison Came Back Wrong because she quotes the old Argent code, though she remembers the new one when Scott prompts her.
  Allison: We hunt those who hunt us. […] We protect those who cannot protect themselves.
• Fainting: Eli faints every time he sees his fangs.
• Feeling Their Age:
  • Poor Sheriff Stilinski
    Noah: God damn it, I knew I should’ve retired.
  • Jordan isn’t sure he can burn through such a large mountain ash barrier anymore.
  • Lydia hasn’t used her powers in years and is out of practice.
• Feet-First Introduction: Scott
• Flashback: The movie is practically a clip show for the series.
• Foreshadowing: The mysterious fires in Beacon Hills use a chemical accelerant: a Call-Back to season 1, when Harris gave Kate a chemical accelerant to set the Hale fire, indicating Harris is the arsonist..
• The Glomp: Lydia does this to Malia when they reunite.
• Glowing Eyes: Pretty much every supernatural being except Lydia.
• Guns vs. Swords: The Beacon Hills Sheriff’s Department vs. the Oni
• Hates Being Nicknamed: Lydia is not amused by Rick calling her “Lyd”
• Hates Their Parent: Malia interacting with Peter.
• Have We Met?: Finstock proves to be (perhaps willfully) very unobservant
  Derek: You don’t know who my son is, do you?
  Finstock: I don’t know who you are.
• Hearing Voices:
  • The Nogitsune talks to the hooded figure through the jar.
  • Chris keeps hearing Allison’s voice.
• Heroic Rematch: Allison and the Oni
• Heroic Sacrifice: Derek pushes Scott out of harm’s way and holds the Nogitsune in place so Jordan can burn it up, becoming collateral damage.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: The triskelion jar containing one of their most dangerous enemies sits next to a bunch of other jars in a busy bar.
• Hunter of Monsters: Allison was already a hunter from a long line of hunters, but she’s much more focused on hunting when she’s resurrected.
• I Am Who?: Ishida learns he’s a kitsune right before having his tails ripped off.
• I Hate You, Werewolf Dad!: Eli doesn’t want to be a werewolf and it causes tension between him and his father.
  Noah: Why the hell does he keep taking the Jeep?
  Derek: Because he knows I hate it.
• I Know Your True Name: One of Lydia’s banshee powers is that she can scream someone’s true name and reset them to themselves, which she does to help Allison remember.
• "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight: Scott spends most of the movie trying to convince Allison to stop trying to kill him and remember who she is.
• In the Hood: Harris wears a face-obscuring black hoodie most of the film.
• In-Series Nickname: Deaton tells the firefighter that people call Scott “The Alpha”.
• Indispensable Scoundrel: Literally no one likes Peter except Peter.
• Insistent Terminology:
  Lydia: Banshees don’t scream, they wail.
• Irony: Of the cosmic variety. Derek burns to death just like the rest of his family, meaning Eli inherits that same survivor’s guilt.
• Kill It with Fire: Derek and the Nogitsune.
• Kill the Lights: The lights in the Sheriff’s station flicker when the Oni arrive.
• Large Ham: Peter, as always.
  Peter: I’ve been known to light a spark or two in my time.
• Lens Flare: So many of them in the scenes with Allison and Scott in the storage room, and again with Allison and her dad in the lacrosse stadium.
• Long Bus Trip: Stiles and Kira don’t come back.
• Madness Mantra:
  • ALLISON in the investor pamphlet
  • BARDO in the Nemeton drawing
• Magic Pants: When Jordan burns up Derek and the Nogitsune, his pants remain, which is extra bizarre because we saw him bare-assed earlier in the film so there’s no need for it.
• Man Hug: Scott and Chris
• Meaningful Gift: Noah gives Eli the Jeep after Derek dies.
  Eli: He hated that Jeep
  Noah: After my son left it behind, Derek towed it in, thinking it was probably beyond repair. But then he opened up the hood and he pulled off all the duct tape Stiles had stuck on it, and he managed to fix it. That Jeep, no matter what’s been done to it, it just keeps running. He could never figure out why it wouldn’t break down and stay down. And I don’t think he ever realized that that’s exactly the way we saw him. I have never seen anyone take the kind of punishment that Derek Hale took and kept taking in order to protect the people he loved. He kept going. He kept standing back up until the day he couldn’t. Hey, your dad had complicated feelings about that Jeep, but it doesn’t mean it needs to be complicated for you. All you gotta do is keep it running. Just keep it going.
• Morton's Fork: Allison chases Scott to the edge of a cliff.
• The Movie
• Mummy: Because Dylan O’Brien didn’t reprise his role as Stiles, the Nogitsune again takes the appearance of its previous host, Rhys, who received burns all over his body and was thus completely bandaged when he died, giving the Nogitsune the appearance of a mummy.
• Naked on Revival: Allison when she is resurrected.
• Noodle Incident:
  Finstock: I haven’t felt this level of disappointment since I lost my virginity.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Derek harasses Finstock into letting his son play in the game.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: Finstock is under the impression Derek’s request to have Eli play in the game for five minutes is a negotiation. It isn’t.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Malia when Eli transforms on his own.
  • Scott when Allison is fighting the hospital guards.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Peter reminds them that Derek killed him once.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Werewolves, we have them.
• Playing Catch with the Old Man: Derek asks Eli to practice lacrosse with him.
• Plot Detour: My dad’s missing but we really need to play this lacrosse game first.
• Pop the Tires:
  • Derek claws the Jeep’s tires to stop Eli.
  • Allison shoots an arrow into Scott’s tire.
  • The Oni use their swords to slash the tires on Liam and Hikari’s car.
• Portent of Doom: This is why Lydia left Stiles: she was trying to prevent him from dying like in her dream.
• Psychosomatic Superpower Outage: Eli can’t shift because he saw Derek shift to combat an intruder as a baby and so his powers scare him to the point of fainting.
• Put Me In, Coach!: Eli finally gets to play and scores the game-winning goal in overtime.
• Rage Quit: The Nogitsune poofs out angrily when the Oni start dying.
• Reality Warper: The Nogitsune can bend the reality around them.
• Really Dead Montage: Derek’s montage of shitty things that happened to him during Noah’s monologue.
• Regained Memories Sequence: Allison has one when Lydia calls her name.
• Remember the New Guy?: Hikari. Granted, there was a time jump but we never learn anything about her and are just expected to accept she’s part of the pack.
• Reports of My Death Were Greatly Exaggerated:
  • Jackson lampshades this:
    Jackson: “Supposed to be dead” is starting to be a recurring theme around here.
  • Allison is stuck in between worlds and has to be resurrected.
  • Harris somehow didn’t die when Jennifer sacrificed him to the Nemeton, which raises some confusion about how the rest of that plan came off if he’s not dead.
  • A more subtle example with Dr. Fenris, who was presumed dead after he was stopped from his attempts to commit supernatural genocide.
• Resurrected Romance: Scott, with the help of Lydia, Malia, and Chris, resurrects his high school girlfriend.
• Retcon: a frustrating amount
  • Despite not knowing he’s a kitsune, Ishida apparently has nine tails automatically, whereas Kira had to earn her first tail, and it’s implied kitsune gain tails with age. So either Ishida’s secretly Older Than He Looks or they forgot.
  • Technically in the main series they don’t burn wolfsbane out directly, you need to burn a sample of the same strain of wolfsbane and shove that into the wound. Here Allison just holds a road flare to Scott’s wound.
  • Despite the fact the shujendo scroll specified that such a bite would change, and therefore disqualify, the host when Scott bit the Nogitsune, apparently instead that bite now made the Nogitsune a kitsune/wolf hybrid that doesn’t need a host.
  • When Derek dies, he becomes a True Alpha, which is evidently not as rare as they said and conflicts with the lore of how one becomes a True Alpha.
• The Reveal: Harris is the big bad.
• Riddle: Even for the Nogitsune, who liked to speak in riddles in season 3B, he goes through a lot of them, so much so that Deaton can tell Chris is possessed because the Nogitsune cannot refuse to answer a riddle.
• Rousing Speech: Zigzagged: Malia refuses to give Jordan one of these because it’s not her style, only to keep talking and end up inadvertently giving him one anyway.
• Ruder and Cruder: It’s not MTV, they can swear now.
  Scott: Shit, dude.
• Running Gag: Mostly continuations of gags from the series:
  • Scott flips the sign on the Animal Clinic to Closed, which once again stops exactly no one.
  • Greenberg.
  • Jackson is only there to be bitchy and remind people of the time he was a kanima.
• Shirtless Scene: Surprisingly few, considering this is Teen Wolf we’re talking about.
  • Scott and Derek have a couple in flashbacks.
  • Allison by virtue of being Naked on Revival
  • Jordan and Malia are both topless (and then bottomless) when they hook up.
  • Jordan again after killing Derek and the Nogitsune.
• Sickly Green Glow: The bioluminescent fireflies are symbols of the Oni, who in this movie work for the Nogitsune. When the Nemeton generates them, it too glows green.
• So Proud of You: Derek is very excited to hear Eli healed himself, even if Scott did most of the heavy lifting.
• Some Kind of Force Field: Scott and Eli run smack into a mountain ash circle.
• Stairs Are Faster: During the hospital chase, Allison gets in an elevator and Scott takes the stairs to catch up to her.
• Stock Footage: A metric shitton of it from the series.
• Suddenly Bilingual: Liam speaks Japanese now, though with the Time Skip it makes sense considering he lives in Japan.
• Super-Scream: Lydia’s banshee wail banishes the Oni and makes everyone cover their ears.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: For Stiles and Kira, because both their actors declined to participate.
  • Hikari (whose name is an anagram for Hi Kira) is a kitsune who’s good with a sword, though we don’t learn much more about her.
  • Despite being Derek’s son, Eli is almost exactly like Stiles (to the speculative delight of some fans): he’s obsessed with the Jeep, awkward, a benchwarmer, antagonistic towards Derek, closer to human than the rest of the pack, seemingly motherless, sarcastic, faints easily…
• Technobabble: Rick accuses Lydia of this during her investor presentation.
• Three-Point Landing: Scott does one after leaping out of the pit.
• Time Skip: The movie takes place at least eleven years after the events of the finale.
• Timmy in a Well: Inverted: the rescuers call the Lassie to get Alicia and her dog out of the pit.
• Title Drop:
  Fenris: Trust me, we’ve heard plenty of stories about teenage werewolves.
• Twitchy Eye: Lydia when she sees she typed Allison’s name all over the page.
• Unflinching Walk: Allison after the car she crashed into Derek’s explodes.
• Unsafe Haven: Sure, let’s just put a 1000-year-old chaos demon on the shelf of a crowded bar next to a bunch of similar-looking jars, What Could Possibly Go Wrong??
• Unseen No More: We finally meet Greenberg! Kind of.
• Wall Slump: Scott after he gets wolfsbane poisoning.
• The Walls Are Closing In: Scott forces the walls of the collapsing building back when rescuing Alicia and her dog.
• Werewolves Are Dogs: Peter sniffing the blood on the cliff.
  • Also Defied Trope when the firefighter assumes Scott's nickname "The Alpha" refers to him as a dog, and Deaton clarifies "no, like a wolf"
• Wham Line:
  • Rick interrupts Lydia's investor meeting with the plot
    Rick: Look, all I wanna know is, who is Allison?
  • Allison wakes up very confused
    Allison: Where’s the Alpha? Where’s Derek Hale?
  • this exchange:
    Lydia: Jackson, do you know what rowan trees become after they’re burned?
    Jackson: Ash?
    Lydia: Mountain Ash.
  • saying this to Lydia out of nowhere alerts us there's something to tell
    Harris: Tell us why you left Stiles.
• What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: The hooded figure releases the Nogitsune, thinking they can control it.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Despite remaining as a threat the end of season 6, the fates of Monroe and her army of supernatural hunters aren't mentioned at all. Alec, the werewolf who was saved by Scott at the series finale, is not referenced at all.
• Where It All Began: Many of them haven’t been to Beacon Hills for a while but are called to return.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: There are way more than 9 Oni in the final battle.
• You Do Not Want To Know: Melissa asks why the girl brought to the hospital looks exactly like Allison, Scott asks if she really wants to know, which she doesn’t.
• You Keep Using That Word: Deaton corrects their understanding of Bardo:
  Deaton: Bardo is a Tibetan word, it’s a means of interpreting death and the movements of consciousness between physical states of being. It’s just a word, it’s a concept.

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