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Wrong Genre Savvy / Film

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  • Tom in (500) Days of Summer grew up on romantic comedies and confused them with reality (and missed the point of The Graduate, declaring it the perfect love story when it clearly isn't). When he meets Summer, he tries out the Love at First Sight and Fourth-Date Marriage tropes, completely oblivious that she doesn't feel the same way and only treats their relationship as a fling. When he tries the genre-appropriate action of standing up to the guy hitting on his girlfriend and knocking him out with one punch, the guy gets up right away and kicks his ass. Turns out he's in a Deconstruction of a love story.
  • The title character in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is a flamboyant gunfighter straight out of a Hollywood Western. He's an implausibly skilled gunfighter with a cheery demeanor, who only shoots people who are threatening him, and consequently assumes that he's the hero of the story. In truth, he's a borderline-sociopathic Villain Protagonist who appears to enjoy provoking life-and-death conflicts, confident that his Plot Armor will protect him. At the end of his segment, he's unceremoniously shot through the head by an even better gunfighter..
    Buster Scruggs: Shoulda seen this comin'...
  • Barely Lethal: Megan is a girl raised since childhood to be an assassin until she fakes her death to escape and decides to live as a normal high school girl. To prepare herself, she does "research" by watching several high school films like Mean Girls. But since these movies do not reflect real life, she ends up weirding everybody out by trying to follow their tropes. She also automatically assumes the cheerleaders trying to befriend her are all alpha bitches trying to set her up, since that is what happened in Mean Girls, when in reality, their offer was genuine.
  • Big Trouble in Little China is perhaps one of the most celebrated examples of the Plucky Comic Relief thinking he's the star. Jack Burton insists on acting like The Hero in a standard action movie (having taken a steady diet of John Wayne films throughout his life from the way his swagger sounds) when he's actually a Supporting Protagonist at best who's serving as the unofficial sidekick to his friend Wang (the true main hero of the story that Jack thinks is the sidekick) in an Urban Fantasy movie that just happens to feature moments of action. To further emphasize just how out of his depth he actually is, he also spends several scenes having to ask what the hell is going on when everybody else already knows, and he's only able to successfully make meaningful contributions to the plot (such as killing the Big Bad) via sheer luck in times when he's acting on pure reflexive gut instinct.
  • Blood Red Sky: Colonel Drummond thinks he's in a mundane airplane thriller like Non-Stop and dismisses the warnings to the contrary from both the wounded pilot, whom he thinks is the lead hijacker, and the sole escapee. However, he's actually in a vampire horror film. He waits for nightfall to assault the airliner for the supposed cover of darkness, sending his team to their deaths and allowing the vampires to almost escape.
  • Bodies Bodies Bodies:
    • Alice is caught up in the idea that the deaths are related to the game of Bodies Bodies Bodies they were playing, seeming to think that this is a Deadly Game movie along the lines of Truth or Dare (2018). She's quickly shouted down for having faulty evidence (Greg was the first "victim" in Bodies Bodies Bodies, but the second to die in real life), and for still fixating on it after three people have died.
    • More broadly, the main characters think they're in a whodunit Slasher Movie and that one of them is the killer. Bee and Sophia only realize that there was no killer after everybody else was dead, victims of their own paranoia after they turned on each other.
  • Catch Me If You Can: Frank impersonates a doctor and a lawyer, but everything he knows about those professions he learned from Dr. Kildare and Perry Mason respectively. His attempts to use this knowledge in actual medical and legal settings just end up confusing his colleagues.
  • In the little-known Alien ripoff Creature, someone says they remember seeing an old movie (specifically, The Thing from Another World) where they tried to stop the monster from killing everyone with an electrified forcefield. Not too effective against this monster.
  • An exchange from Detroit Rock City, about whether or not some road-tripping stoners should pick up a hitchhiker:
    Jam: It's a teenage girl walking along the side of the highway. They make scary movies that start out like that!
    Trip: But they make porno movies that start out like that too, man!
  • Escape Room (2019): Danny has the most experience with escape rooms so he can anticipate a lot of the gameplay. However, he keeps downplaying the actual danger that the players are put in, reasoning that the company behind the escape rooms would be sued into oblivion if somebody actually died. He's not aware that Minos is an Evil Corp that profits off their deaths. End result, Danny is the first person to die.
  • In Freaky, early on Josh Dormer operates on the assumption that he's basically in a classic slasher film when in reality he's in a modernized, subversive take on the genre. During his and Nyla's first encounter with The Blissfield Butcher (who has actually switched bodies with their friend Millie by this point), he even says this gem of a line.
    Josh: [Whist running from "The Butcher"] You're black, I'm gay, We're so dead!
  • In Fresh, the titular character has a friend named Chucky who he brings into the business of running drugs. Unlike Fresh who is a smart teen, Chucky is a Leeroy Jenkins who's obsessed with the gangster movies, gangsta rap music, and comic books like The Punisher. When the two go on their first delivery job at night, they get jacked by rival drug dealers. Fresh warned Chucky beforehand that if they get jacked to drop the book bags filled with drugs and run. However, Chucky, thinking he's in a gangster film, takes out his gun and starts shooting at the adult dealers — missing with every shot. They kill him and Fresh gets away.
  • In The Frighteners, Agent Milton Dammers has suffered various traumas from his investigations into "supernatural" cases, with the result that he thinks he's an Occult Detective who's tracked down a serial-killing psychic. In reality, he's actually stumbled into a battle between a Not-So-Phony Psychic and a serial-killing ghost, and it's left ambiguous whether any of his supernatural beliefs are remotely valid or just pure delusion. His inability to stretch his mind that one extra inch and accept the mere possibility that the psychic (named Frank) isn't the bad guy results in him interrupting an exorcism ritual the psychic and his partner are performing against the killer ghost at a crucial moment and then subsequently getting his head blown off by Patricia (the killer ghost's mortal lover).
  • The hostages in From Dusk Till Dawn, particularly Scott Fuller, have all the Genre Savvy needed to survive in a heist film or hostage-taking film. Scott even lampshades this by telling his father, "I've seen this on TV, Dad!" Pity for them the bar the Gecko Brothers choose to stop at is full of Fricking Vampire Strippers!
  • Galaxy Quest: A comedy spoof of Star Trek, the actors of a Star Trek-like Show Within a Show meet a group of aliens who have based their society on the broadcasts of that show, believing them to be historical records. Guy, who played a Red Shirt, goes through the events of the film in a depressed and terrified state, convinced that he's doomed to die to prove the seriousness of the situation. He is so obssessed with the sci-fi tropes that he never considers the possibility that tropes common to comedy genres may be in play; eventually, one of his colleagues gives him a pep talk by suggesting he's actually the Plucky Comic Relief instead of the Red Shirt. It works, he lives, and winds up getting a starring role in a revival series.
  • In Knives Out, Fran the housekeeper mentions having watched quite a few Hallmark Channel murder mysteries, and tries to blackmail the killer after engaging in some Amateur Sleuthing. This promptly gets her killed since, unlike the murderers she's familiar with from Hallmark, this culprit doesn't immediately back down after being presented evidence of their crimes. Had her savviness gone just a little deeper, she would have known that trying to blackmail the killer is the fastest way to die in old school Agatha Christie novels.
    • In the film’s sequel, Glass Onion, it only takes Blanc as long as it does to crack the case because he thinks he’s in a more traditional cat-and-mouse type thriller or mystery with a cunning villain behind everything going on similar to what he found himself experiencing in the previous movie. In reality, he’s in a mystery satire of the .01%, and as it ultimately turns out, the simplest and most obvious answer behind the mystery (which Blanc had previously considered far too stupid to be taken seriously as an option) turns out to indeed be the case, with the villain behind it all turning out to be a complete idiot.
  • Last Action Hero: Child hero Danny rides his bicycle head-on to play chicken with the main villain's car, reasoning that it has to work because he's the hero in a non-R rated movie where the kid would never die. Then it dawns on him that he's the Plucky Comic Relief instead, and is vulnerable; at which point he is only just barely able to get out of the way in time.
  • Late Phases: Westmark the gunsmith, when asked why he thinks Ambrose is buying bullets, doesn't seem to consider the werewolf angle, just commenting it reminds him of The Lone Ranger and the image of a Vigilante Man with the symbolism of purity in the clamps.
  • Martin from Love, Simon thinks he’s the Dogged Nice Guy protagonist whose questionable decisions and over-the-top romantic gestures will help him get the girl. Sadly, he’s not the protagonist, but rather the ANtagonist. And He Did Not Get the Girl, either.
  • Maleficent: When Aurora meets Maleficent, she assumes the fae to be her Fairy Godmother because of the books she's read. Nice guess if she were Cinderella, not so much as Sleeping Beauty.
  • Colonel Nathan Hardy in Man of Steel at first acts like he's the protagonist of a Military Science Fiction action story where Kal-El is a Defector from Decadence and the Kryptonian invaders can be defeated with enough firepower from humanity's military. Truth of the matter is, he's a side character in a superhero origin story and the newly-christened Superman is the only one who can fight the invaders off on an equal physical level, so in order for the humans to help him, they're going need to be a lot craftier (in this case, sending them off into the Phantom Zone).
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Avengers: Infinity War: Spider-Man watched the Alien movies, and automatically assumes Mantis is a creature similar to a Xenomorph, frantically begging her not to lay eggs inside of him.
    • Avengers: Endgame:
      • War Machine and Ant-Man cite Back to the Future, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, and other time travel films to reveal their idea of how time travel works, believing they can simply kill Thanos as a baby to undo his crimes. Smart Hulk lectures them that "time travel" actually sends you to a parallel universe, so nothing you do there affects your own universe. The best they can do is borrow the parallel universes' Infinity Stones and use them to undo "The Snap".
      Ant-Man: What, so Back to the Future is a bunch of bullshit!?
      • When War Machine and Nebula arrive at the temple where the Power Stone was originally kept, War Machine stops her from entering, convinced the place is filled with Raiders of the Lost Ark style booby traps. Nebula, being from this part of the universe and knowing there's no such thing, proceeds to just waltz in and grab the stone, to his confusion.
  • MonsterVerse: A lot of people In-Universe (particularly before the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)) such as Admiral Stenz believe that humanity needs to attempt to kill the Titans using manmade super-weaponry in defence of their right to rule the Earth uncontested and to prevent future destruction and casualties to their cities; and Monarch's arguments against that and tendency towards admiring the creatures make most people see them as that one guy in a monster movie who insists on keeping the monster alive For Science at the risk of causing the end of the world through sheer naivete. As it stands, many of the kaiju in this setting are capable of coexisting with humans peacefully if a benevolent Alpha like Godzilla or Kong gets them in line, and they're furthermore allegories for forces of nature — attempts to up technology to a level which can deal serious damage to Titans always goes awry, doing nothing but leaving the world in an even worse situation with the Titans than it was before, and humanity is simply reliant on the Titans to survive in the long-term since many of them act as antibodies maintaining the world's ecosphere. Monarch are in actuality every bit the Titan experts that they're supposed to be per their job because of their pro-Titan arguments. This Wrong Genre Savvy is quite central to the ridiculously-arrogant Apex Cybernetics' Evil Plan to control or exterminate all the Titans in Godzilla vs. Kong, and to the organization's downfall.
  • Nope: Ricky "Jupe" Park thinks he's in an A Boy and His X story where he befriends a bunch of aliens in a flying saucer, due to having survived an attack by an enraged chimp in the past because the animal had a bond with him (it actually didn't, it was mostly luck, making it another example of the trope). He's actually in a monster movie and the 'flying saucer' is in reality a giant animal that eats him without a second thought.
  • Nanny McPhee: Thanks to all the stories they’ve read, the Brown children are certain that any woman their father remarries after their mother’s death will be horrible to them and treat them like servants. Derek even produces a book of stories about children with Wicked Stepmothers as “hard evidence” for the theory. They might be right about their father’s first choice, Mrs. Quickly, but their father ultimately marries the sweet, angelic scullery maid Angeline, who has been kind and motherly to the children long before the wedding, and cares for them so much that she willingly went to live with their cold aunt Adelaide so one of them would not be separated from their family.
  • In The Other Guys:
    • Detectives Gamble and Holtz (our heroes) attempt an Unflinching Walk away from an explosion, but the explosion knocks them down and partially injures and deafens them. They proceed to complain that all the action movies they watched lied to them by making them think you can casually walk away from an explosion to look badass.
    • Danson and Highsmith are a Cowboy Cop pair that have lived their lives like Bad Boys (1995) starring Samuel L. Jackson and Dwayne Johnson. They are insanely reckless yet beloved as super-cops and have seen a lot of action films. They are the Decoy Protagonist pair because they jump off a freaking building with nothing to stop their fall in the apparent belief that something will appear as they do (they even say "aim for the bushes" when there's not even any there). They get splattered all over the pavement and Gamble and Holtz spend a couple of minutes during the funeral scene wondering just what the hell were they thinking.
    • Holtz, apparently thinking in an action movie terms, is convinced that they are chasing drug dealers of some kind (the criminals are white-collar and have no connection to drugs at all).
  • The Package looks at Jeremy's reaction after he accidentally cuts his penis off while high and leaves it behind while he's taken to hospital. As his friends and sister try to get the penis to him, Jeremy starts relying on his belief in tropes from several other genres that don't quite apply to a more grounded comedy. At one point, he believes that a flower slowly dying in his room is a magic clock counting down the time that his friends have to reach him and tries to send messages to Becky using Twin Telepathy.
  • Captain Vidal in Pan's Labyrinth thinks he's the hero of a war film who wants to live up to his father's legacy and be remembered as a great soldier. On the DVD commentary Guillermo del Toro notes that Vidal expects his death at the end to be the kind of emotional climax often seen in similar stories where the hero dies honorably as the music swells up, as he asks for his son to know who he was. He's legitimately shocked when he's unceremoniously executed after being told that his child will never know anything about him.
  • In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Elizabeth Swann somehow does it twice:
    • She spends a good deal of the movie expecting and hoping one of the pirates she runs into would be like the romantic, dashing rogues she reads about in her books, or for them to at least adhere to some honor-among-thieves morality. Over the course of the film she's increasingly disillusioned (Barbossa shirks the code whenever it inconveniences him; the Black Pearl crew want to rape her; Jack Sparrow's a horny, opportunistic drunk; Jack's own crew don't bother to rescue their captain once they get their ship, etc.) until the very end. When Will risks his life to do what's right, she sees he's the kind of heroic ne'er-do-well she'd been hoping to see.
    • When she first meets Barbossa and his crew, she believes they are just normal, mundane pirates that would hold her for ransom if they knew she was the Governor's daughter, so she gives her name as "Elizabeth Turner" and claims to be a maid of the Governor. Unfortunately, these pirates couldn't care less about the Governor or ransom and need a Turner to break the curse, effectively guaranteeing she remains a captive aboard their ship.
      Barbossa: You best start believing in ghost stories, Miss Turner... you're in one!
    • James Norrington, Elizabeth's Hopeless Suitor, is exactly the kind of man who would be the lead in a traditional pirate story (one where the pirates were the bad guys, anyway): a highly successful, improbably decorated young naval officer who's made commodore by the age of 26 and seems to always have a one-liner ready when he apprehends Jack Sparrow (multiple times, actually). Unfortunately for him, the moral rules of this universe are extremely gray, his act of mercy toward Jack and general movement toward taking a more sporting attitude toward the whole thing end up costing him his flagship and his entire crew, and when he shows up in the sequel he's a disgraced, filthy, vengeance-crazed drunk... who still hasn't figured out that bringing the heart of Davy Jones to corrupt suit Cutler Beckett in order to regain even a shadow of his former life isn't the way this world works, either. After failing at being the hero, and realizing he doesn't have it in him to really be a villain of either the backstabbing pirate type or the ruthless pirate-eradicating type, he ends up making a Heroic Sacrifice to save Elizabeth, who has become a pirate captain herself by that point, and her crew.
  • Predator: In a unique twist on the trope, the characters initially prove right at home in the film's first half (which just so happens to be a typical 1980s action flick), only for a sudden Genre Shift in the film's second half to plunge them into a sci-fi slasher horror. At which point, as badass and nigh unstoppable as the film's soldier protagonists are against ordinary hostile human enemies in a regular earth combat scenario, they learn the hard way just how hopelessly out of their depth they are against an alien monster that's come to the area for the sake of Hunting the Most Dangerous Game.
  • The Return of the Living Dead: When confronted with a reanimated cadaver, a group of characters put a pick axe through its brain based on what they know about zombies from seeing Night of the Living Dead (1968). It has no effect.
    Burt: I thought you said if we destroyed the brain, it'd die!
    Frank: It worked in the movie!
    Burt: Well, it ain't workin' now, Frank!
    Fred: You mean the movie lied?
  • Santa's Slay: Lampshaded when Nicholas tries to shine a flashlight in Santa's face, and all it does is annoy him.
    Santa: I'm Santa Claus, not fucking Dracula!
  • Smokey and the Bandit: Frog/Carrie is driving the Bandit's car with him in the passenger seat. They decide to swap places, but find it is pretty much impossible to do while driving. Confused, they point out people do it all the time in movies.
  • Stranger Than Fiction is a unique case, where the main character realizes he's in a story after he starts hearing his own narration. He seeks out help to try to become Genre Savvy, and correctly deduces that in the context of his narrator's story, he's in a tragedy, which is ironically Wrong Genre Savvy as the meta-story (the movie about the story about a man who hears his own narrator, i.e., the movie you're watching) is actually a comedy.
  • The Terminator does this with the LAPD. Traxler and Vukovich are competent investigators who quickly catch on to the T-100's pattern and leak the story to the press to flush out Sarah Connor so they can place her in protective custody. When the cops bring Sarah and Kyle Reese in, they take them to a heavily-occupied precinct for protection while detectives prepare to search for the Terminator. Of course, they aren't dealing with a serial killer but a nearly-indestructible cyborg who makes quick work of the police when he arrives.
  • In This Is the End, Emma Watson is perfectly aware that the apocalypse is happening, but is under the impression that it's a Zombie Apocalypse rather than The Rapture.
  • Most of the college students in Tucker & Dale vs. Evil are under the belief that they're in a Hillbilly Horrors film and act accordingly ("Deliverance" is mentioned by them at one point). Except the hillbillies are our actual heroes; they just happen to suffer from poor communication skills and bad timing. As a result, the students die in various ways thanks to their own stupidity, and one of them is so driven by his hatred that he becomes a serial killer himself. A notable example is when one of the students wants to call the cops with her cell phone and get it all over with, but Chad (the aforementioned crazy fanatic) just smashes her phone and says "they never work in times like these!" (not only did he never check to see if they work before saying that, none of them ever do later).
  • In The Wolfman (2010), psychiatrist Doctor Hoenneger decides to try and treat Lawrence's 'delusion' that he's a werewolf by making Lawrence experience a full moon while surrounded by witnesses, hoping that seeing nothing happen will essentially "shock" Lawrence out of his delusion. This might have been effective and helpful to Lawrence in a psychological thriller about a man who only had mental delusions about lycanthropy, but unfortunately for Hoenneger, Lawrence really is a werewolf, and he proceeds to throw Hoenneger out of a window and tear through a few other doctors before he escapes the lecture hall.
  • Mr. Beauchamp in Unforgiven is a big-city writer who travels with English Bob and later Sheriff Bill Daggett to mine material for his dime novels. He thinks life out west is a classic "white hats vs. black hats" setup. In reality, it's a Crapsack World where everyone is varying degrees of "bastard".

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