Writers Cannot Do Math / Film

Animated

• Beauty and the Beast:
  • According to a lyric in "Be Our Guest", the castle has been under the Enchantress's curse for 10 years. Since the rose stopped blooming once the Beast turned 21, this would mean that he was 11 years old when he was cursed. This does not match up with the stained glass windows in the prologue or the portrait of his human form in the West Wing, which show him as a young adult (not to mention that the curse comes off as a lot crueler if he was a child when he was affected).
  • The span of time over which the main events of the movie take place. The movie appears to start in autumn ("Belle"), then quickly goes into winter (the "Gaston" reprise). The famous title song dance scene takes place on a warm night (complete with crickets chirping), yet that same night after Belle is released, there is still a foot of snow on the ground. Later that same night, there is a torrential thunderstorm, suggesting that it is spring, which means LeFou would have been waiting for Belle and Maurice to come home for the entire winter, yet somehow he hasn't died of hypothermia.
  • Maurice sets out for the castle to save Belle when the Beast is still animalistic and unrefined. When Belle looks into the mirror and sees him out in the woods, the Beast has become gentler and has fallen in love with Belle. Does that mean Maurice was out in the woods for weeks or months on end, which is much shorter than the timespan it took for others to travel between the village and the castle elsewhere in the movie, or was the Beast reformed in the span of one or two days? This is also the entire aforementioned timespan in which LeFou would have been waiting out in the snow.
  • The various direct-to-video films and other follow-ups don't help with this issue. Enough time passes in the castle that they celebrate Christmas, for instance. The Perspective Flip novel The Beast Within scraps the movie's implication that the Beast was cursed when he was only eleven years old, but keeps the condition of the curse becoming permanent when he turns 21. But it's not clear at all how much time passes over the course of the story — he is old enough to be engaged when he's cursed, several months pass as the curse begins to take effect, and years pass after that. Thus the Beast's age remains in doubt.
• Cars: Lightning says at the beginning, "One winner, 42 losers," implying there are 43 racers competing (as if this were a Cup Series race pre-2016). During the race, only 36 racers are shown, the size of an Xfinity Series field. Unless we're to assume that some cars had already been taken out in an earlier crash.
• The Polar Express: Throughout the film, the titular train is mostly depicted with 6 passenger coaches, yet in some shots, it's pulling as many as 20.
• Toy Story 2 features a scene set in an airport at night where Big Al - the film's Big Bad - is preparing to fly to Tokyo. His next scene shows him appearing in a television commercial - he runs a chain of toy stores - that is clearly produced after he arrives in Japan, discovers Woody and the rest of the Round-up Gang are missing, and returns to the United States, as he is visibly despondent at his lost fortune. It is impossible to fly from America to Japan and back again overnight. The filmmakers admitted that this made no logistical sense, but let it slide to show that he got his comeuppance.

Live-Action

• π:
  • Mathematician/genius Max Cohen tells the Kabbalists that he can't just tell them the 216 digit MacGuffin number because "You've already written down every 216 digit number and intoned them all and what has it gotten you?" To do so would, of course, take even a large group of researchers, such as the entire population of the Earth, significantly longer than the age of the Universe to do, and inconceivably more ink than there is mass in the universe — indeed, even if only one electron were needed to write down each number, 10^100 universes would be much too small. Any mathematician should be well aware of this. Of course, Max and reality don't always see eye to eye, especially considering he's having a schizophrenic breakdown at that point.
  • The Kabbalists are after it because they're looking for a 216 character word. Since this would be in Hebrew, which has 22 characters, they actually want a number with roughly 290 digits. So Max probably doesn't even have what they want.
  • Max explains the golden ratio to Lenny and says it's represented by the Greek letter theta (θ). In actuality, the ratio is represented by the letter phi (φ).
• 10 Items or Less: Scarlet is stated to know how much a customer owes just by sight, and explains it as "You've got prices, you've got totals, how many can there be?" Considering the number of items in even a small store, factor in the number of items a customer will buy will vary and the quantity of each item a customer purchases and the answer turns very astronomical very quickly. And that's before factoring in inflation and market fluctuations that will change prices on a daily basis.
• Ace Attorney (2012): In the present day, Prosecutor Mandred von Karma hasn't lost a case in 40 years. Phoenix says that Gregory Edgeworth found it suspicious that he hadn't lost a case in 40 years... but Gregory was killed 15 years ago, which means von Karma's streak was 25 years at the time.
• Aliens:
  • There are several problems with the Director's Cut, which restores several scenes. The first is that there are only about 150 colonists on the planet, which means a maximum of about 150 aliens (it's unclear how many colonists were not successfully impregnated and died other ways). This isn't too bad a problem with the theatrical cut, but the Director's Cut includes scenes of 4 Sentry Guns with 500 rounds apiece blasting away at the aliens when they attack in a Zerg Rush, with the camera showing scores of aliens killed. There are also plenty of aliens killed throughout the rest of the movie by the Marines. And yet, when attempting to escape, the motion trackers light up with what looks to be 50-100 aliens at least converging upon them.
  • The same scene that introduces the Sentry Guns also shows the remaining marines only have about 50 rounds apiece in their rifles, yet they clearly fire way more than that when they try to rescue Ripley from the Med Bay and in the subsequent base assault and retreat through the air shafts.
  • Both versions of the film also have thegre alien attack on their sealed base, while Hudson is reading the distance to the closest target. When he reaches 6 meters, they start arguing because they realize that the aliens would be inside the room at that point. Problem is, Hudson keeps counting down the distance before they get their realization that the aliens are coming from above and/or below them, getting down to 3-4 meters. The marines then spend a good 10-20 seconds realizing what's up and figuring out a way to take a look in the shaft above the ceiling. Apparently, the aliens decided to be good sports and stopped moving while they were discussing matters, or the writers didn't think that anything less than 2 meters is basically within touch range and Hicks wasn't going to get a chance to look above the ceiling tiles.
• Annabelle is set a year before the eponymous doll was taken in by the Warrens. In The Conjuring, we're shown that this takes place in 1968, so Annabelle should be set in 1967. However, evidences within the film suggest that it actually takes place a couple of years later. Not only the Sharon Tate murder (which happened in 1969) is mentioned, a newspaper flash actually gives away the year the film is set in as 1970 (though you have to freeze frame it). The filmmakers seem to have forgotten that there is a three year timeskip between the Warrens taking Annabelle and the Perron case, which neatly explains where the missing three years went.
• Back to the Future:
  • A stock DMC DeLorean only got about 130 horsepower. It would go 0-60 in about a day and a half. That, of course, is before you dump a fission reactor in the back seat, with the requisite lead shielding to keep everyone inside from dying of a radiation overdose, easily doubling the weight of the car. So, the notion that the car ever got up to 88 mph is hilarious.
  • Back to the Future Part III: While the trilogy is mostly good at avoiding this (for example, all the dates traveled to fall on the same weekdays that they did in real life), there is one such example. When Doc sends Marty back to 1885, he inputs the destination time as 8:00 A.M. Marty gets knocked out within minutes of his arrival and is found by his ancestor Seamus. Upon waking up, Marty is told by Seamus' wife Maggie that he's been asleep for nearly 6 hours. Being around 6 hours after 8:00 A.M. would mean he would wake up at around 2:00 P.M., yet it's depicted as being completely dark out and they have supper right after.
• Bill & Ted
  • In Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey Ted mentions the princesses are celebrating their fifth year of living in the 20th century. They arrived in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure which was set in 1988 so Bogus Journey must be set in 1993 instead of 1991 when the movie was released. Most of the newspaper and magazine articles shown in the credits are dated 1991 (a few are dated 2691 so they must be future reprints).
  • Bill & Ted Face the Music (set in 2020): The Great Leader says Bill and Ted won The Battle of the Bands 25 years ago. Which would mean that Bogus Journey would have to be set in 1995 rather than '91 or '93, which, given the aforementioned five year gap between the first two films, contradicts the explicit 1988 placement of Excellent Adventure.
  • The Rufus hologram in Face the Music mentions first meeting Bill and Ted in 1989. Though Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was released in '89, it was explicitly set in 1988.
  • Meanwhile Billie and Thea are stated to be 24 in 2020, meaning they should have been born in 1995 or 1996, which doesn't quite line up with the 1993 date of the battle of the bands, even accounting for the versions of their fathers and their baby selves seen at the end of Bogus Journey being from 16 months in the future.
• Captain America: The boy who would become The Red Skull is kidnapped by government agents to make him a super soldier, it is stated that seven years pass when Captain America comes to rescue him by this point he appears to be in his mid-late twenties, this doesn't add up at all because if he was abducted when he was 10 the oldest he'd be is 17.
• Judge Dredd gives the crime rate in Mega-City One in Dredd as "Twelve serious crimes reported every minute. Seventeen thousand per day." This is obviously meant to sound astonishingly high to the audience, but at the same time the city has a population of over 800 million. Doing the math, that means about 780 "serious crimes" per 100 000 residents per year (which is a standard method of expressing crime rates). In comparison, the violent crime in New York city was considered high in the 1980s, that number hovered around 900-1100, while 2010 had a "historical low" of 581. Of course, we do not know what exactly is considered a "serious crime" in Mega-City One or the number of crimes that just go unreported, which seems rather high based on the comics.
• Entrapment: Catherine Zeta-Jones needs ten extra seconds after midnight in order to use a computer program to steal billions of dollars from an international bank. After 11pm, a device she set up "steals" 1/10th of a second every minute until midnight, which will total 10 seconds by midnight. But that only equals 6 seconds, which is 4 shy of the required 10.
• In the 1914-set prologue of The Fifth Element the Mondoshawans arrive to take the five elemental stones and the Fifth Element promising that they'll bring them back in time 300 years later to protect the Earth from "The Great Evil". And yet, when the Great Evil shows up, we can attest from Korben's clock that the current year is 2263, when 300 years after 1914 should be 2214.
• Forrest Gump: Forrest claims that Jenny died on a Saturday, and yet her gravestone says 22 March 1982, which was a Monday. Odd that Robert Zemeckis would make that mistake, considering he so thoroughly avoided it in the Back to the Future films.
  • Gets lampooned in 'Great Movie Mistakes, a miniseries in which comedian Robert Webb comments on such errors and said of this scene “Forrest, I know you’re upset about her death, but lying about it won’t bring her back.”
• Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter: The film reveals that Friday the 13th (1980) took place in 1979 as indicated by the gravestone of Pamela Voorhees, who died in that film, possibly to make The Final Chapter take place in the year it was released, 1984 (the film is an Immediate Sequel to Friday the 13th Part III, which itself is an immediate sequel to Friday the 13th Part 2, which is explicitly set five years after the first film). However, in the first film, the titular Friday the 13th is specifically given as June 13, which, while a Friday in 1980 when the film was released, was a Wednesday in 1979.
• Ghostbusters (1984):
  • Egon describes the paranormal activity in the New York area as "a Twinkie 35 feet long, weighing approximately 600 pounds". Assuming that the enlarged Twinkie maintains its ratio of dimensions, a 600-pound twinkie would only be 6.4 feet long, and a 35-foot-long Twinkie would weigh approximately 50 tons. A Twinkie that was only expanded in length to 35 feet (like 108 Twinkies laid end-to-end) would weigh about 10 pounds.
  • The Good-Times Montage includes a USA Today newspaper with a headline dated Tuesday, October 8, 1984. October 8, 1984 was actually a Monday, not a Tuesday.
• Halloween: The prologue takes place in 1963 and Michael is explicitly six years old. The rest of the film takes place in 1978, and yet the credits list Tony Moran as playing "Michael Myers (age 23)." He should, of course, be 21.
• The Heavenly Kid has the title character die in what is clearly the late '50s or early '60s. He's then brought up to The Present Day (1985) and discovers he sired a son, who's now in High School. Apparently, his son had to repeat a few years.
• In Home Alone, Kevin is 8 years old; in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Kevin is 10, the same age as actor Macaulay Culkin, who plays him, was at the time of filming; that is, the sequel was made two years after the original. But it was set exactly one year later. Either his birthday occurs over the course of both movies (and nobody bothers to mention it), or he should be 9.
  • Also in the first one, they take-off from Chicago in daylight and arrive in Paris, also in daylight. With flights between the two cities lasting around seven and a half hours and, assuming a 9am take-off - they wake up a little after 8am and it's mentioned the flight leaves in less than an hour - it would land around 11.30pm Paris time.
• It's a Wonderful Life:
  • Clarence says that, in the altered reality, Harry Bailey died at the age of nine, but the gravestone right in front of him as he says the line reads "1911 - 1919", making him either 7 or 8.
  • Clarence implies that he was a contemporary of Mark Twain, then later calculates his age as 293 ("next May"). That would have put his birth in 1653: many, many years before Mark Twain. Moreover, Mark Twain died in 1910, meaning that, as per the point above, his lifespan would have overlapped with George’s.
• The original Jumanji was pretty bad at this when it came to how many gameboard spaces were left for the game pieces to move down their 36 space lanes towards the center finish line. There just wasn't enough rolls (high number rolls especially) amongst Alan, Sarah, Judy, and Peter for it to be believable that one of the players managed to finish the game with the rolled numbers they provided. The first couple dice roll movements made sense, but the later rolls become an absolute mess where the characters start claiming that they only need to roll a certain amount on their current turn to complete the game when they should still be really far out. While there are many of these errors throughout the movie, the most egregious was probably Peter's 3rd roll. After Peter's first 2 rolls moved him up 7 spaces, he claims during his next roll that he tried to cheat because he was only 10 spaces away from finishing the game. This obviously wasn't the case, because Peter at that point should have still been 29 spaces from the end.
• Kelly's Heroes, a World War II film, features a bank heist of 14,000 bars of Nazi Gold supposedly worth $16 million in 1944 dollars. No matter how you do the math, these figures cannot be reconciled with (a) the number of shares, (b) the observed weight and size of the bars, (c) the number of boxes. See the Headscratchers.Kellys Heroes page for all the gory details.
• The Last of the Mohicans: A leftover from the original script. Ducan says the Huron ambush of his men killed 18 of his men. His escort was 26. (One NCO, one drummer, and 24 privates of which 3 survive).
• Magadheera has a Bollywood math example in it's iconic 1-vs-100 fight, when the hero Kala Bhairava pulls a One-Man Army and slays a hundred enemy mooks from one end of a bridge to another in 15 minutes. He easily broke 100 after the ten-minute mark, and there's somehow at least 30 enemies (give or take a few) and after all that, and after reaching the bridge's other side somehow there's still one remaining mook (who gets kicked aside by the Giant Mook lieutenant).
• Nothing about the timeline of Mamma Mia! makes any sense. The film's plot involves a 20-year-old girl trying to find out which of three men her mother had teenage flings with is her birth father. Despite her being conceived around 20 years prior, and the film being set at least fairly close to when it was made, numerous references to her mother's teen dalliances make it seem like it was at least thirty, perhaps even forty, years prior. The characters' ages seem to imply this as well, and yet they all continually make references to what happened "twenty years ago", as well as the daughter continually referred to as being 20 years old. Twenty years prior would be the late 80s, not the late sixties, as the film's dialogue implies. For that matter, the ages of the adult characters are another mystery; if her mother was impregnated as a teen twenty years ago, she'd only be in her late 30s in the modern era, and her friends and the three lovers would be roughly the same. Yet not only are all the adults played by actors ranging from early fifties to mid-sixties, their dialog also implies that is the age the characters are: "We've got a senior citizen coming through!".
• In The Man in the Moon, a boy is taking the oldest daughter to a school dance. The dance ends at 11:00, so Dad demands that his daughter be home by 11:30. The problem is that the school is near 30 miles away. That would require going almost 60 mph on back roads. Dad does interrupt the boy's answer with a possible Conjunction Interruption; we don't know what the boy was going to say, but it could have been to note that fact.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • A line in Thor: Ragnarok ("We were eight at the time.") hints that Thor and Loki might have been raised as twins, and the Minor Kidroduction at the beginning of Thor shows them looking the same age (both actors were 11). However, while Thor shows that the battle against the Frost Giants was in 965 (which is also likely Loki's birth year), 1053 years before the events of Avengers: Infinity War, in this film Thor states that he is 1500 years old.
  • The opening scene where Toomes is cleaning up the wreckage from the Battle of New York is stated to take place eight years before the rest of the scenes in Spider-Man: Homecoming. However, this is impossible. For starters, The Avengers (2012) was released only five years prior. And all media made clear the battle indeed happened on the year the film was released, and the main events of Homecoming take place in 2016, a few months after Captain America: Civil War. The "Eight years later" thing was admitted to be an error.
  • There are two lesser ones. In Civil War Vision makes a reference to Tony Stark revealing himself as Iron Man to the world eight years ago, making it fit in real life, as Iron Man was released in 2008, but not once it was estabilished in-universe that the events took place in either 2009 or 2010. And in Homecoming, Aaron Davis is mentioned to be 33 years old, and his criminal record states a birth date of April 1984, when, as mentioned above, the movie did come out in 2017 but is set on the year prior.
• In Mean Girls Cady is supposed to be a mathematical genius, so the writers used really overcomplicated explanations of how to do simple things like working out percentages, but seem to be okay in terms of accuracy. However, Cady intentionally makes mistakes to help her crush/tutor feel smart, leading to moments like this little exchange:
  Aaron: ...sometimes the product of two negative integers is a positive number.
  Cady: Yeah, like negative four and negative six.
• Men in Black 3: J travels back in time to 1969 and meets a young K. When J explains himself to K, he says "25 years from now, you recruit me...". 25 years after 1969 is 1994, whereas the first film took place in 1997.
• Alex O'Connell's age in The Mummy Returns. He's eight in 1933, so he'd have to have been born in 1925. The problem is that his parents Rick and Evy met in 1926 and there's no indication he's an adopted child or a child one of them already had. The writers for Returns appear to have missed the fact that the first film has a time skip of three years between O'Connell's first appearance in 1923 and him meeting Evey and assumed the whole movie took place in 1923.
• In Never Been Kissed, the geeky kids sell pies at a bake sale, with a sign proclaiming "pi = 3.1457" followed by some more digits to make it look sufficiently nerdy. Only the first three digits are correct; the rest is nonsense. Also, Josie's initial high school tenure is played against the backdrop of The '80s, when, based on the dates and ages mentioned, they actually should have occurred in 1992, 1991 at the earliest. Instead of the soundtrack you'd expect to hear for a sequence set during the heyday of Grunge, Josie and her classmates are always shown cavorting around to Cyndi Lauper and The Smiths, music more apropos of what should have been their grade school years.
• In Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, an Einstein bobblehead (supposedly as smart as the real Einstein) claims that pi is exactly 3.14159265. Pi is an irrational number, meaning that no matter how many digits you use, you can never get to the exact value.
• The Odd Couple II is an absolute mess of chronology. The script is never sure how long this film takes place after the original: 30 years (which was the real-time length between the films) or 17 years (because the plot revolves around the marriage of Felix and Oscar's children, neither of whom look much older than 30). The opening caption states "30 years later", but dialogue throughout the next few scenes keep insisting it to be 17 years. And then near the end, Felix and Oscar are confronted with their ex-wives, both of whom they separated from during the events of the first film. Oscar's ex tells him he hasn't changed in 30 years, and then Felix tops it by declaring that he hasn't spoken to his ex in 50 years (!), which would be impossible without their daughter being well into middle-age. What happened, Neil Simon?
• The Queen: When the Queen and Tony Blair are meeting at the end of the film, she mentions that the clocks are about to go back. The start of the scene bears the caption "Two months later", suggesting it happens that long after the previous scene, the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales. That happened on 6 September 1997, meaning the meeting was held sometime around 6 November. The clocks went back on 26 October in 1997.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark: While translating the inscriptions on the headpiece of the Staff of Ra, the translator initially says the staff should be six kadam high, or "about seventy-two inches", as Indy notes. However, the translator then says "And take back one kadam to honor the Hebrew God whose Ark this is". So, the staff has to be 5 kadam or about 60 inches long. So, since each kadam is approximately equal to a foot, the proper staff should be 5 feet long. Nevertheless, when Indy is seen using the staff, it's much taller than Harrison Ford, who stands around 6 feet tall.
• Rocky:
  • In Rocky, set in 1975, Mickey mentions that he's 76 years old, which would put his year of birth in 1899. However, in Rocky III, Mickey's gravestone gives his lifespan as 1905 to 1981. Interestingly, this would make him 76 at the time of his death, so it seems they did remember the age quote, but didn't take into account that several years passed in between the first and third film.
  • In Rocky III, the characters refer to the events of Rocky II as happening three years prior. While that matches the real world time span between the releases of the two movies, Rocky II took place immediately after the first film, which ended in 1976. Mickey's gravestone indicates that the film takes place in 1981, which is supported by a picture of Rocky with Ronald Reagan, who became president that year. That would make the gap between films closer to five years. The age of Rocky Jr., who was born in the last movie, also supports this, as he looks closer to five than three.
• In Roxanne, a modern-day remake of Cyrano de Bergerac, C. D. Bales agrees to make twenty jokes about his own nose. Apparently he and the rest of the bar patrons lost track. He actually did twenty-five jokes. (Word of God says the bar knew and just wanted C.B. to do more insults.)
• Scanners: Darryl Revok reveals himself to be Cameron Vale's older brother, then tells him that one of them was born in 1943, the other in 1948. Earlier in the film both characters are stated to be thirty-five years old by Dr. Ruth. Either their birth dates are incorrect or one of their ages is.
• A Serious Man: When Larry scrawls the equations of the uncertainty principle on a chalkboard, he miswrites one of the equations as "Δp = √(〈p〉² - 〈p〉²)", making the equation the square root of zero (which is zero). The correct equation is "Δp = √(〈p²〉 - 〈p〉²)".
• In The Shawshank Redemption, Red states that Andy crawled a pipe that was 500 yards, just shy of half a mile. A mile is 1760 yards, so 500 yards would be a little more than a quarter-mile.
• Played with in Stranger Than Fiction: Harold is asked a complicated math question and can't think because of the narrator in his head. She tells him an answer, which he promptly says out loud. She then says that answer was wrong and gives another one, causing Harold to apologize and switch to the new answer. The first answer was the right one. This was intentional on the part of the writer.
• In Scream (2022) the sisters Sam and Tara Carpenter are five years apart in age (it is explicitly said their parents divorced when Sam was 13 and Tara 8). However, at the end of the movie, a reporter claims that 25 years almost to the day have passed since the events of Scream (1996), meaning that, since Sam is the biological daughter of Billy Loomis, who was killed at the end of that film, she can't be younger than 24, making Tara 19... despite Tara and her friend group still being in high school.
• Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:
  • Kirk tells Carol "There's man out there I haven't seen in fifteen years who's trying to kill me," which is the real-life timespan between the original airdate of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Space Seed" in 1967 and this film's release in 1982. However, "Space Seed" took place in the year 2267, while this film takes place in 2285, which is 18 years later in the Star Trek universe. Khan makes a similar error by saying that Kirk marooned him 15 years before.
  • Likewise, unless some of Khan's followers were made up of literal children when they were left on Ceti Alpha V, his remaining followers are all far too young to have been his original crew but too old to have been born to the original Augmented humans in the period of time which passed. Some expanded universe materials attempted to solve this by saying they were in fact the children born to the original Augments who aged at a faster rate than normal into their prime due to their superior genetics.
• One scene in the 2007 reboot of St Trinians had Stephen Fry award points to a team for concluding that the volume of a sphere is πr^3. A fourteen-year-old could probably tell you that it's actually (4πr^3)/3. Clearly the writer extrapolated from πr^2 giving the area of a circle. Although he claimed in his biography to enjoy studying maths under his father, Stephen Fry is much better versed in humanities than mathematics, otherwise he might have spotted this one. The scene has three characters make the same mistake: the contestant (a student at a presumably top school), the bursar (a numbers man), and Stephen Fry. It's odd, to say the least.
• At the end of Summer School, the students' final grades in Remedial English are recounted in front of their teacher and two school administrators. Apparently the vice-principal could use some Remedial Math, because the average he cites for the class as a whole (63%) isn't the actual mean of the grades reported (43, 51, 74, 38, 75, 59, 70, 82, 91).
• Superman Returns: Lois' article "Why the World Doesn't Need Superman" is shown in a newspaper dated Tuesday, February 13th 2005. February 13 was a actually a Sunday in 2005.
• In Super Mario Bros. (1993), Spike, after being turned super-intelligent, asks Iggy what the square root of 26,481 is, while delivering the answer immediately: 191. The thing is, 191 is actually the square root of 36,481. 26,481 isn't a square number.
• Terminator:
  • The Judgment Day was to occur August 1997. John Connor was born February 1985. Terminator 2: Judgment Day shows him at the age of ten being attacked by the T-1000. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines then Retcons his T2 age to thirteen. The problem is that he wouldn't turn thirteen until six months after the bombs supposedly fell in Kyle Reese's timeline. Additionally, during T3, John tells the T-850 that the destruction of the Cyberdyne lab was "10 years ago". T3 takes place in 2004 and as mentioned above, the events of T2 take place in 1995, making it more like 9 years.
  • In the second movie (set in 1995), Dr. Silberman explicitly refers to Sarah as 29 years old. In T3, the "gravesite" indicates that she was born in 1959, which would have made her 36 in that year, and 24 or 25 in the first movie, where she is stated to be eighteen.
  • Kyle Reese questions a policeman at the beginning of the first film about the date, and gets the response "12th! May! Thursday!" However, that date in 1984 was a Saturday. It would have been the correct weekday in 1983, which was when the film was originally supposed to be made, but it was postponed due to Arnold Schwarzenegger having other commitments.
• Time Trap: Except for the cavemen, everyone who entered the cave should have still been fairly close to the entrance when the protagonists enter. Because one second in the cave is one year outside, even the Conquistadors would've only been about eight minutes ahead of them and the Hoppers would've only had a forty-seven second head start over the protagonists. Despite this, everyone is deep in the caves by the time anyone else enters. Apparently, everyone just started sprinting in a random direction the moment they got inside.
• Trading Places: The movie takes place from November 1982 to January 1983, identifying January 2, 1983 as the day the Department of Agriculture presents its crop estimates amid trading. However, January 2, 1983 was actually a Sunday, so there'd be no government officiating or trading taking place that day. January 3, 1983, which was a Monday, would have been the time those things would take place.
• Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen: 5 Decepticons go into the water to revive Megatron. When they get down there, they kill one for parts and revive Megatron. When they go up, a sub commander says that six are going up.
• The Wizard of Oz: As pointed out on The Simpsons, the Scarecrow gets the Pythagorean theorem wrong after he gets his token: "The sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side." Correctly, the theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse of a RIGHT triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides.^note If one wants a theorem relating any side of a triangle with the other two sides, one needs the Law of Cosines. Two sides of an isosceles triangle are always equal to one another, so what Scarecrow says is never correct.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • In X-Men, during Xavier's opening narration, he claims that evolution is a slow process that normally takes thousands and thousands of years, but that it "leaps forward" every few hundred millennia...which would actually be far longer than "thousands and thousands of years" since one hundred millennia is one hundred thousand years.
  • In X-Men: First Class there is a scene with Charles Xavier as a child which is set in 1944, while the bulk of the story takes place in 1962, 18 years apart. However, the two actors are credited as playing "Charles Xavier: 12 years" and "Charles Xavier: 24 years", which is only a 12-year difference.

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