Funny Aneurysm Moment/Film

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Cracked.com gives us 7 completely unrealistic movie plots that came true. Such offenders include Office Space, The Shawshank Redemption, Three Kings, and others.
  • In Stardust Memories, Woody has an argument with a girlfriend about him "flirting" with her 14 year old cousin.
    • Even more famous is a fan walking up to Allen, telling him he's his biggest fan, then shooting and killing him. A few months later, Mark David Chapman did the exact same thing to John Lennon.
  • In Logan's Run from 1976, the hero and heroine re-enter the city by diving into the Ft. Worth Water Gardens pool, where eight years later four people drowned.
  • In Manhattan, Woody Allen ends the film by going back to the high school girl he dated at the start of the film. Many years later, Allen started a relationship with his ex-girlfriend Mia Farrow's adopted daughter Soon Yi, whom he had helped raise.
  • An older example of this phenomenon, known only to studio execs for many years, occurs in the movie To Be or Not to Be: After the 1942 death of star Carole Lombard in a plane crash, the studio had to cut out a scene (before the film was released) in which her character remarks, "What can happen on a plane?"
  • Heather Chandler of Heathers asks, "Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?" Tragically, Kimberly Walker, the actress who uttered the line, died of a brain tumor at age 32. Uncomfortably, her character's death and funeral is a huge part of the movie, and her ghost turns up in a dream sequence to complain about the quality of the afterlife.
    • Also, the plot of the movie: High School students murdering each other due to rivalries and popularity. Absurd for 1989, real for Columbine (1999) and Virginia Tech (2007), hence why we're not going to get a remake any time soon.
    • From the same movie, the character Peter Dawson (sort of a nerdy, sycophantic character on the yearbook staff) says, as voice-over, "Dear God, please don't let this happen to me, 'cause I don't think I could handle suicide," while at Heather Chandler's funeral. Jeremy Applegate, the actor who played Dawson, later committed suicide.
  • In Desmond Llewelyn's (Q) last appearance in the James Bond film series, in The World Is Not Enough:

Q: (to Bond, while getting into an elevator platform.) I've always tried to teach you two things. First, never let them see you bleed.
Bond: And the second?
Q: Always have an escape plan. (Elevator lowers Q out of scene.)

    • The scene wasn't written as a sendoff for Llewelyn, but he died shortly after the film's release. Worse still, Desmond L. died in a car crash, and the elevator takes him down in a car as he slowly fades from sight.

      And it gets much, much worse. Shortly before he died, Desmond Llewelyn was asked in an interview about how long he planned to carry on playing Q. His response? "Oh, 'till God decides he wants a new Q, I suppose"...
  • In The Living Daylights, Art Malik plays a Mujahideen warrior who helps out James Bond. Several years later in True Lies, he plays a Middle-Eastern extremist about to detonate a nuke on United States soil. The uncomfortable part is that his character in True Lies could have in effect been the same one as in The Living Daylights, as the Mujahideen was the genesis of the Taliban and was where many future extremists were incubated.
  • Monster In A Box is more poignant and sad as Spalding Gray talks endlessly about his mother's suicide, and his own suicidal tendencies. One particular moments has a chilling subtext now, a previously funny line when trying to do volunteer work with the Suicide Hotline and they tell him he should go into therapy.

Spalding Gray: When the Suicide Hotline says it's time for you to go into therapy, IT'S TIME!

  • A similar effect comes from any movie or TV show set in New York that shows an image of the World Trade Center. For quite a while after 9/11, the WTC was edited out of places it would appear in. See also Too Soon.
    • Appears in the otherwise forgettable and inexplicable Super Mario Brothers movie out of nowhere. The film featured a plot by King Koopa (Dennis Hopper) to merge our dimension with his own (the film has an... interesting take on the games' plot). When the alternate dimensions start combining in New York, the film shows the Twin Towers disintegrating.
    • Escape from New York stated that the only place in New York that a plane could land on in the future (1997, when they still existed) was the roof of the World Trade Center. In the same film, a plane crashes into a building. On purpose. In New York. It had been hijacked by terrorists who were crashing the plane as an act to oppose U.S. policy.
    • AI Artificial Intelligence starts in the near future, where New York is flooded. Among other buildings sticking out of the water are the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center. The end goes into the way far future, showing a frozen-over New York with the Twin Towers as the tallest structures sticking out of the ice sheet. The movie came out before 9/11, but the DVDs came out after. Knowing he would take flak for the decision, Spielberg decided to keep the buildings in.
    • A banned trailer for Spider-Man.
    • The poster for the 1987 movie "The Squeeze". Yes, those are the Twin Towers. Same goes for the poster for Die Hard
    • In Ghostbusters, the containment system is shut down, the trapped ghosts are released throughout New York and see them flying out over Manhattan. During a long-distance shot, they seem to originate from right around the towers. So we have bright lights and ghosts flying out from the WTC. One of the memorials to the Twin Towers has been shining twin spotlights straight up into the sky from Ground Zero once a year.
    • The catastrophe movie Down (AKA The Shaft) takes place in a skyscraper. The characters make an offhanded remark about somebody blowing up WTC and mention Bin Laden in a separate conversation. To top everything off, the movie was released in the summer of 2001, and quickly pulled from distribution for obvious reasons.
    • The song "All for the Best" from the 1972 movie of Godspell ends with an aerial shot of the cast dancing and singing on a rooftop in NYC. The shot pulls out to show that the roof is that of the North Tower, as the cast sings the last line, "Yes, it's all for the best!" The second last line in that song, just before the camera pulls out to reveal where they're dancing? "Someone's got to be oppressed!"
    • Just before the climax of Trading Places, as they walk into the WTC, Louis Winthorpe tells Billy Ray Valentine "Nothing in your life can prepare you for the unbridled carnage you're about to witness." and "In this building, it's either kill or be killed.".
  • A particularly horrifying example occurs in Superman IV, where Clark Kent goes to a gym with Lois Lane and pretends to injure his back lifting weights. It's not a direct parallel, but the image of Christopher Reeve holding his spine and wincing in pain is very eerie.
    • In a more apt example, Reeve's last movie before the accident was Above Suspicion, in which he played a paralyzed cop who uses the sympathy he receives to literally get away with murder.
  • One of the advertisements for The Dark Knight features Heath Ledger in full Joker regalia drawing on a mirror with lipstick and the caption "Why So Serious?" - an image with a far different meaning with Ledger's death.
    • A rather sad, ironic Aneurysm Moment near the end of the film, the Joker says to Batman:

"I think you and I are destined to do this forever."

    • Also, the sight of him getting out of a body bag after faking his death.
    • In his one scene with Two-Face, The Joker talks about how people freak out if a mayor dies, but nobody cares if a bunch of soldiers get killed. When Heath Ledger died, the collective freak-out was huge. Meanwhile, hundreds of soldiers around his age were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan that year and hardly anyone cared.
  • The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, the film Heath Ledger was working on when he died, introduces Ledger's character hanging by his neck from a bridge and having to be resuscitated, which has been noted by several reviewers as being uncomfortably eerie.
  • The 1976 remake of King Kong is best known for King Kong standing on the World Trade Center instead of the Empire State Building. It was dated even before 2001; after...
  • The 1992 film Sneakers features a scene in which one character hacks into the federal air traffic control computers and jokes, "Anybody want to crash a couple of passenger jets?". His friends don't find the joke funny at the time, but the audience still could... at least before 9/11...
  • Airplane!. The tag line "...and able to hit tall buildings at a single bound," and the plane running through and destroying a radio tower on a building (also taking out the neon sign). After 9/11, planes crashing into buildings are less funny... (And yes, the WTC had a major radio tower!)
  • John Lennon getting menaced with a gun in Help!, however silly it looks, is a little chilling now. And it's up in the air whether George being the one who is most affected by "filthy Eastern ways" is funnier or not, considering how George was the one who most actively pursued Hindu spirituality.
  • In A Hard Day's Night, Norm tells John Lennon more than once that he'll murder him if he doesn't behave.
  • The late-'60s anti-war comedy How I Won The War has an especially cringe-worthy moment near the end when Gripweed (played by John Lennon) is shot and killed. Made worse when he looks directly into the camera and says, "I knew this would happen. You knew it would happen, didn't you?"
  • The plot of the Affectionate Parody The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu hinges on the title character trying to stave off death by concocting a youth elixir, occasionally using electrical shocks to prolong his life in the meantime. Peter Sellers played Fu (and Nayland Smith), and what makes this trope-worthy is that he had been suffering from heart problems for years, had a pacemaker, and died of a heart attack a few weeks before this film made it to theatres. Roger Ebert admitted the attempt to play Fu's rejuvenation efforts for laughs was unpleasant in that context. That said, Peter was never above joking about his real-life health problems, especially late in life, which softens this a bit.
  • In the Woody Allen movie Everyone Says I Love You, his character gets the line:

"I should go to Paris and jump off of the Eiffel Tower. If I took the Concorde, I could be dead three hours earlier."

    • Some years after the film was released, an Air France Flight 4590 crash led to the permanent grounding of the entire Concorde fleet. * wince*
    • This movie was not released in Poland until 1997, which brought another aneurysm moment when one of the characters says, "We spend Christmas always in Paris at Ritz". By this time the Paris Ritz was all over the media in association with Princess Diana's death.
  • Clark Gable was so stressed out at Marilyn Monroe's antics during the filming of The Misfits that when the film was finished, he remarked "Christ, I'm glad this picture's finished! She damn near gave me a heart attack!" Gable died of a heart attack eleven days later. The Misfits turned out to be the last completed film for both Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, who died a year later.
  • Robert Newton's portrayal of Blackbeard in 1952's Blackbeard the Pirate includes several scenes near the beginning of him drinking from a large flask. It's mild, but it comes off as a little awkward when you know that Newton struggled with chronic alcoholism, eventually dying from it.
  • If you happen to know what became of the killer whale, Keiko, who played Willy in the Free Willy films, and just how well freeing him for real worked, then the whole Free Willy trilogy becomes a sustained Funny Aneurysm.
    • Doubly so when you remember "Keiko" means "The Lucky One".
  • In 1999, Jeffrey Jones played Uncle Crenshaw in Stuart Little. In at least two scenes, he's shown cuddling Jonathan Lipnicki, who was eight or nine years old when the movie was made. In 2002, Jones was convicted of possession of child pornography and employing a minor for purposes of taking sexually explicit photos, becoming a registered sex offender.

Your ass is mine.

  • Fictional example: Even though the humor in Welcome to The Dollhouse is already black as pitch which has been coated in tar and shot into space, whatever amusement could be gained from the suffering of lonely seventh-grader Dawn Weiner is shattered by the revelation in the film's Spiritual Successor, Palindromes, that she eventually went to college, gained a bunch of weight, and shot herself.
  • Watching Aaliyah play the original Vampire who is resurrected in Queen of the Damned months after her tragic death was a touch disturbing.
  • Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. The movie tells Bruce Lee's life in a part biographical and part mythical way. One thing suggested was that he had a family demon that wouldn't stop hunting him. Towards the end of the movie, a daydream sequence had him end up battling the demon to protect his son, Brandon. The movie came out just a few months after Brandon's death in 1993.
    • Worse yet, Brandon Lee had been offered the opportunity to play his father, but declined, opting to do The Crow instead.
  • In the 1977 Brucesploitation film The Clones Of Bruce Lee, a corrupt gold smuggler/movie producer suspects his new "star", one of the clones (Bruce Lee 2), of being a spy. He and his partner brainstorm a plan in which they continue to film the movie and arrange for him to be shot by an actual gun during filming, thus eliminating the threat, making it look like an accident, and causing instant publicity. Let's hope that Bruce's son Brandon didn't die for the same reason...
    • The Spoony One (Noah Antwiler) comments on this movie with his flavor of dark humor

Dr. Insano: Why that's brilliant! We stage a weapons malfunction with one of the onset firearms so that Bruce Lee gets shot but it still looks like an accident!
Spoony Bum: It worked for Brandon Lee...
* A resounding chorus of boos*
Spoony: Darkest sketch! Darkest sketch! Darkest sketch!

    • Clones of Bruce Lee is already a shameless exploitation of Bruce Lee's death. It just got considerably darker later.
  • In Casablanca, Victor Laszlo's line:

"Even Nazis can't kill that fast."

    • The movie contains repeated references to the concentration camps, but it was released in 1942, before the whole truth was widely known. The Nazis could kill that fast.
  • In Ernest Goes to Jail, right before his electrocution he lives, the guard asks if he wants a blindfold or cigarette. He answers "No, I'm afraid of the dark, and cigarettes will kill you." Jim Varney died of lung cancer due to a life of smoking.
  • Nearly every scene of The Great Dictator after the WWI sequence, especially the concentration camp sequence and the scenes of "Hynkel" killing his men. Chaplin himself said that if he had known the extent of the Nazis' "homicidal insanity," then he could not have made the film.
  • In an eerie real-life coincidence to the film The Day After Tomorrow, a reporter covering tornadoes in LA was hit and killed by a flying billboard. A year later, Anderson Cooper was almost decapitated by a flying sign while covering Hurricane Dennis.
  • A personal example: Elvis Presley, devastated by the tragic death of his young co-star Judy Tyler in a horrific car accident, vowed never to watch Jailhouse Rock, the movie they made together.
  • The Fearless Vampire Killers: The whole film is about Roman Polanski trying and failing to save Sharon Tate from a murderous cult. They fell in love while making the movie and got married. Two years later, Tate and their unborn child were murdered by members of the Charles Manson family while Polanski was out of the country. He's since said that he's sure he would have been able to save her had he been there.
  • Jackass 3D has a rather jarring one. In the ending scene, Ryan is sitting with a mug of beer that shatters while a explosion goes off behind him. A few months after the movie was released, he died - drunk in a freak car explosion.
    • Then there's Dunn's final film, Living Will, in which he plays a slacker who dies and comes back as a ghost. Lines like "being dead is the best thing that ever happened to me," are beyond eerie.
  • Ah, Armageddon. The line "Saddam Hussein is bombing us!" Check. People falling out of collapsing New York City office buildings? Check. Shots of the World Trade Center with a burning hole in each tower? Check.
    • Irresponsibly drilling for oil in deep water and causing a major accident, check. For the number of times his films invoke this trope, Michael Bay must be prescient or a time traveler.
  • In Anchorman, Christina Applegate declares that her character, Veronica Corningstone, has "exquisite breasts." A few years later, Applegate would undergo a double mastectomy as treatment for breast cancer.
    • Similarly, there's a scene in The Sweetest Thing where a group of women are fascinated by fondling her breasts.
  • Every frame of Network. The story is about a struggling television network that suddenly finds a hit after its news anchor, Howard Beale, delivers an angry rant after he learns that he's been fired. The network then climbs the ratings by turning its news program into an extravagant soapbox for Beale to rant from, making it more entertainment than news, and by replacing most of its primetime lineup with shows like "The Mao Tse-Tung Hour," a reality show (to use the modern word) that glorifies the exploits of a leftist domestic terrorist organization. Remember that this film was made in 1976 -- a time when Jerry Springer, COPS, Reality Television, Keith Olbermann and Glenn Beck didn't exist.
    • And folks say there's no such thing as "The Good Old Days"...
    • That's not the worst part. The movie famously opens with Beale announcing that he's going to kill himself during a live news broadcast, and ends with his being murdered -- on live TV, in front of a studio audience -- due to sinking ratings. It's played as black comedy. Google "Christine Chubbuck" if you want to know why this was hard to laugh at then. Google (or, better yet, YouTube) "Budd Dwyer" to find out why it's a Funny Aneurysm Moment today.
      • Some people have come to believe that the entire movie has effectively ceased to be fictional and has become a completely accurate documentary released 20 years too early.
    • In a retrospective interview, director Sidney Lumet claimed to have taken issue with people labeling the film as satire from the very start. "What satire? It's sheer reportage." The screenplay was based on writer Paddy Chayefsky's observations of television backstage life in the 1960s, with Lumet pitching in the occasional memory. "Everything in that film happened. The only part that hasn't come true is that we haven't seen anyone killed for ratings yet."
  • On the Special Edition DVD release of Star Trek III the Search For Spock, in the text commentary by Mike Okuda for the scene where the Starfleet commander tells Kirk the Enterprise is to be decommissioned because she's twenty years old, he remarks that NASA has less trouble with old spacecraft, as the Space Shuttle Columbia was still flying despite being over twenty years old. Shortly after the DVD's release, the Columbia burned up on re-entry, killing all on board.
    • The Enterprise burning up in the atmosphere resembles the Columbia disaster.
  • In Star Trek IV the Voyage Home, Bones (DeForest Kelley) tries to chat up Spock (Leonard Nimoy) about the experience of being dead. Spock replies that the conversation wouldn't work because they have no common frame of reference--Bones had never died. DeForest Kelley died in 1999. His partner in that conversation lives on.
  • All of O. J. Simpson's showbiz career now falls under this trope.
    • The best examples are The Naked Gun films, in which Simpson plays the Butt Monkey character Nordberg, who spends most of the movies getting beaten and bloodied.
    • In an inversion of this Trope, many people enjoy the Naked Gun series MORE for that.
    • Nordberg is a police detective whose wife tearfully shouts, "He's a good man! He'd never hurt anyone!"
    • The Terminator was originally going to be portrayed by O.J. Simpson, but according to director James Cameron, "people wouldn't have believed a nice guy like O. J. playing the part of a ruthless killer."
    • This even happens with films where Simpson is referenced but doesn't appear in himself. The 1976 Freddie Prinze TV movie features the following exchange between a couple of cops talking about their chief:

“We do all of his down-field blocking, and he comes off like O.J. Simpson!”
“You carry that grudge like a knife in the belly.”

  • In Snow Dogs, James Coburn's character Thunder Jack talks about how it will be his last race. Coburn died later that year.
  • In Eagle Eye (2008), there's an extensive Product Placement scene set inside a now defunct (as of 2009) Circuit City. Maybe Shia should have bought himself a couple of flatscreens at clearance while he was there.
    • If you pay attention to various displays in the movie, you can see that the timeframe in which the movie takes place is a few days after Circuit City officially announced its bankruptcy. They would still be open, mind you (they didn't close the stores until 2009 or all the merchandise was sold, whichever came first); but yes, it would be a good time to get a TV, or maybe a webcam, and a bad time to get the extended warranty.
  • In the one of the segments of the 2003 film Love Actually, Liam Neeson plays a man who is grieving the death of his wife from cancer. In 2009, Neeson's own wife, actress Natasha Richardson, died tragically. Although Richardson died from a brain injury caused while she was skiing, it still makes that movie, and also Blow Dry, in which she plays a character dying of cancer, tough to watch.
    • As an addendum to that, this clip on the American talk show The View is terribly, terribly a funny aneurysm moment in light of his wife's death.
    • His character also lost his wife in Batman Begins (Throwaway line). In fact, he seemed... fond, of losing his wife in fiction.
    • Possibly made even worse when you're aware that Natasha Richardson herself has said in interviews that a major accident Liam Neeson was in years ago is what convinced her that life was precious and fleeting, and should be treasured because it could end at any moment.
  • In both All Dogs Go to Heaven and The Land Before Time, Judith Barsi, who was the victim of her father in a murder-suicide, plays victims of Parental Abandonment.
  • In the Harry Potter movies, Richard Harris as Dumbledore explains to Harry how a Phoenix rebirths itself. Mr. Harris died shortly after completing the movie. Dumbledore was promptly recast.
    • Also, *sniffle* Dobby's line in Deathly Hallows: "Dobby didn't mean to kill you! Only maim or seriously injure!" Guess what happens two seconds later?
    • "Promise me one thing, Dobby." "Anything, sir!" "Never try to save my life again." Except he does. And he succeeds. And he dies.
    • In the movie version of Goblet of Fire, Fred and George have a fight after being turned into old men by the age line, which in itself is ironic considering it's the closest Fred will ever get to growing old properly. But also, if you listen close enough and/or turn on the captions, one of them says, "I'll tear your ears off!"
    • In Deathly Hallows Part 2, Ron complains that Ginny is only paying attention to Harry, not him: "I'm only her brother!" Then Seamus says "She's got lots of those, hasn't she?" She'll have one less pretty soon...
  • In Fern Gully Robin Williams, who plays the character Batty, dramatically gasps "Oh! My heart!" Williams would later undergo heart surgery.
  • The 1993 film Addams Family Values showed a summer camp detention cabin, were non-conformists Joel, Wednesday and Pugsley are made to watch Disney films while a poster of Michael Jackson looks on over them. Michael in this case is meant to showcase the over-the-top positive image of the place that he would have had when the film was shot. Unfortunately, 1993 was the year Michael Jackson was first publicly accused of child abuse.
    • Jackson had planned to contribute a song ("Is It Scary?") to the soundtrack and, with Stephen King, hashed out a premise for a video in which Michael would confront a Torches and Pitchforks mob that regarded him as a freak. This was put on hold in the wake of the allegations. Jackson later revived the project as the stand-alone short Ghosts in 1997.
  • The original film, The Addams Family has as its climax Uncle Fester using an enchanted book called Hurricane Irene: Nightmare From Above to summon a storm that defeats the film's villain. Yeah.
  • In Michael Jackson's Moonwalker (1988), scenes where he plays happily with young children (completely absent any other adult characters) showcase this trope due to the court cases involving Jackson. (Whether the combination is funny or troubling depends on whether you believe he's an unconvicted pedophile or an eccentric crucified by the media.)
  • Frank Capra's You Can't Take It With You has a scene where Lionel Barrymore's character, Grandpa Vanderhof, is confronted by an IRS agent over his failure to pay income taxes. When Barrymore demands to know what the government will provide in return for his money, the taxman mentions protection from invasion. (Keep in mind this is from 1938):

Taxman: How do you think the government's going to keep up the army and navy, with all those battleships?
Grandpa: Battleships? Last time we used battleships was in the Spanish-American War, and what did we get out of that? Cuba, and we gave that back. I wouldn't mind paying for something sensible.

  • In the first Shrek film, The Gingerbread Man is tortured for information by being repeatedly dunked into a glass of milk. Milkboarding, anyone?
  • In 200 Motels, Keith Moon plays a groupie who's convinced he's dying of a drug overdose. His death was related to substance abuse...
  • In the 1964 film Sex and the Single Girl, Bob (Tony Curtis) and Helen (Natalie Wood) accidentally fall into the sea. They're rescued, and later, share a romantic moment in Helen's apartment, but she rejects Bob, because she thinks he's married. On the next day, Bob tries to convince her, saying, "Last night, something happened that was very real. Something that very few people get." Helen replies, "I know, drowned". In 1981, Natalie Wood fell of her yacht, and drowned.
  • "Ha ha, they killed congress!" was made a bit more unsettling after watching a Smithsonian Channel (yes really) show about the White House staff: there was supposed to be a congressional BBQ at the White House on the evening of September 11th, and if the terrorists had waited until the end of the day... * whoa* .
  • Andy Kaufman's unfilmed project The Tony Clifton Story (which he co-wrote) opened its third act with the "real" Andy explaining that Tony Clifton died of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles before the film had finished shooting. From there, Andy plays Tony for most of the remainder of the film until the "real" Tony appears, having been alive all that time, to take back the film for the finale. On May 16, 1984, Andy Kaufman died of a rare form of lung cancer at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.
  • David Carradine has a cameo in the movie Bed and Breakfast. He's in one scene and gets killed. After that there are a few probably-supposed-to-be-funny references to his character's botched autopsy. Since then, he died, and the autopsy went counter to the immediate first impressions about his death... Also, there is the look on his face in the movie Kung Fu when the bad guy puts a rope around his neck.
  • Universal and Sacha Baron Cohen had to remove a scene from Bruno where Bruno interviews LaToya Jackson and steals her phone to get Michael Jackson's phone number just hours before the film's red carpet premiere in Los Angeles on June 25th, 2009 when news broke that Michael had died.
  • The scene in Lethal Weapon 2 where Riggs calls the head of the South African embassy a racist (referring to him as "Aryan") becomes interesting when you remember Mel Gibson's racist anti-Semitic tirade during his 2006 arrest.
    • In Lethal Weapon 4, Riggs unleashes several anti-Asian slurs as well.
  • The scene in Semi-Pro where Jackie Moon wrestles a "killer" bear, which subsequently escapes and causes danger becomes much less funny when the bear used in the film killed its trainer shortly after release. The bear was put down.
  • Kyle in Darkness Falls (2003) suffers night terrors and is afraid to sleep at night. The actor playing Kyle, Chaney Kley, died of sleep apnea in 2007.
  • In the first Transformers movie, Sam's dog Mojo urinates on Ironhide's foot. Ironhide makes a comment about how it's going to rust. Fast forward five years to DOTM, Sentinel Prime kills him with a Rust Cannon in an act of betrayal. Damn.
    • Similarly, a behind-the-scenes article published during the filming of Dark of the Moon made a joke about how a source comparing the movie's death toll to Transformers: The Movie gave the impression that Ironhide would die. Looking at it now, it looks like a thoughtlessly-leaked spoiler.
  • In the Adam Sandler movie Click, a futuristic news report has two funny aneurysm moments: the first for Britney Spears and Kevin Federline having their 23rd child together; in Real Life, they divorced a few months after the movie was released. The second was about Michael Jackson being cloned and having the clone sue him for molestation.
    • Which now means it's a triple aneurysm? Either way, the psychic they hired obviously sucked.
  • Blazing Saddles - at the end of her introductory song "I'm Tired", Lili von Shtupp (played by Madeline Kahn) exclaims "Let's face it - everything below the waist is kaput!" Two decades later, Kahn died of ovarian cancer.
  • In Eurotrip, after a series of unfortunate events wherein Scotty and Cooper manage to get into the Pope's private quarters (don't they lock that?) in the Vatican (and set his hat on fire), they accidentally make Rome (and the world - we live in the technological age) believe the Pope has died and the cardinals have elected a new head of the Church: Scotty, who appears on a big balcony before a crowd, clad in a curtain and wearing - something that passed for a pope hat. This is shown on a live news broadcast, and we see a shot of Pope John Paul II, watching this on his TV, going "What the hell??" in confusion. Quite a bit less funny to watch after his death. By the way, there is no reasonable explanation for why Scotty didn't get arrested.
    • If you listen to the DVD commentary track, the creators of the film were terrified that it would be their luck that JPII would die before the movie was released, thereby marking the film forever.
  • In Black Hawk Down, there is an early scene in the movie when they capture an arms dealer. After the interview, the commander in charge talks to a subordinate about how Somalia is "different to Iraq, more complicated." The movie was released in late 2001, just as the US was invading Afghanistan.
    • Well, considering this was in 1993 he was obviously talking about the 1991 Gulf War, wherein Coalition forces did not need to engage in nation building.
    • And considering that the second war in Iraq happened in part because certain people thought the first one ended too simply...
  • In the American remake of Godzilla, a newscaster makes a reference to Godzilla's attack being the "worst act of destruction since the World Trade Center bombing". Y'know, the one from 1993.
  • Stripes: Seeing John Candy talk about joining the army so he could lose weight is unsettling because he died from a heart attack in 1994 and, at the time of his death, was making an effort to lose weight.
  • The French Thriller Les Diaboliques ends with the school teacher dying of a heart attack. A few years later, the actress died... of a heart attack.
  • Since it features two missions on the Challenger and two of the astronauts who would die in the accident, all of the otherwise excellent vintage IMAX film The Dream is Alive is one of these.
  • "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!
  • In one scene in Shallow Hal, a gorgeous woman tells Mauricio that she has tickets to The Beatles reunion:

"Well, not the Beatles, but Paul, George, and Ringo will be there, and Eric Clapton is filling in for John."

    • Between the time the movie left the theaters and the DVD release, George Harrison died of cancer.
  • In the documentary Number Our Days, anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff explains she wanted to study the culture of a Jewish seniors center because "I'm going to be a little old Jewish woman one day." Nine years later, she died of breast cancer just shy of her 50th birthday.
  • One of the headlines of a 2015 newspaper in Back to the Future Part II:

"Queen Diana visits Washington".

  • The plot of Robocop 2 involves an African-American mayor of a failing, debt ridden Detroit offering to make a deal with a group of drug lords, in order to prevent OCP from outright purchasing the city. The movie was made in 1990, it takes place around 2010. In 2008, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, an African-American mayor of failing, debt ridden Detroit, had to resign from his position as mayor due to, among other things, allegations of bribe taking, perjury, and obstruction of justice.
  • In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, the titular characters are mistaken for terrorists. The movie came out less than a month before 9/11. What's really eerie is Jules Asner referring to them as "hot new terrorists".
  • The final plot angle in Risky Business involves young Tom Cruise hurriedly scraping together a high-class hooker show for his classmates in an attempt to get enough money to get his father's Porsche repaired before he finds out. Sounds innocent enough, right? Well, this movie was made in 1983- when the spread of HIV was at its most pernicious but there was the least public knowledge about it. All of a sudden hookers for your high school buddies doesn't sound that fun anymore.
  • One of several actresses who have been considered for the role of Janis Joplin in the Development Hell cursed biopic Piece Of My Heart...just died of a heart attack, apparently due to prolonged drug use.
  • A poster for the movie Deadline, featuring actress Brittany Murphy lying dead in a bathtub will be altered due to Brittany Murphy actually dying of apparent heart failure...after being found, having collapsed, in her shower.
  • The 2007 TMNT movie uses a newscast about the collapsing real estate market to establish its Next Sunday A.D. timeframe, since the real estate market had actually been thriving for years. Three years and a global real-estate-fueled recession later, that subtle gag's funny for a whole different reason.
  • Delirious, a 1991 film starring John Candy, features Charles Rocket (a former cast member of SNL's disastrous sixth season) as a Jerkass character who joked about suicide. In October 2005, Charles Rocket was found dead outside his home in Connecticut with a slashed throat, which the police ruled a suicide.
  • The Wedding Singer has a couple of jokes at the expense of George near the beginning: Steve Buscemi's drunk best man character checks him out and muses "Ooh, I like her", while two of the groomsmen quietly agree that George looks "scary". George was played by Alexis Arquette, who was a male transvestite at the time. Now that Arquette is a transgender woman, the jokes take on some Unfortunate Implications in retrospect.
  • In Hocus Pocus Sarah Jessica Parker plays one of three The Hecate Sisters who is hanged after killing a girl in Salem, MA. In Who Do You Think You Are, Sarah Jessica Parker learned that her ancestor was accused but not convicted - luckily the witch craze ended one month before her trial of witchcraft after a girl claimed she saw her and two other women's "specters" choking an ill woman to death in Salem, MA. SJP was really disturbed, although she was relived her ancestor wasn't an accuser.
  • The Last Hurrah: While some characters are discussing potential candidates in the upcoming election, one of them makes an offhanded remark about the head of Planned Parenthood running for office. Those present know he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell, and scoff at such a ridiculous absurdity: "The head of Planned Parenthood running for office in this state?" Keeping in mind that "this state" is probably a stand-in for Massachusetts, and recalling the, um, changes that have happened there since 1956...
  • In Monkey Business, Groucho Marx tells Thelma Todd: "I know, you're a woman who's been getting nothing but dirty breaks. Well, we can clean and tighten your brakes, but you'll have to stay in the garage all night." Two years later, Thelma Todd died of carbon monoxide poisoning in a garage. First ruled an accident, a grand jury ruled suicide, but many still think she was murdered.
  • In Orchestra Wives, bandleader Glenn Miller plays a fictionalized version of himself, with Miller's real-life musicians and vocalists playing most of his fictional orchestra. During plot complications, they all walk out on him except for loyal piano player Cesar Romero. When Miller asks "What can I do now?", Romero replies "You could always give swimming lessons" ... then he apologizes for the bad joke. Soon afterward, Glenn Miller drowned in the English Channel.
  • In the 1936 movie The Nuisance, Charles Butterworth plays a con-man who flings himself in front of moving cars, pretending to have been struck and injured so he can sue. A few years after he made this movie, Butterworth was killed in a car accident.
  • The Alfred Hitchcock film To Catch a Thief has a suspenseful sequence when Grace Kelly drives a car along the twisting mountain roads of Monaco. Decades later, she died in a car accident in this same region.
  • National Treasure: Book Of Secrets had one character tell Nicholas Cage that he had problems with the IRS.
  • In the live-action Street Fighter movie, Raul Julia's "M. Bison" is revived from his first defeat by Guile by a defibrillator built into his suit which restarts his heart. Shortly after filming was complete, Julia died from a brain hemorrhage.
    • Probably a double funny aneurysm when you realize that Jean-Claude Van Damme is beating the crap out of somebody who is dying of cancer.
  • Toy Story 3 Lotso Hugging Bear meet and greets at Disney Theme Parks. As you can read on the YouTube link (first release in May 2010), it did not escape anyone who commented after the movie's release that kids getting to prance around with a Complete Monster is completely wrong.
    • Not to mention the Prospector's line in Toy Story 2: "Do you really think Andy would take you to college?" A lot more poignant after you've seen the third movie.
    • It's either this or Harsher in Hindsight, but Barbie, when the toys are caught by Lotso, quote the Declaration of Independence ("Authority should derive from the consent of the governed, not by threat of force!") when refusing Lotso. This gets a bit uncomfortable when Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya basically did this sort of thing in a method a lot closer of "threat to force" rather than the consent of the governed, leading the Muslim Brotherhood's rise in those countries.
  • The 1998 remake of The Parent Trap is kind of depressing to watch now since it's a family movie starring the now late Natasha Richardson (who of course, recently died in a skiing accident). It also of course, stars a young Lindsay Lohan in more innocent, precocious times. Also, the whole plot centers on Dennis Quaid's twins (both played by Lindsay Lohan). In real life, Dennis Quaid's own newborn twins almost died due to an accidental overdose.
    • Don't forget the scene where Hallie asks the mom if she can have a sip of wine and she says "I don't think you're gonna like it". After two DU Is, jailtime, and rehab; that scene is very uncomfortable to watch.
  • Arguably the entire plot of Mean Girls could be seen as this. Lindsay Lohan plays the protagonist Cady, who falls in with the wrong crowd and transforms from a well-meaning good girl into a mean, callous, and spiteful bitch who drinks and parties alot at the expense of her friends, and in real life, Lindsay herself engaged in similar behavior, resulting in several arrests and trips to rehab.
  • In the film An American Carol the film that Rosie O'Donell's Expy shows concerns alleged terrorist attacks by Christians. Passengers at an airport are herded through a full-body x-ray machine, as one cynically remarks that it's all thanks to "the underwear bomber." The movie was released in 2008. One year later, of course, what was typical Abrams hyperbole was no longer funny.
  • Julie Andrews in "Victor Victoria" says near the beginning that she's had enough personal experiences to tell her that it does not pay to take chances with your health. Victor Victoria on stage was her last major musical before she lost her voice due to a botched surgery.
    • Speaking of Victor Victoria: At the end of Robert Preston's rendition of "The Shady Dame from Seville," he is given a bouquet of roses. He says "I might as well. They're the last roses I'll ever see." Preston died just four years later.
  • British pop group Atomic Kitten made an appearance in the mockumentary Mike Bassett: England Manager sans one member, Natasha Hamilton. The film's explanation is one of the England players gave her food poisoning. Three years later in the middle of their Greatest Hits Tour, Natasha would suffer a nasty bout of food poisoning that would force her to miss two shows in Ireland.
  • In North Dallas 40, one of Dallas' games ends with a one-point loss after a QB-bungled point-after attempt... something Tony Romo knows all too well (his fateful game-deciding FG bungle wasn't a point after, but it was from the same distance).
  • In the Hong Kong film Beyond Our Ken, a school teacher played by Gillian Chung is fired from her job after a nude photo of her with her ex-boyfriend lands on the internet. Four years later, nude photos of Chung, among other female celebrities, taken by her ex-boyfriend Edison Chen would end up on the internet, causing a major stir in the entertainment media and forcing her to take a leave of absence from her career.
  • Maybe not so much "funny" as "romantic", but The Empire Strikes Back is now infamous for the scene where Luke and Leia make out in Echo Base. When the movie first came out, this would be an innocent Ship Tease. But when you factor in the revelation in Return of the Jedi...Yeeeecchhh.
    • Not to mention what Leia says in the next movie "...I've always known."
    • Worse, George Lucas stated that he'd always intended Luke and Leia to be siblings. Oh, really? Check out how Luke first meets Leia in A New Hope. Ewwwwwwwww.
  • Both Grumpy Old Men and its sequel Grumpier Old Men end with Hilarious Outtakes of bloopers and flubbed line readings. It's funny until you realize that Burgess Meredith's mistakes were due to the fact that he was suffering from late-stage Alzheimer's.
  • In Big Money Hustlas, Rudy Ray Moore portrayed himself as "The Ghost of Dolemite". One part has Sugar Bear[1] says that he isn't dead because "he lives in Vegas", with Dolemite remarking that he knows Goddamn well that he isn't dead.
  • A comedy called Diana & Me, about an Australian woman who dreams of meeting Princess Diana and a paparazzo trying to get a photograph of the princess, finished shooting in the summer of 1997 and thus had not even made it into release when Princess Diana died in a car crash. Due to the death, the film required significant editing before being released, and even then its release was minimal at best.
    • This is made even worse due to the fact the Princess of Wales was practically manslaughtered by the paparazzi, who proceeded to take pictures of their own handiwork.
  • The early Alfred Hitchcock comedy Champagne was about a millionaire trying to teach his spoiled daughter a lesson in humility by claiming that the stocks had crashed and that they had lost everything. The movie premiered in August 1927. Two years and two months later...
  • In The Cheetah Girls series of movies and books, Galleria(Raven-Symone)'s big ego causes fights in the singing group and pushes the girls out of the group. In real life, when the group was defictionalized, Raven-Symone left due to "backstage catfights".
  • Rare example where the joke got public exposure AFTER the thing that made it unfunny- in the outtakes for Little Shop of Horrors, Rick Moranis says during his death scene "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE SEQUEL?!" They wound up cutting the death scene and ending the movie on a Sequel Hook (which never lead anywhere). One can only hope that the quip wasn't connected to this in any way.
  • In one of The Little Rascals shorts, "Birthday Blues", Spanky and Dickie Moore are wondering what they could get mom for her birthday:

Spanky: "Let's get Mama those guns."
Dickie: "Aw, what would she do with a gun?"
Spanky: "Shoot Papa!"

    • The actor playing Papa, Hooper Atchley, would eventually kill himself with a gunshot to the head, demonstrating once again that irony is a bitch.
  • "Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown" (released in 1988) has a subplot about muslim terrorists who intend to hijack a plane. The main characters don't do anything about it, the only cops who know about it get drugged, and at the end two characters enter the plane which is about to be hijacked. This is entirely played for laughs.
  • In The Secret of NIMH after agreeing to sedate Dragon, the cat, Mrs. Brisby mutters "I must be crazy." Five years later, Mrs. Brisby's voice actress, Elizabeth Hartman, a recent mental institute outpatient, jumped from a fifth story window.
  • The opening of The Naked Gun, features Nordberg, who is portrayed by OJ Simpson, sneaking around a shipyard at night while brandishing a gun. It's difficult to not associate the scene with Simpson's alleged murder. It became even more difficult to not see similarities once OJ was accused of armed robbery in 2007.
  • Fictional example that mixes it with Gone Horribly Right: In an early scene of the original Tron, Flynn is communicating with his hacking program, Clu.

Flynn: I wrote you. I taught you everything I know about the system...Now, you're the best program that's ever been written. You're dogged and relentless..."

    • ...Then in the sequel Tron: Legacy, we find that Clu (2.0) turned on Flynn, and has become a Complete Monster whose list of crimes include taking over the Grid, turning it into a totalitarian state, and comitting genocide. And he's still pratically the toughest program around.
    • Another pair of FAM courtesy of the tie-in games: Due to Intellivision getting an early draft of the script, Tron is depicted by an orange figure in the Deadly Disks game, and cuts down armies of blue-colored enemies. Then, there's Maze-A-Tron, where you're controlling Flynn across the Grid. Both are impossible to win - just keep playing until the computer tires you out. Now, recall what happens to the poor bastards in the sequel...
  • Occurs is low-budget action flick Future Force, starring David Carradine as a cop in the future, when Carradine attacks The Dragon with a flying remote-controlled robot arm that repeatedly punches The Dragon in the crotch. It's a scene seemingly designed to elect roars of laughter. That laughter will abruptly cease once switches to slowly strangling the villain while Carradine watches with a grin. You can see the whole uncomfortable sequence here.
  • Diving In had the Jerk Jock say "Are you guys ready? Let's roll." Ouch.
    • Todd Beamer might have made the phrase very memorable, but it's been used many, many times in fiction before 9/11.
  • Bruce Almighty. Remember when Bruce pulls the moon closer to Earth for the romantic evening? The next morning, the news reports relief workers are massing to assist in rescue efforts in Japan, which had been hit by a freak tidal wave.
    • It eases off a little when you realize that the moon doesn't cause earthquakes (unless Bruce willed it to).
      • "Freak" tidal wave as in unexpected, rather than accompanying an earthquake. The gravitational pull of the moon is the primary influence on the tides. By moving it closer, the oceans would move a great deal more than they ordinarily would, causing something almost identical to a mid-size tidal wave but over a much wider area. However, the damage should have been primarily on the side of they planet they were on at the time, and would cover every coastline, not just a single island chain.
  • Down Periscope has a war game involving to see if it is possible for a diesel-sub with a rogue commander to bypass the conventional and regulation rigid US Navy using unconventional tactics. Cue 2006, when a Chinese diesel sub went undetected by USS Kitty Hawk's battlegroup until it surfaced within torpedo range.
  • Pillow Talk stars Rock Hudson as a straight man pretending to be gay. Years later, he would die of AIDS. That is not enough, though: After that, AIDS activists said "Straight men are dying, too!" Then America found out he was a gay man pretending to be straight his whole life.
  • The first Charlie's Angels film opens with Drew Barrymore's character (disguised somehow as LL Cool J) preventing a sky jacker from blowing up an airplane. Keep in mind that the movie was released a mere 11 months before 9/11 (the movie was released in November 2000). So the idea of passing off a potentially deadly skyjacking in the guise of escapism was no longer immediately enticing.
  • Richard Pryor and Michael J. Fox first discovered that they had MS and Parkinson's respectively, while on the set of medical themed movies (Critical Condition and Doc Hollywood respectively).
  • Seeing Gordon Gekko drinking booze and smoking rather excessively in Wall Street and its sequel is perhaps a bit cringe inducing in light of Michael Douglas being diagnosed with throat cancer prior to the sequel being released. During Gordon's lecture in the second movie, he even uses "cancer" as an analogy.
  • The Russian film If Tomorrow There Is War, made in 1939, depicts a hypothetical war between USSR and "an enemy" (not explicitly named but implied to be Germany) as a relatively easy battle for the Soviets, with the enemy advances easily stopped, and the Soviet forces victorious in nearly all battles (there are obligatory Heroic Sacrifice s, but generally the Red Army wins handily). Of course, when the war really started in 1941, it was nothing like that (almost inverted in fact), which makes the film extremely cringe-worthy.
  • Mike Tyson recommending that Stu get his tattoo removed in The Hangover Part II is now to be taken as a sign that Tyson must've foreseen some legal trouble over Stu sporting the tattoo--S. Victor Whitmill, who inked Tyson's face with that tattoo, sued the film to try to get it banned because of Stu's tattoo. And the film continues to be hit by lawsuits from other parties for unrelated reasons to this day.
  • in Hot Fuzz the Neighborhood watch kills some teenagers for wearing hoodies and ruining their town's idyllic image. Fast forward a few years and Trayvon Martin is killed by a Neighborhood watchman, and certain media pundits speculate that his hoodie wearing was a cause.
    • The same event led to a forthcoming sci-fi comedy, Neighborhood Watch, to be renamed The Watch after similar imagery made the studio uncomfortable.
  • The gag in "Wedding Crashers" where Owen Wilson's character is reading 'don't-kill-yourself' books became a lot less funny once Wilson attempted suicide only a few years later.
  • Detroit: City on the Move — a promotional film made for the City of Detroit, an unsuccessful bidder for the Olympic Games was filmed in 1965. Then 1967 riots came and its chance for 1968 Olympics evaporated, but of course things got so much worse later. So the film aged into an unintentional masterpiece of dark irony (or maybe tears, if you're an old American). Advertisements for things that proceed to crash and burn or Utopian optimism Inspired By something real usually ends like this, but in this case the subject is both specific and visual — that is, you could find later photo or video documents of the same places and compare.

In-Universe examples

  • In the movie Boogie Nights, a running gag in the beginning of the movie involves Little Bill, whose wife always humiliates him by having sex with other men. It's a nice laugh until the New Years Eve sequence, where Little Bill sees his wife cheating again in a bathroom, leaves the house, gets a gun out of his car, reenters the bathroom, and shoots his wife and partner before turning the gun on himself. That scene, taking place at the end of the 1970s, is meant to be a grim foreshadowing of the hardships the main characters face in the uptight '80s.
  1. ↑ Dah dah dah dah DUN!
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