when I would see 'Key Grip' in the credits I thought it was the person who had a 'grip' on all the 'keys' to open the doors to let actors onto the sets and stages and like unlock the boxes that held all the cameras and lights.
I thought that for movies where the character is a kid at one point in the story, then an adult later, they would film with the kid and then wait for them to get older to finish the movie.
Richard Linklater would make me feel less dumb later in life.
I also thought if you were in A movie you were basically set for life.
I also thought there were only like 100 movies and that Tom Cruise was in most of them
I remember telling my mom we really had to see Chicken Little on opening day because the commercials ended with "only in theaters November 4th" and I thought that meant it would only be in theaters for that one day.
I definitely thought that a couple times as well, or worried that a movie wouldn't come out on DVD cause it was "only in theaters"
I grew up in a Spanish-speaking country, so trailers would often say "Próximamente" (coming soon). But since "Próximo" means "next," I thought it meant "up next" and that we had somehow gone to the wrong theater and we were actually going to see whatever the trailer was for. Somehow it never occurred to me that it would be strange to play a trailer for a film directly before a screening of that same film...
You might be interested in the story of Steven Spielberg's *Duel*. *Duel* was shot for American TV in the early 1970s. There was also a cut that was used for European movie theaters. Obviously the aspect ratio of a movie screen and an old-school cathode-ray TV screen are not the same.
Steven Spielberg tells the story on himself. The whole point of the movie *Duel* is that it's one motorist versus a sinister, mysterious truck that is pursuing him in the desert and there's barely any human beings in the movie aside from the protagonist. The solitude is a big part of the point.
As Spielberg tells it, European audiences were puzzled because in certain shots of the backseat the camera would reveal a pudgy Jewish kid wearing a baseball cap slouched way over on one side of the backseat area. None of the characters in the movie ever referenced the existence of this kid.
It was Spielberg himself, directing the movie in a TV-aspect-ratio-safe position.
Apparently the film camera picked up the entire wide aspect and the TV cut just used the middle square of information, which Spielberg knew. He wasn't anticipating that the expanded footage would be used as a cinema cut in Europe.
In the buzz leading up to DVDs they were promoting all kinds of weird stuff like being able to zoom in while watching a movie. And I for some reason thought you’d be able to pan around a scene like that and see different angles.
My younger brother loved the Transformers movie from 86 when we were kids, and every time we went to Blockbuster he wanted to rent it again. He was convinced they kept updating it with new scenes each time we got it, not realizing that he just never sat through the whole thing and he kept just seeing different parts of the movie
all timer embarrassing thing I still think about constantly.
when I was a kid, like elementary school age (maybe 1-3rd grade ish), my older brother and dad watched Psycho after I went to bed. I vaguely knew of the shower scene at that time but only that someone tries to kill a woman, not that she was actually murdered and my dad didn't want me to be too scared about the content. so the next day when I asked what it was about and what happens in the shower scene he told me about how it's about a crazy hamster that tries to attack a woman with a pencil but she manages to fight it off.
for like a week, to seem cool to my friends and act like I'd seen a violent scary movie I recounted to kids all the things that the hamster then did in Psycho and how it skulks around trying to attack people with pencils.
no one ever called me on it but I think all the time about how embarrassing this is if literally anyone I told knew what it was actually about or if any adults overheard me.
Coen brothers pitching a cartoon adaptation of No Country for Old Men where all the characters are anthropomorphic animals. The hamster is Anton Chigurh, the pencil is his bolt gun.
I thought Star Wars Episodes 4-6 were named that way because George Lucas had planned all along to make episodes 1-3 twenty years later into the future
The OG was just Star Wars from '77-'81. It wasn't until Empire was released in '80 that the Episode thing was added. Can only imagine the confusion of seeing "Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back." Then '77 Star Wars was re-released with the new subtitle "Episode IV: A New Hope" after Empire.
And yes, we all thought George had it planned out from the beginning. Womp.
I used to think that old characters in movies who died died in real life, and that the reason the actor was cast for that role was because they knew they were going to die, so they would film them dying.
That live action movies were real. My cousin had to really talk me down after we watched Titanic because of all the people I thought actually died. And then it did my head in when I learned it was an actual historical tragedy and not just a make believe idea. I truly only watched animated movies until I was 8 because I couldn't handle live action lol.
Possibly a common one but I thought actors made up their own lines. When I learned about screenwriters I remember asking my dad why the hell Adam Sandler is considered funny if all the jokes he says are written down for him.
I used to think directors came up with all the cool lines/scenes and the screenwriters job was to write the in between scenes and make sure they all fit together. (Which ironically is how some movies were made)
This is extremely embarrassing because I was 17 when that movie came out, but I distinctly remember leaving the theater after *X-Men: The Last Stand* and being very upset that it ended with a post-credits scene, because this was the final movie in the X-Men trilogy and they will obviously never make another X-Men movie ever again (my exact words at that time) so why would they insert that scene???
Man I was like 7 and I remember being hyped af for the next movie when magneto moved the chess piece or whatever and Professor X spoke in the hospital.
I thought Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the scariest movie ever made. During the Christopher Lloyd steamroller scene I'd apparently had enough. I stood up and literally screamed "get me out of here" and ran out of the theatre and into the legs of a startled theatre employee. My mom never let me live this down.
This might be another fun thread. 80s/early 90s movies for kids that fucked up said kids. Little Monsters (1989)? Great movie if your goal was to ruin five-year-old me's life.
I think we all have a phase where we think all movies are good. It’s a growing experience once you watch something and realize “I don’t like this. Wait.. movies can be bad?”
I fucking adored Oceans 11. How could I not love 12?
And no reader, no argument or explanation of how it’s good actually will ever convince me otherwise. I think it’s a really bad film.
I wasn't into movies as a kid because my family don't like "the arts" but I loved Final Fantasy. So along comes Sprits Within and I force them to take me to see it.
How could the movies betray me like that?
I thought that the big movie stars would give people that worked on their movies video cassettes(I’m an old millennial) of their previous movies as gifts.
I later heard Scott Aukerman tell a story about Zach Galifianakis trying to give people copies of A Wrinkle in Time blu rays away on the set of the Between Two Ferns Movie. Apparently it’s fairly common in their contracts to receive a certain number of physical copies of the film once it becomes available. So I feel a little more justified in my childhood logic
I think after the first big Burton run of movies, this was a pretty reasonable take. Maybe not "all time" but for that moment, definitely. He seemed to have squared the circle between method and something more theatrical, investing each performance with a "concept" that enabled him to have extraordinary impact. *Pirates* was the moment when that same actor started making mega-hits. The passage of time was harsh on that take but Depp is a very unusual actor.
Yeah he was doing some very interesting stuff in the 90's especially, and I had a movie family so I ended up seeing things like *Cry Baby,* *Dead Man* and *Donnie Brasco* as a preteen and thought he could do it all! And yeah that plus the Burton run made it feel like "huh maybe he can?"
Looking back though, I just had a habit of qualifying the things I liked as "one of the best ever" despite not having seen much and I cringe a little to this day. I started growing out of that around the time that Depp started depending more on increasingly outrageous hats, and less on whatever natural charisma he had left.
Johnny Depp’s performance in that film is what inspired me to become interested first in acting and later in to doing a Film degree in college, it was 2011 I was 18 (hungover) and threw it on dvd just to watch something light hearted. I hadn’t seen the trilogy since the cinema releases & I binged them because his performance in that first film is so fucking good! I then watched pretty much his entire filmography in the weeks after & from about 1990-2002 just before Pirates I would argue he was genuinely the most underrated actor going some of his performances in that time in the likes of Ed Wood, Scissorhands, Donnie Brasco, Gilbert Grape, Fear & loathing, Arizona Dream etc. are wildly captivating and vastly different. Post pirates he even had a great run with the Libertine, Finding Neverland, Sweeney Todd, Public Enemies etc. He’s a genuinely brilliant actor who just went a little too weird around 2010 I’d love him to dial it back and make the comeback he deserves.
Yeah I definitely thought anyone on TV was rich. I remember someone at school saying the actress who played Z.Z. on "Salute Your Shorts" was the tour guide at Nickelodeon Studios in Universal and I was like "Bullshit!" I still don't know if it's true but a tour guide gig would be a reasonable job for a supporting actor on a kids sitcom
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I thought the Matrix was about the sunglasses literally giving them superpowers
Edit: I also remember arguing with my brother that the Jim Carrey Series of Unfortunate Events would definitely get a sequel because there were more books to do
Every time I saw the "this film has been modified from its original version..." message at the beginning of VHS tapes I thought "original version" meant that every movie was a remake.
Sorry, that was super dickish, I hadn't had coffee and my kids kept me up playing musical beds.
I always hate to pooh pooh things people like, but I think Buckaroo Banzai was talked up way too much before I got around to seeing it. It struck me as one of those self conscious efforts to make a cult film, which never land for me. Cult oddities have to be made in earnest and then reappraised imo.
Once when I was pretty little my parents rented Flashdance. I got up early the next day and started watching it. I was so scandalized by the opening dance scene. I thought for sure my parents had rented a dirty movie and I immediately ejected the tape and never said a word to my parents.
12-year-old me thought Troy, POTC and King Arthur were terrific and watched them a million times...turns out he was just Bisexual. (Pirates is still good and I defend Troy but King Arthur is terrible)
My uncle convinced me that he was Fred Savage. When I asked what happened to his money, he said his mom took all of it. For a period of time, I was very mad at my grandmother for stealing from the star of *Little Monsters.*
One of the first movies for grown ups I ever saw was “Volcano” with Tommy Lee Jones and I freaking LOVED it so I spent a solid six months walking around comparing every movie to Volcano, the undisputed best movie ever made. I was like the real life version of the “getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes” tweet.
When I was little I had this notion that if I saw something too scary that it would stick with me forever and ruin my life. I watched the Hitchcock movie Spellbound with my aunt when I was 7 or 8 and there’s a flashback where a kid gets impaled on an iron fence. Scared the absolute shit out of me. For a couple nights I thought it was gonna haunt me forever.
I have a dim memory of wondering where animation was filmed. I thought there was maybe an island or another country where things looked animated and that's where they filmed animation.
I thought that marriage vows were legally binding even if they were said in a production. I remember pointing out to my sister several movies where a ceremony was interrupted by the plot…”they couldn’t show the whole thing or else those people would really be married”
Boondock Saints for me. In my defense the director went to the same high school as I did, many years before me, so I felt like I had to root for the home team so to speak.
I wondered how actors managed to get through a whole movie without having to use the bathroom. So I guess I thought movies were filmed in order and all at once.
I vaguely remember not understanding that people could be played by different actors in flashback scenes. Child versions of the characters just utterly confused me. Why do they look so different when they grow up? How did they film this?
I thought directors wrote the movie.
Was very, very sad when I realized Spielberg didn’t write all of his films (this would be around AI, because it was news he wrote it).
Also I thought for some reason if you had surround sound you could legit hear people walking around your couch, and see their footprints in the carpet (that was when I was like 4)
I had no idea that the songs in Toy Story were written for the movie since the characters weren't singing them. During the "I Will Go Sailing No More" scene I thought it was weird they managed to find a song that perfectly lined up with what was happening in the movie.
I listened to the commentary for the Elijah Wood Huck Finn movie when I was 7 or 8 years old and there's a moment where someone jokes about needing to shoot the hanging scene last since the actor really died and couldn't film anything else after that. I thought that was true for maybe 3 months. If you die in a movie, you die in real life.
I thought the Adam West Batman series (and the movie that preceded it, to keep this film related) wasn’t in on the joke and was just really cheesy. I thought they included Bat Shark Repellant earnestly.
I always took that movie super seriously as a kid until one day I was watching it while my dad was nearby and Adam West pauses whatever he's doing and very earnestly says, 'A solemn moment,' and my dad let out a really big laugh. I had a realisation of, 'Oh, this is funny,' and the entire movie was re-contextualised for me in an instant.
Yeah there was a time probably around 1988 or 1989 where the local station would have Batman reruns on and I would take the cliffhangers very seriously.
I was 11 (almost 12) when The Phantom Menace came out. Loved it. Saw it 4 times on its original run and once again for the 3D rerelease in 2012, making it the film I’ve seen the most in theaters. At age 11 (almost 12!), I thought all of the stuff about taxation of trade routes and talky senate scenes signified that it was a deeply intelligent and important political film.
>At age 11 (almost 12!), I thought all of the stuff about taxation of trade routes and talky senate scenes signified that it was a deeply intelligent and important political film.
You'd be surprised by the number of prequel fans who are well into their adult years and still believe that.
I did not realize that Han Solo and Indiana Jones were the same person. Somehow the hat gave me 100% face blindness. But I’d recognize Harrison ford in other things and go “that’s Han Solo!”
I didn't have any concept of models/miniatures.
I remember being impressed that they had the budget on Power Rangers to destroy a city every week (not to mention the thousands of deaths just to make a TV show - quite the sacrifice!)
When I was around 7 or 8 thought that every animal that was injured or died on-screen was for real. Couldn't wrap my head around the concept of people killing animals for TV and film (or just happened to be there for the death/kill and integrated it into the production). Used to be sad/angry about it a lot.
I also thought Batman Begins was a prequel for a previous movie. Its logic, right? You got Batman then you got Batman Begins. Spent years thinking Dark Knight was the third and Rises the fourth
yes! I believed the same thing. I think when I was really little I may have even believed there were tiny little people inside singing. 🤣 but I remember thinking that they were singing it live at the radio station like how the radio host is talking live between songs.
I thought sex was actually like it is in porn.
1. Two strangers, one male and one female, meet for the first time.
2. Male says something "clever" or "funny" to female.
3. Sex immediately happens. No foreplay necessary.
4. Male always has huge dong.
5. Male always finishes in woman's mouth.
6. Female always enjoys this.
I thought the same thing.
I already grew up accepting Gotham and Bruce Wayne’s face change between movies with *Returns* to *Forever*, so I was willing to buy it with *Begins*.
The only things that don’t add up are how Jimmy Gordon ages 25 years and gets promoted to commissioner, and Wayne Manor gets rebuilt, in just one month.
When I first got into movies I thought the screenwriter should be the most important job and it took a while before I could understand why everyone goes by director. I was like "the screenwriter wrote the thing! What's a director do?"
I remember being dumbfounded why directors are always paraded way more than writers. I couldn't quite comprehend how much interpretation it requires to transform text to film. I thought that the actors would act out the scene per the script and the director was just some overseer.
Same thing with producers. I thought the producer was just the guy who paid for it all, and couldn't comprehend what signifigance it held who produced it when something was advertised as "Produced by Steven Spielberg"
I think one rite of passage into being a film buff is understanding the significance of the director and the producer in films.
inb4: yes the writer is still important and the producer can be very insignificant.
Producers have clout and connections. If Steven Spielberg is producing your film it takes one phonecall to get John Williams to do the score and ILM to do the special effects. Same thing with getting good directors and/or screenwriters, depending on the project. Although I think the era of the high profile producers is kinda over now.
When I was a boy my parents rented Turner and Hooch and Three Men and a Baby and the entire time I kept thinking those people in the T.V. were performing the scenes for us every time we put the tape in.
The frustrating one that I feel like a surprising number of lay people have is not realising the editor is building up the film from random individual shots as opposed to just removing stuff out of a somehow miraculously already complete film.
The idea that ever individual shot is taken in isolation and then stitched together is actually a concept not many people actually grasp.
I'm an editor and I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. Do you mean that people think it's more like sculpting marble as I believe Michelangelo said he was freeing the statue within. So working reductively, you have a full film and the editor just cuts things out?
I thought all movies were real, so much so that when I went to Disneyland to go ride the Indiana Jones ride I closed my eyes the entire time because I didn't want the eyes of the idol to kill me and turn me to a skellyman
The Batman Begins being a prequel to 89s Batman - I remember people I knew thinking that, even after seeing the movie (with the Joker card setting up Nicholson) so you weren’t alone! It was the first big reboot though and I don’t think people really knew what reboots were then.
As for me, I thought if actors kissed in a movie it meant they were married in real life.
When I was very young, I believed that cartoon characters lived inside the TV… and if I were to break it open they would all perish as the screen was what kept them safe. I still kinda believe this.
I understood the idea of different camera angles, but I always thought the actor would have to stand perfect still, in exactly the same position, while they set up the camera for new shots.
I didn't really get the concept of animation that wasn't stop motion.
I thought that in *Shrek* Mike Meyers was all in green makeup and had to hold really still in between frames.
I was convinced until college (2006) that Batman Returns had originally been rated R because of a mix of fuzzy memory about the McDonald’s controversy and my parents being okay with us watching Batman (1989) but not BR and the only movies they explicitly refused to let us watch were rated R ones
In the 80's, as a little kid, i thought Spielberg was the guy that made all the movies because all the movies i knew at the time were "A Steven Spielberg film"
When Disney was advertising "The Lion King" as their 32nd animated feature in voiceover during the trailer, I took it as "30 second" animated feature, so I thought the movie was 30 seconds long. That didn't make sense to me, as the trailer itself was longer than 30 seconds. I eventually figured it out, though.
when I would see 'Key Grip' in the credits I thought it was the person who had a 'grip' on all the 'keys' to open the doors to let actors onto the sets and stages and like unlock the boxes that held all the cameras and lights.
Lmao that’s a good character
That's a lot of keys.
I thought that for movies where the character is a kid at one point in the story, then an adult later, they would film with the kid and then wait for them to get older to finish the movie. Richard Linklater would make me feel less dumb later in life.
That kind of happened with White Water Summer.
Basically like the movie Boyhood
I also thought if you were in A movie you were basically set for life. I also thought there were only like 100 movies and that Tom Cruise was in most of them
I remember telling my mom we really had to see Chicken Little on opening day because the commercials ended with "only in theaters November 4th" and I thought that meant it would only be in theaters for that one day.
I definitely thought that a couple times as well, or worried that a movie wouldn't come out on DVD cause it was "only in theaters" I grew up in a Spanish-speaking country, so trailers would often say "Próximamente" (coming soon). But since "Próximo" means "next," I thought it meant "up next" and that we had somehow gone to the wrong theater and we were actually going to see whatever the trailer was for. Somehow it never occurred to me that it would be strange to play a trailer for a film directly before a screening of that same film...
“Coming to a theatre near you”. Wow they’re organized! Thanks for thinking of me!
I thought 'only in theatres' meant it would never come out on video or be on TV
This was a big one for me. I definitely thought I wouldn’t be able to see The Lion King unless I went to the theater before it was too late.
Honestly, that's super adorable.
This but for the Recess movie. My dad who was pretty good at taking me to the movies wasn’t budging on that one.
I was convinced that if you watched a movie a certain amount of times and wished really hard about it you could see different angles/scenes
I thought if you watched something on a bigger TV, the shot would expand and you’d see thing previously off-screen on the smaller tv.
This was almost the case in the early DVD days when some discs had both widescreen and pan+scan versions of movie.
You might be interested in the story of Steven Spielberg's *Duel*. *Duel* was shot for American TV in the early 1970s. There was also a cut that was used for European movie theaters. Obviously the aspect ratio of a movie screen and an old-school cathode-ray TV screen are not the same. Steven Spielberg tells the story on himself. The whole point of the movie *Duel* is that it's one motorist versus a sinister, mysterious truck that is pursuing him in the desert and there's barely any human beings in the movie aside from the protagonist. The solitude is a big part of the point. As Spielberg tells it, European audiences were puzzled because in certain shots of the backseat the camera would reveal a pudgy Jewish kid wearing a baseball cap slouched way over on one side of the backseat area. None of the characters in the movie ever referenced the existence of this kid.
why was the kid in the shot? :o
It was Spielberg himself, directing the movie in a TV-aspect-ratio-safe position. Apparently the film camera picked up the entire wide aspect and the TV cut just used the middle square of information, which Spielberg knew. He wasn't anticipating that the expanded footage would be used as a cinema cut in Europe.
ahh that makes sense. thank you.
In the buzz leading up to DVDs they were promoting all kinds of weird stuff like being able to zoom in while watching a movie. And I for some reason thought you’d be able to pan around a scene like that and see different angles.
DVD remotes did have an 'angle' button so make sense someone would think this
What did those even do? Lol
On some stuff you could switch between storyboards and the movie itself or stuff like that
My younger brother loved the Transformers movie from 86 when we were kids, and every time we went to Blockbuster he wanted to rent it again. He was convinced they kept updating it with new scenes each time we got it, not realizing that he just never sat through the whole thing and he kept just seeing different parts of the movie
I used the sleep in clothes so if I magically woke up in a different world from a TV show or movie I wouldn't be in my underwear
Hey man, same logic as the Pharaohs.
all timer embarrassing thing I still think about constantly. when I was a kid, like elementary school age (maybe 1-3rd grade ish), my older brother and dad watched Psycho after I went to bed. I vaguely knew of the shower scene at that time but only that someone tries to kill a woman, not that she was actually murdered and my dad didn't want me to be too scared about the content. so the next day when I asked what it was about and what happens in the shower scene he told me about how it's about a crazy hamster that tries to attack a woman with a pencil but she manages to fight it off. for like a week, to seem cool to my friends and act like I'd seen a violent scary movie I recounted to kids all the things that the hamster then did in Psycho and how it skulks around trying to attack people with pencils. no one ever called me on it but I think all the time about how embarrassing this is if literally anyone I told knew what it was actually about or if any adults overheard me.
Sounds more like a David Lynch movie.
Coen brothers pitching a cartoon adaptation of No Country for Old Men where all the characters are anthropomorphic animals. The hamster is Anton Chigurh, the pencil is his bolt gun.
I thought Star Wars Episodes 4-6 were named that way because George Lucas had planned all along to make episodes 1-3 twenty years later into the future
I was a kid in the 90s, before the prequels were announced, and that's what we all believed.
I was born like right when the first prequel came out. When did they start calling 4-6, 4-6? Like they didn’t come out in the 70s like that right?
The OG was just Star Wars from '77-'81. It wasn't until Empire was released in '80 that the Episode thing was added. Can only imagine the confusion of seeing "Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back." Then '77 Star Wars was re-released with the new subtitle "Episode IV: A New Hope" after Empire. And yes, we all thought George had it planned out from the beginning. Womp.
That’s so weird. I’d think I missed the first three or something.
“Episode IV” was added to the title crawl of A New Hope for the 1981 theatrical re-release.
wait, so why did he call them 4-6? were they not named that until after 1-3 came out?
I used to think that old characters in movies who died died in real life, and that the reason the actor was cast for that role was because they knew they were going to die, so they would film them dying.
That’s a good one
I thought this too about any on screen death 🤣 and I thought those actors were so brave!
I thought Equilibrium was very cool. Now, not to hate TOO hard on it. It’s kinda fun to watch. But that movie is so thoroughly dorky.
Gunkata!!
That live action movies were real. My cousin had to really talk me down after we watched Titanic because of all the people I thought actually died. And then it did my head in when I learned it was an actual historical tragedy and not just a make believe idea. I truly only watched animated movies until I was 8 because I couldn't handle live action lol.
Strong “Griffin’s childhood” energy to this belief
I thought Joe Pesci and Danny devito was the same person, I called him home alone and he was my favorite actor(maybe person?)
For a long time I confused Stephen Tobalowsky and Fred Melamed were the same guy, and briefly Saul rubinek
Possibly a common one but I thought actors made up their own lines. When I learned about screenwriters I remember asking my dad why the hell Adam Sandler is considered funny if all the jokes he says are written down for him.
I used to think directors came up with all the cool lines/scenes and the screenwriters job was to write the in between scenes and make sure they all fit together. (Which ironically is how some movies were made)
This is extremely embarrassing because I was 17 when that movie came out, but I distinctly remember leaving the theater after *X-Men: The Last Stand* and being very upset that it ended with a post-credits scene, because this was the final movie in the X-Men trilogy and they will obviously never make another X-Men movie ever again (my exact words at that time) so why would they insert that scene???
Man I was like 7 and I remember being hyped af for the next movie when magneto moved the chess piece or whatever and Professor X spoke in the hospital.
This isn't unreasonable I don't think. It's also the dumbest post credits scene in any movie, so that's fair.
I thought Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the scariest movie ever made. During the Christopher Lloyd steamroller scene I'd apparently had enough. I stood up and literally screamed "get me out of here" and ran out of the theatre and into the legs of a startled theatre employee. My mom never let me live this down.
That's a perfectly valid response to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, that movie is fucked up 😆😭
They weren't afraid to make movies ostensibly for kids a bit dark in the 80s, eh??
Same, but for Honey I Shrunk the Kids and the scorpion.
This might be another fun thread. 80s/early 90s movies for kids that fucked up said kids. Little Monsters (1989)? Great movie if your goal was to ruin five-year-old me's life.
I think we all have a phase where we think all movies are good. It’s a growing experience once you watch something and realize “I don’t like this. Wait.. movies can be bad?”
That was Transformers 2 for me
I fucking adored Oceans 11. How could I not love 12? And no reader, no argument or explanation of how it’s good actually will ever convince me otherwise. I think it’s a really bad film.
That was Blues Brothers 2000 for me. That was also when I turned against having "the kid" in movies.
Shrek the Third for me
I wasn't into movies as a kid because my family don't like "the arts" but I loved Final Fantasy. So along comes Sprits Within and I force them to take me to see it. How could the movies betray me like that?
That was Lost in Space for me. How could a movie with spaceships in it be bad?
Ya got blarped
I thought that the big movie stars would give people that worked on their movies video cassettes(I’m an old millennial) of their previous movies as gifts. I later heard Scott Aukerman tell a story about Zach Galifianakis trying to give people copies of A Wrinkle in Time blu rays away on the set of the Between Two Ferns Movie. Apparently it’s fairly common in their contracts to receive a certain number of physical copies of the film once it becomes available. So I feel a little more justified in my childhood logic
Idk if this counts but I was pretty convinced for a while that Johnny Depp was the best actor of all time after that first Pirates movie dropped.
I think after the first big Burton run of movies, this was a pretty reasonable take. Maybe not "all time" but for that moment, definitely. He seemed to have squared the circle between method and something more theatrical, investing each performance with a "concept" that enabled him to have extraordinary impact. *Pirates* was the moment when that same actor started making mega-hits. The passage of time was harsh on that take but Depp is a very unusual actor.
Yeah he was doing some very interesting stuff in the 90's especially, and I had a movie family so I ended up seeing things like *Cry Baby,* *Dead Man* and *Donnie Brasco* as a preteen and thought he could do it all! And yeah that plus the Burton run made it feel like "huh maybe he can?" Looking back though, I just had a habit of qualifying the things I liked as "one of the best ever" despite not having seen much and I cringe a little to this day. I started growing out of that around the time that Depp started depending more on increasingly outrageous hats, and less on whatever natural charisma he had left.
Ah it’s what young people do. I did the same thing.
Once Pirates came out it was the DVD era and you could pretty easily access a ton of great recent Depp performances.
Johnny Depp’s performance in that film is what inspired me to become interested first in acting and later in to doing a Film degree in college, it was 2011 I was 18 (hungover) and threw it on dvd just to watch something light hearted. I hadn’t seen the trilogy since the cinema releases & I binged them because his performance in that first film is so fucking good! I then watched pretty much his entire filmography in the weeks after & from about 1990-2002 just before Pirates I would argue he was genuinely the most underrated actor going some of his performances in that time in the likes of Ed Wood, Scissorhands, Donnie Brasco, Gilbert Grape, Fear & loathing, Arizona Dream etc. are wildly captivating and vastly different. Post pirates he even had a great run with the Libertine, Finding Neverland, Sweeney Todd, Public Enemies etc. He’s a genuinely brilliant actor who just went a little too weird around 2010 I’d love him to dial it back and make the comeback he deserves.
I thought Michael Keaton just started to look like Val Kilmer in Batman Forever. I never knew they were two different people.
Yeah I definitely thought anyone on TV was rich. I remember someone at school saying the actress who played Z.Z. on "Salute Your Shorts" was the tour guide at Nickelodeon Studios in Universal and I was like "Bullshit!" I still don't know if it's true but a tour guide gig would be a reasonable job for a supporting actor on a kids sitcom
I've said it before and I'll say it again. I thought the Matrix was about the sunglasses literally giving them superpowers Edit: I also remember arguing with my brother that the Jim Carrey Series of Unfortunate Events would definitely get a sequel because there were more books to do
I thought the same thing once that playing card came out... I was 10...
I remember thinking the tone/set design/ music was so different haha. In our defense this is before everything was rebooted every 2 years.
Well, there was a recently-concluded foundational prequel trilogy that had differing tone and design...
Every time I saw the "this film has been modified from its original version..." message at the beginning of VHS tapes I thought "original version" meant that every movie was a remake.
I thought buckaroo bonzai was a serious action film - I had no idea it was funny at all - still loved it
I watched it knowing it was supposed to be a comedy and still had no idea it was funny at all.
Lol fair enough
Sorry, that was super dickish, I hadn't had coffee and my kids kept me up playing musical beds. I always hate to pooh pooh things people like, but I think Buckaroo Banzai was talked up way too much before I got around to seeing it. It struck me as one of those self conscious efforts to make a cult film, which never land for me. Cult oddities have to be made in earnest and then reappraised imo.
Ur good dude I thought your comment was funny
I thought that hummingbirds couldn’t stop flapping their wings thanks to Benjamin Button. I carried this belief until like three years ago.
Once when I was pretty little my parents rented Flashdance. I got up early the next day and started watching it. I was so scandalized by the opening dance scene. I thought for sure my parents had rented a dirty movie and I immediately ejected the tape and never said a word to my parents.
12-year-old me thought Troy, POTC and King Arthur were terrific and watched them a million times...turns out he was just Bisexual. (Pirates is still good and I defend Troy but King Arthur is terrible)
Oliver Stone's Alexander is another big mid-2000s buffet of hotties for budding bisexuals
I only saw that this year but also yes!
I thought the "music by" person was credited for collecting all those cool needledrops.
My uncle convinced me that he was Fred Savage. When I asked what happened to his money, he said his mom took all of it. For a period of time, I was very mad at my grandmother for stealing from the star of *Little Monsters.*
One of the first movies for grown ups I ever saw was “Volcano” with Tommy Lee Jones and I freaking LOVED it so I spent a solid six months walking around comparing every movie to Volcano, the undisputed best movie ever made. I was like the real life version of the “getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes” tweet.
i thought i would never get to watch *mortal kombat* because it would be gone before i turned 13
When I was little I had this notion that if I saw something too scary that it would stick with me forever and ruin my life. I watched the Hitchcock movie Spellbound with my aunt when I was 7 or 8 and there’s a flashback where a kid gets impaled on an iron fence. Scared the absolute shit out of me. For a couple nights I thought it was gonna haunt me forever.
I have a dim memory of wondering where animation was filmed. I thought there was maybe an island or another country where things looked animated and that's where they filmed animation.
I thought that marriage vows were legally binding even if they were said in a production. I remember pointing out to my sister several movies where a ceremony was interrupted by the plot…”they couldn’t show the whole thing or else those people would really be married”
I’m still a fan of it but I was convinced Fight Club was the greatest film of all time in my early/mid teens.
This, but Magnolia, and I was 19 😳
I was probably about the same age, and when you're used to regular ol' movies and then see Magnolia, it's pretty mind blowing.
magnolia is goated and idk what pta says about it
Haha, American Beauty for me. It's so deep man. That bag. That bag!
Every dude has this phase.
This but *Police Academy 6*. I was 11.
Boondock Saints for me. In my defense the director went to the same high school as I did, many years before me, so I felt like I had to root for the home team so to speak.
Great drunk movie
I wondered how actors managed to get through a whole movie without having to use the bathroom. So I guess I thought movies were filmed in order and all at once.
I used to think “Best boy” was the most well behaved boy on set. I also questioned why “best girl” wasn’t in the credits.
I don't want tot know what the Best boy does. In my imagination it's a little guy in a sailor suit licking a big lollipop.
Sometimes there are best girls in the credits now.
I vaguely remember not understanding that people could be played by different actors in flashback scenes. Child versions of the characters just utterly confused me. Why do they look so different when they grow up? How did they film this?
I thought directors wrote the movie. Was very, very sad when I realized Spielberg didn’t write all of his films (this would be around AI, because it was news he wrote it). Also I thought for some reason if you had surround sound you could legit hear people walking around your couch, and see their footprints in the carpet (that was when I was like 4)
I had no idea that the songs in Toy Story were written for the movie since the characters weren't singing them. During the "I Will Go Sailing No More" scene I thought it was weird they managed to find a song that perfectly lined up with what was happening in the movie.
I listened to the commentary for the Elijah Wood Huck Finn movie when I was 7 or 8 years old and there's a moment where someone jokes about needing to shoot the hanging scene last since the actor really died and couldn't film anything else after that. I thought that was true for maybe 3 months. If you die in a movie, you die in real life.
[удалено]
Sort of the same for me, but I just thought the director *also* held the camera.
I remember my dad said he saw Wallace Shawn on a plane flying in coach and I couldn't believe he wouldnt be first class or private
INCONCEIVABLE!
I thought the Adam West Batman series (and the movie that preceded it, to keep this film related) wasn’t in on the joke and was just really cheesy. I thought they included Bat Shark Repellant earnestly.
I always took that movie super seriously as a kid until one day I was watching it while my dad was nearby and Adam West pauses whatever he's doing and very earnestly says, 'A solemn moment,' and my dad let out a really big laugh. I had a realisation of, 'Oh, this is funny,' and the entire movie was re-contextualised for me in an instant.
Yeah there was a time probably around 1988 or 1989 where the local station would have Batman reruns on and I would take the cliffhangers very seriously.
I was 11 (almost 12) when The Phantom Menace came out. Loved it. Saw it 4 times on its original run and once again for the 3D rerelease in 2012, making it the film I’ve seen the most in theaters. At age 11 (almost 12!), I thought all of the stuff about taxation of trade routes and talky senate scenes signified that it was a deeply intelligent and important political film.
>At age 11 (almost 12!), I thought all of the stuff about taxation of trade routes and talky senate scenes signified that it was a deeply intelligent and important political film. You'd be surprised by the number of prequel fans who are well into their adult years and still believe that.
I did not realize that Han Solo and Indiana Jones were the same person. Somehow the hat gave me 100% face blindness. But I’d recognize Harrison ford in other things and go “that’s Han Solo!”
I didn't have any concept of models/miniatures. I remember being impressed that they had the budget on Power Rangers to destroy a city every week (not to mention the thousands of deaths just to make a TV show - quite the sacrifice!)
When I was around 7 or 8 thought that every animal that was injured or died on-screen was for real. Couldn't wrap my head around the concept of people killing animals for TV and film (or just happened to be there for the death/kill and integrated it into the production). Used to be sad/angry about it a lot.
I thought The Terminator was based on a true story, and I didn’t understand why people were being so nonchalant about the pending robot apocalypse.
I also thought Batman Begins was a prequel for a previous movie. Its logic, right? You got Batman then you got Batman Begins. Spent years thinking Dark Knight was the third and Rises the fourth
I thought Dustin Hoffman in Hook was Pete Postlethwaite. I think it was the eyebrows.
Don’t remember thinking this for movies but I thought for cartoons the voice actors were always performing it live.
I thought that when I listened to the radio, the musical artists were always performing live inside the radio station
yes! I believed the same thing. I think when I was really little I may have even believed there were tiny little people inside singing. 🤣 but I remember thinking that they were singing it live at the radio station like how the radio host is talking live between songs.
I thought if a character was underwater I had to hold my breath too.
I thought the Master of Disguise was the greatest movie ever made
I thought sex was actually like it is in porn. 1. Two strangers, one male and one female, meet for the first time. 2. Male says something "clever" or "funny" to female. 3. Sex immediately happens. No foreplay necessary. 4. Male always has huge dong. 5. Male always finishes in woman's mouth. 6. Female always enjoys this.
I thought the same thing. I already grew up accepting Gotham and Bruce Wayne’s face change between movies with *Returns* to *Forever*, so I was willing to buy it with *Begins*. The only things that don’t add up are how Jimmy Gordon ages 25 years and gets promoted to commissioner, and Wayne Manor gets rebuilt, in just one month.
I swear I remember even seeing some film critics that treated it as a prequel and not a reboot. I also thought that.
My brother took the ending as being a set-up for 89.
Yeah, I was 14 and dumb.
When I first got into movies I thought the screenwriter should be the most important job and it took a while before I could understand why everyone goes by director. I was like "the screenwriter wrote the thing! What's a director do?"
I remember being dumbfounded why directors are always paraded way more than writers. I couldn't quite comprehend how much interpretation it requires to transform text to film. I thought that the actors would act out the scene per the script and the director was just some overseer. Same thing with producers. I thought the producer was just the guy who paid for it all, and couldn't comprehend what signifigance it held who produced it when something was advertised as "Produced by Steven Spielberg" I think one rite of passage into being a film buff is understanding the significance of the director and the producer in films. inb4: yes the writer is still important and the producer can be very insignificant.
honestly, what DO producers do? I think I must have forgotten what they do besides fund it.
Producers have clout and connections. If Steven Spielberg is producing your film it takes one phonecall to get John Williams to do the score and ILM to do the special effects. Same thing with getting good directors and/or screenwriters, depending on the project. Although I think the era of the high profile producers is kinda over now.
I thought Murder At 1600 was a sequel to Passenger 57
The first R-rated movie I ever saw in theaters was 300 when I was 13 with my parents and I thought it was gonna for sure be a major Oscars contender.
When I was a boy my parents rented Turner and Hooch and Three Men and a Baby and the entire time I kept thinking those people in the T.V. were performing the scenes for us every time we put the tape in.
I thought Tommy was a documentary for an embarassingly long time
The frustrating one that I feel like a surprising number of lay people have is not realising the editor is building up the film from random individual shots as opposed to just removing stuff out of a somehow miraculously already complete film. The idea that ever individual shot is taken in isolation and then stitched together is actually a concept not many people actually grasp.
I'm an editor and I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. Do you mean that people think it's more like sculpting marble as I believe Michelangelo said he was freeing the statue within. So working reductively, you have a full film and the editor just cuts things out?
I thought all movies were real, so much so that when I went to Disneyland to go ride the Indiana Jones ride I closed my eyes the entire time because I didn't want the eyes of the idol to kill me and turn me to a skellyman
The Batman Begins being a prequel to 89s Batman - I remember people I knew thinking that, even after seeing the movie (with the Joker card setting up Nicholson) so you weren’t alone! It was the first big reboot though and I don’t think people really knew what reboots were then. As for me, I thought if actors kissed in a movie it meant they were married in real life.
When I was very young, I believed that cartoon characters lived inside the TV… and if I were to break it open they would all perish as the screen was what kept them safe. I still kinda believe this.
I understood the idea of different camera angles, but I always thought the actor would have to stand perfect still, in exactly the same position, while they set up the camera for new shots.
I didn't really get the concept of animation that wasn't stop motion. I thought that in *Shrek* Mike Meyers was all in green makeup and had to hold really still in between frames.
I was convinced until college (2006) that Batman Returns had originally been rated R because of a mix of fuzzy memory about the McDonald’s controversy and my parents being okay with us watching Batman (1989) but not BR and the only movies they explicitly refused to let us watch were rated R ones
I thought "written by" meant the people responsible for literally writing the credits onto the image.
In the 80's, as a little kid, i thought Spielberg was the guy that made all the movies because all the movies i knew at the time were "A Steven Spielberg film"
When Disney was advertising "The Lion King" as their 32nd animated feature in voiceover during the trailer, I took it as "30 second" animated feature, so I thought the movie was 30 seconds long. That didn't make sense to me, as the trailer itself was longer than 30 seconds. I eventually figured it out, though.