Big Fancy House/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Examples of Big Fancy Houses in Film include:

Mrs. Lucas: ...And whose house is that, Franky?
Frank Lucas: That is your house Mama!
Mrs. Lucas: My house! ...and who else's?!

  • Wayne Manor in Batman Begins is one of these, what with the Batcave in the basement/surrounding caves. However, it burns down, forcing Bruce to move to just a Cool House—though considering that it's a penthouse floor with an express elevator to another Batcave, it may qualify as another Big Fancy House.
    • Actually the new Batcave is in a different part of the city, in a run-down industrial district, and you need to take a car to get there from Bruce's penthouse, but there is a hidden room in the apartment which contains a spare batsuit and equipment.
  • The mansion in Eyes Wide Shut that Bill bluffs his way into once he gets the password from a friend. Of course, the fact that it's gigantic isn't as impressive as the Black Mass-esque ceremony culminating with an orgy in every single room.
  • Michael Douglas's character in The Game has a palatial residence that he presumably inherited from his father, and he is also fabulously wealthy. Apart from his servants, he lives there alone.
  • Jodie Foster's character in Panic Room buys a big, brownstone rowhome in Manhattan for her daughter and herself while she goes to study at Columbia. It's a bit of a spooky place, large for two people, and featuring the title safe room. The real estate agent seems curious about how she expects to afford it and it's revealed that she was formerly married to the chairman of a pharmaceutical company.
  • In A Good Year, the aggressive London stockbroker Max Skinner inherits a beautiful vineyard-estate in Provence from his uncle. Acting on his normal instincts, he prepares to sell the place and make a pretty penny but eventually falls in love and gives up his old lifestyle in favor of a quieter life in France.
  • The title country estate of Sir William McCordle in Gosford Park.
  • The title mansion of Brideshead Revisited.
  • Croft Manor in the film adaptations of the video game franchise. 87 rooms. Eighty. Seven. And a trailer out front for Bryce.
  • The mansion of The Haunting. The massive sets were appropriately housed in the hanger for the Spruce Goose, the largest wooden airplane ever built.
  • Tony Stark's pad. If this doesn't count, this whole page is a lie.
  • Xanadu from Citizen Kane.
    • Possibly a deconstruction. Xanadu was too big, and it's massive halls too empty. It was symbolic of Kane himself, oppulent and garish, but devoid of anything that actually mattered.
  • The Corleone houses in The Godfather. The most luxurious being the one at Lake Tahoe.
    • Also the film producer's California mansion in the first Godfather.
  • Tony Montana's Florida mansion in Scarface.
  • Tara Plantation in Gone with the Wind.
    • Mostly averted in the book, where the house is described as a graciously decorated but somewhat haphazard structure valuable mainly for the farmland it sits on, and important mainly because of the emotional connection the protagonist feels toward it.
    • The house that Scarlett has built in Atlanta when she marries Rhett may count, although Rhett never loses an opportunity to describe how grotesque the place is.
  • The plantation in Song of the South.
  • Adam Kesher has one of these in Mulholland Drive—a road famous for its Big Fancy Houses.
  • Ilam, home of the Hulmes, in Heavenly Creatures.
  • Mr. Brooks has one, complete with his own pottery studio/hidden serial killer equipment closets.
  • The mansion of Bill Murray in Zombieland.
  • In The Matrix Reloaded, the Merovingian lives in one of these. In addition to the "usual" lavishly decorated hallways, Wall of Weapons, and prison located behind a secret bookcase, it also has doors which lead directly into the City as well as a private garage. Noteworthy here because the house is actually located 500 miles away from the city in the mountains (open the doors normally and you go outside into the mountain area, open them with a special key and you enter the city.)
  • John has such a house in Knowing, a huge, rambling, half-ruined place that he was fixing up. He stopped when his wife died.
  • The Pottsdorf palace in The Great Race.

Back to Big Fancy House