It Will Never Catch On/Film

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Animated

• In Ice Age, Manny passes a Stonehenge-like structure and remarks, "Modern architecture. It'll never last." Later, he scoffs at Sid's ridiculous notions of "global warming".
• One scene in Disney's |Hercules plays with this, showing the Fates, expounding on their ability to see Past, Present, and Future, giving an aside mentioning the popularity of indoor plumbing.
• When Merlin in The Sword in the Stone predicted reminisced about the advent of flying machines, his owl familiar chides him for his crazy ideas of men ever being able to fly about in such things.
• Here's a memorable exchange from The Lion King (which, may or may not be in modern times, since we never see any humans)

Pumbaa [looking up at the night sky]: Hey, Timon, ever wonder what those sparkly dots are up there? Timon: Pumbaa, I don't wonder; I know. Pumbaa: Oh. What are they? Timon: They're fireflies. Fireflies that, uh....got stuck up on that big bluish-black thing. Pumbaa: Oh, gee. I always thought they were balls of gas burning billions of miles away. Timon: Pumbaa, with you, everything's gas.

• Both the film and comic of Asterix in Britain have Asterix introduce tea to Britannia. However, the film ends with Getafix declaring it will never catch on.

Live-Action

• Evelyn one scene has a bartender trying to adjust a TV antenna to watch a TV interview with Desmond. After fiddling with it for the longest time with no luck in improving the picture, he gives up muttering how TV will never catch on.
• In Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin are hanging around the Hollywoodland sign talking about the new sound movies, or "talkies", which Chaplin believes will never catch on. This was Truth in Television for Charlie Chaplin. As a physical comedian, he was one of the great resisters of talkies. His Tramp movies had international appeal, which would be severely reduced by adding an English soundtrack. Chaplin continued to make silent (or near-silent) movies long after the rest of Hollywood went for sound, producing the final Tramp movie - Modern Times - in 1936.
• The Passion of the Christ has a scene of Jesus building a dinner table at a modern height, to be used in conjunction with an upright chair, in contrast to the Roman habit of reclining beside low tables. Mary doesn't think it'll catch on. This is actually anachronistic, as standard tables have been around for thousands of years, while the Roman style of reclining was only a recent invention at the time.
• In Titanic, Rose's fiancé isn't impressed with a painting by a then-obscure Picasso, and doesn't think he'll become famous.
• There was a hilarious example in the 2007 film Molière involving the capitalist son of an idle aristocrat. He comments on how production of a good would be more efficient in Spain than in France as you can pay the workers less there. This leads his father to remark sarcastically something like, "The next thing you know you'll be talking about moving production to China."
• Shanghai Noon gets a few miles out of this trope; its sequel, Shanghai Knights, practically runs on it.

"John Wayne? That's a terrible name for a cowboy!"

"Hey Chon, you're lucky I didn't invest in that ridiculous 'auto-mobile' idea. Yeah, that's gonna make a lot of money."

• • In the second example, he is also claiming that zeppelins are going to be huge after investing a substantial amount of gold into it (interestingly, Zeppelin did not begin construction of his first airship until 1899, and the movie takes place in 1887).
• In Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, while hanging around Hamlet's castle, one of the title characters independently discovers Newton's principle of reaction, observes that objects of different weights fall at the same speed, invents a rudimentary steam engine and even constructs a paper model of a biplane with little propellers. Outrageous fortune, however, attends and ruins all his attempts to display these discoveries to others.
• Back to the Future
  • In the first movie, Marty meets the future Mayor of Hill Valley, Goldie Wilson, working in a diner. When Marty says that Wilson is going to be Mayor, Wilson's boss just scoffs, "A colored Mayor. That'll be the day."
  • And related to it, when Marty goes by the name "Clint Eastwood" in 1885 Hill Valley, Bufford Tannen replies, "What kind of stupid name is that?"
  • And, of course, Doc's hilarious tirade after Marty informs him who the president of the U.S. will be in 1985. ("Ronald Reagan! The actor? Then who's vice-president, Jerry Lewis?")
  • And the Doc's surprise at finding out that all the best cars and electronics are made in Japan.
  • In an early draft of the script, the Doc refuses to invest in the Xerox company, wondering aloud, "How are they going to sell a product if you can't even pronounce the name?"
  • Again when the men in the bar scoff at Doc Brown's predictions that people will run for fun in the future.
• The DVD Bonus Content for Anchorman included an "audition" of Ron Burgundy for ESPN.

Director: It's sports. Ron: Around the clock? Sports all the time? Director: That's the concept of the news... Ron: That's never gonna work. That's ridiculous. That's like a 24-hour cooking network or an all-music channel. Ridiculous, that's really dumb. Seriously, this thing is going to be a financial and cultural disaster. Sports Center, think about that. That's just dumb.

• In the film of Stephen King's Riding the Bullet, set in what seems to be the late sixties, two characters remark that the rock gods of the time will never grow old and will be around forever—they simply can't, they're rock gods. Sure enough, they cite Jimi Hendrix as an example.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Judge Doom reveals that the goal of his master plan is to own land that will be used by the city in a massive construction project called a freeway. Eddie Valiant is rather skeptical of all this.

Judge Doom: Eight lanes of shimmering cement, from here to Pasadena. Smooth, safe, fast. Traffic jams will be a thing of the past. Eddie Valiant: So that's why you killed Acme and Maroon? For this freeway? I don't get it. Judge Doom: Of course not. You lack vision, but I see a place where people get on and off the freeway. On and off, off and on, all day, all night. Soon, where Toon Town once stood will be a string of gas stations, inexpensive motels, restaurants that serve rapidly prepared food, tire salons, automobile dealerships, and wonderful, wonderful billboards as far as the eye can see! My God, it'll be beautiful!

• • Eddie's comment after The Reveal about Doom's character:

Eddie Valiant: That lame-brained freeway idea could only be cooked up by a Toon.

• • Depending on interpretation this could be another case of Did Not Do the Research. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? takes place in 1947. The freeway from Hollywood to Pasadena was constructed in 1940. It could be argued that since we're dealing with an alternate reality where Toons and Toon Town exist, the existence of Toon Town prevented the construction in 1940.
• In Gypsy, the characters see Jack Benny perform a stand-up comedy act in the 1920s. Mama Rose remarks: "He'll never get anyplace."
• In the satirical comedy Bullshot the 1930's hero scoffs at the idea that the future world economy will be based on oil, or that England could ever be run by a woman (despite England having already had several queen-regnants, when the monarch was actually a position of power).
• At the beginning of Singin' in the Rain, everyone at a party among movie people scoffs when shown a demonstration of "talking pictures" and predicts that Warner Bros.' new talkie will flop. Of course, when it becomes a huge success, all the other studios quickly install their own sound equipment.
• Good Bye, Lenin! features one of these in a deleted scene. The movie takes place in 1989, but one character, an amateur filmmaker, is wearing what seems to be a Matrix t-shirt, with the green data pattern from those movies (1999-2003). In the deleted scene we find out why: it turns out he has a friend, also a filmmaker, who was telling him about his idea for a movie where humans are kept in an artificial reality by robots. He remarks that he likes his friend's design sense but thinks his movie idea is ridiculous and doomed to fail.
• This is used a bit in The Wedding Singer, which was filmed in the late 1990s, but set in the 1980s. One example combines this with Analogy Backfire. The protagonist's lecherous friend talks about how he modeled himself after John Travolta, and he's been a growing failure at keeping up the image as he's aged, just as "[Travolta's show] got cancelled!" John Travolta, of course, famously ended up having a big comeback with Pulp Fiction.
• A Credits Gag in Night at the Museum 2 shows a World War Two serviceman reverse-engineering Larry Daley's lost cellphone, interrupted by his mother calling his name: "JOEY MOTOROLA!!" However, this is a case of Did Not Do the Research. Motorola has been around since 1928, with one of their first commercial products being car radios. Starting in 1940, they picked up quite a few defense contracts, culminating in the production of the AM SCR-536 hand-held radio - which was vital to Allied communication during World War Two.
• Jimmy Fallon's character in Almost Famous: "If you think Mick Jagger will still be out there trying to be a rock star at age fifty, then you are sadly, sadly mistaken."
• Julie and Julia had several examples, probably based on real life anecdotes:
  • The head of the Cordon Bleu Institute tells Julia Child that she is a terrible cook.
  • Paul Child consoles his wife upon the rejection of Mastering the Art of French Cooking: "You could have a television show!" This cheers her up, but she laughs at the idea.
• Babes In Arms begins with a vaudevillian being warned that vaudeville might soon be eclipsed by the motion picture. He, of course, laughs off this warning.
• The character of Virge in Memphis Belle (set in 1943) is obsessed with hamburgers and will tell anyone who will listen (and everyone else as well) about his idea of starting a chain of hamburger restaurants, all with the same architecture, producing burgers to the same specifications. Most people simply laugh and tell him that no-one wants to eat the same food everywhere they go. However, White Castle dates back to the 1920s.
• Early in the classic film Some Like It Hot (set in The Roaring Twenties), Joe tells Jerry he's going to bet their paycheck on a single greyhound with a hot tip, despite owing a lot of money and being practically penniless. When Jerry asks Joe what happens if the dog loses, Joe assures him that they'll still have keep their jobs—playing in a speakeasy's band. When Jerry asks him what'll happen if they lose their job, Joe snaps with, "Suppose you got hit by a truck! Suppose the stock market crashes! Suppose Mary Pickford divorces Douglas Fairbanks! Suppose the Dodgers leave Brooklyn! Suppose Lake Michigan overflows!"
• The board members in The Hudsucker Proxy think Norville Barnes' Hula Hoop invention is utterly worthless, but go ahead with mass production of the item for the sake of a massive stock scam. They are subsequently ruined when the product is a hit.
• Early in Kevin Smith's Jersey Girl, Ben Affleck's publicist character scoffs at the idea of Will Smith being cast as the protagonist in Independence Day, doubting that anyone could take the Fresh Prince seriously as an action star.
• In Goodbye, Mr. Chips, one of the masters is reading a novel and replies to another who asks about the author: "It's his first. He'll never come to anything. He's too fantastic." The novel is The Time Machine and the author is H. G. Wells.
• Among Caractacus Potts' not-quite-working inventions in his lab in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang are a vacuum cleaner and a prototype television.
  • Going by the style of the car, and the steamship and so on, the film is set in the mid 1920s to early 1930s. Vacuum cleaners were available at least since the 1880s (although ones that were small enough to carry around, as opposed to parking them in the street on a cart, weren't available until the early 1920s), and the earliest television sets went on sale in 1928.
• A deleted scene in Sherlock Holmes has Lestrade express exasperation and incredulity when Holmes suggests that he employ a photographer to record a crime scene.
• In the Czech film Císařův pekař - Pekařův císař, Emperor Rudolf sees Edward Kelly smoke tobacco (a novelty from the New World) and says that it will never catch on. Other items that get dismissed in a similar manner include the kaleidoscope and peanuts.
• Played with in The Buddy Holly Story when Buddy calls 3D movies a flash-in-the-pan. He is perfectly correct... for the first (50s) 3D craze. The movie was released in the late 70s, during the second period of mainstream 3D popularity (which had been a bit too long to call flash-in-the-pan).
• In the 2006 French film The Tiger Brigades one of the detectives demonstrates a new invention by a friend of his: handcuffs! His boss ridicules the idea when he's easily able to pick the lock (a problem faced by some modern handcuffs too).
• The 2009 Japanese film Fish Story has this with the titular track. It's a catchy punk piece with Word Salad Lyrics, but in 1975 it just wasn't mainstream enough. The band knows that it won't sell, but they decide to record it anyway.
• Like the Singin' in the Rain example above, silent film star George Valentin in The Artist insists that sound motion pictures are just a fad. This attitude all but destroys his film career.
• In State of the Union, the characters expect that Harry Truman will be defeated in the 1948 election, which is why they want the Republican nomination. The film was released after Truman won.

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