Defictionalization / Live-Action Films

• The M41A Pulse Rifle from Alien is defictionalized by Lage under the name of MAX-41A. It's a combination of a submachine gun and a short barreled shotgun. Alas, even if one were willing to go through the legal hassles to own one, the weapon is a concept gun and Lage has no plans to create any sort of models for production.
• Wanting an exciting climax for his movie about Australian surf lifesavers, scriptwriter Peter Schrek decided to create The Big Race called The Coolangatta Gold and named the movie after it. Not only did they hold the event for real to get scenes for the movie, but it also went on to become a regular sports event.
• The World's End. A tour offers to do The Crawl with the pubs that were actually used in the film in Hertfordshire - although only 8 are pubs, with four others being refurbished buildings.
• This happens In-Universe in the silent film Exit Smiling. Violet is a bit player in a traveling theater troupe. The troupe performs a single play, a crappy Melodrama in which the heroine has to pretend to be The Vamp in order to delay the bad guy an hour and save her lover. When Violet finds herself needing to delay the bad guy, so that she can get the man she loves cleared of embezzlement charges, she decides to enact the plot of the play in Real Life, including dressing up in the vamp's costume.
• The creation of an entire line of Wonka-branded candies wasn't just a tie-in to the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. In fact, the film was designed specifically to market Wonka-brand chocolates. It was funded by Quaker Oats, who had planned to make a grand entry into the candy business. Many of the signature chocolate bars from the film (and earlier book), such as "Chocolate Scrumdiddilyumptious Bars", were recreated as genuine products. Unfortunately, the formula they used caused the bars to melt on the shelves, and they had to be withdrawn from sale. However, harder sugar-based candies like Nerds and Gobstoppers (a variation on Jawbreakers) were a big hit and remain popular to this day. Even now, over forty years later, the Wonka brand and many of those products still exist (though Nestlé replaced Wonka with "Nestlé Candy Shop" in the US and the UK), no doubt buoyed by a further film adaptation of the book and subsequent reimaging of the brand.
• James Bond:
  • Several of the movies have inspired the CIA to create real life gadgets based on the ones seen in said movies.
  • Spectre opens with James Bond in Mexico City on the Day of the Dead in the middle of a giant parade complete with skeleton floats. While the Day of the Dead is an old tradition, no such parade existed...until this movie came out, after which Mexican audience members loved it so much that the government decided to do it for real.
  • The Tarot deck used by Solitaire in Live and Let Die was designed specifically for the film by artist Fergus Hall. It was later sold briefly as the 007 deck before being renamed as the Tarot of the Witches.
• In Jurassic Park, there's a book on display in the gift shop called The Making of Jurassic Park by Don Shay and Jody Duncan, clearly intended to be an in-universe telling of the park's development. The real book, by the same authors but with a different cover, is about the making of the movie.
• WarGames showed a cool set of missile displays in NORAD. The real life NORAD commander thought those displays were better than the real ones. So, now NORAD displays more closely resemble the ones in the film. The in-story "game" Global Thermonuclear War (actually a real nuclear exchange program) was later defictionalized as DEFCON. Of course, buying the game involves some Aesop Amnesia on the part of anyone who's actually seen the movie, since "the only winning move is not to play".
• Harry Potter:
  • "Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans" was incarnated into the real world by the good if twisted folks at JellyBelly as part of the promotional build-up to the film version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. It helped that they'd already made plenty of bizarre jelly bean flavors — all they had to do was make all the gross ones. A lot of the gross ones are actually discarded, legitimate, if not failed attempts at making good flavors — the vomit flavouring, for instance, was originally meant to be pizza.
  • Chocolate Frogs and Caramel Flies now exist as well, although the frogs are just Pop Rocks in a frog-shaped shell, which come with holographic trading cards.
  • In another Harry Potter reference, King's Cross train station in London now has a sign for "Platform 9 3/4", as well as a luggage cart half-embedded in a brick wall at which tourists can take pictures. One can only imagine how many impressionable young children have run head-first into that wall, expecting to emerge in wizardville.
  • The Muggle world now has The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (now itself a major motion picture!), and Quidditch Through the Ages.
  • In most of the DVD cases for the movies released in the US there's a small leaflet with merchandise you can buy, like replicas of the wands.
  • "Muggle Quidditch" is now playable on college campuses. (The part of the Snitch has to be played by a small fast-running student in a yellow T-shirt.) There's even a movement for it to become an NCAA-sanctioned sport. You can't make this up, folks.
  • The life-size vibrating replica broomsticks. Not like those are likely to be repurposed◊.
  • A lot of Harry Potter products, like pumpkin juice and butterbeer, have now gotten their own official defictionalizations since the opening of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter areas at the Universal Studios parks.
  • With the launch of Pottermore, you can now be officially sorted into a Hogwarts House by a questionnaire designed by JK Rowling herself. And now you can also be sorted into an Ilvermorny house.
• Idiocracy:
  • In November 2007, Brawndo "the thirst mutilator", a fictional brand of energy drink which appeared in the film, became a real product released by Omni Consumer Products, complete with ridiculously over-the-top ads. (''It's like having sex with a tractor trailer in a parking lot!'')
  • The TruTV series It Only Hurts When I Laugh is an everything-but-the-name Defictionalization of Ow, My Balls!.
• Guardians of the Galaxy (2014): the movie's soundtrack is outright named Awesome Mix Vol. 1 and its cover features tape deck to show it's Quill's tape from the movie, and for Record Store Tape there were actual cassette versions! The sequel did the same with Awesome Mix Vol. 2 . Also in existence: dancing Groot toys, which dance to The Jacksons' "I Want You Back".
• RoboCop - Omni Consumer Products is now a real company. Appropriately it specializes in creating defictionalized products (including the aforementioned Brawndo):
• Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy: OCP and Vat19 have both created a real-world Sex Panther product.
• When the The Flintstones movie came out, several McDonald's got Bedrock versions of their golden arches.
• A heartwarming instance of defictionalization and back. During 1960s, a Mexican priest named Padre Sergio Gutierrez was inspired by two movies featuring a priest supporting an orphanage by being a masked wrestler by night to become a masked wrestler himself to support the orphanage he ran, taking up the name from the movies, Fray Tormenta, for more than 30 years. His life, in turn, inspired two movies, one French and the other American, L'Homme au masque d'or and Nacho Libre, about a priest supporting an orphanage as a masked wrestler.
• This is Spın̈al Tap:
  • The mock band Spinal Tap became a real band (performed by the actors from the movie), and have released three albums, toured the world and performed on multiple television shows. Sometimes their support band was The Folksmen, the spoof folk band, played by the same actors, who appeared in the film A Mighty Wind.
  • Several producers of amplifiers and other audio equipment have calibrated the dials on their products to go up to eleven.
  • One of the members appeared in an ad for an amp that went up to 20. 'cos that's 9 louder innit!◊
• The Holiday Inn hotel chain was named for the eponymous inn from the 1942 Bing Crosby/Fred Astaire movie Holiday Inn — the same film which gave us the immortal song "White Christmas".
• Shortly after the release of Grindhouse, it was announced that Machete, one of the fake trailers included therein, would be produced as its own theatrical release. It was released in 2010. Hobo with a Shotgun, another adpatation of a fake trailer from the film, was released in 2011, starring Rutger Hauer as the eponymous hero. A third trailer, Thanksgiving by Eli Roth, received its own film in 2023. This is also supposed to happen with Rob Zombie's Werewolf Women of the S.S..
• The Bubba Gump Shrimp Company restaurant chain came from the movie Forrest Gump (though in the movie, the company only caught the shrimp).
• The Crane Kick, taught by Mr. Miyagi in The Karate Kid is widely considered by martial artists (even practitioners of karate) to be a move too impractical to ever be used. Lyoto Machida, a mixed martial artist, used it to KO an old legend, Randy Couture - granted he didn't do it exactly like it was depicted in the film.
• The hockey team Anaheim Ducks was founded by Disney as Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, based on their film The Mighty Ducks. It's even Lampshaded in the third movie. "You've never heard of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks? They named a pro team after us." They have since dropped the "Mighty" and the uniforms from the movie, since Disney no longer owns the team, and have actually become quite a respectable team, having won The Stanley Cup in 2007. Gordon Bombay even cheered for them!
• The Samsung SPH-N270 was created to resemble the cell phone used in The Matrix Reloaded. Neo used a Nokia 8110. While the film prop version had been modified by the film's production crew to have its keypad cover spring-loaded, the retail model did not have this function. In response, the Nokia 7110 was later released, with a spring-loaded cover inspired by the film.
• Tropic Thunder: Yes, Alpa Chino's Booty Sweat energy drink is real, as are Portnoy's Engrish-laden "Jojo Jelly Beans." This means that the line that the beverage is "available at concessions" in the fake advertisement at the beginning of the film is either surprisingly blatant shilling or just that much funnier.
• Back to the Future series.
  • The multicoloured caps from Back to the Future Part II have undergone several rounds of production.
  • Nike produced the Hyperdunk shoe, designed after the Air McFly. And now they've filed patents for self-lacing Nikes.
    • Nike released the Air MAG, which copies the look of the shoes down to the lights. The ads explain it doesn't have autolaces since they were released in 2011, not 2015.
    • The patent for self-lacing shoes was not a red herring, Nike released a limited number of self-lacing pairs on Oct. 21, 2015. They were auctioned off for Parkinson's research.
  • Though unfortunately not an actual novel, author James Hunt created a real blank-page journal that features the very dust jacket of George McFly's first novel, A Match Made in Space. The photo of George McFly is not featured on the back of the jacket, however.
    • Similarly, many book and collectible retailers sell a replica of Gray's Sports Almanac, though this one is not blank. It's actually filled with sports stats from 1950-2000 with the benefit of actually having been produced in the 21st century.
  • To celebrate the day the second film takes place in the future (Oct. 21, 2015), Pepsi marketed a limited production run of 6,500 Pepsi Perfect bottles for $20.15 each on that date. Their advertisement for it gleefully plays up the film's imagery. Also, Universal decided to make a trailer for Jaws 19, and USA Today wrapped that day's edition in a recreation of the paper Doc shows Marty (complete with a Lampshade Hanging, regarding "a USA Today copy with fictional articles and studies, many of them inspired by Back to the Future Part II").
  • Skating company Arx Pax worked together with Tony Hawk to develop the hendo hoverboard as seen in the second film. It does not use antigravity technology to hover though, just electromagnetism.
  • Part II has a fictional "Florida Gators" in the World Series, as the state didn't have an MLB team yet. Thus in 2015 the Miami Marlins made sure to use the alligator logo in some specific days (including Oct. 21) and create some merchandise with it.
• Beetlejuice: And like BTTF, James Hunt did the same exact thing with The Handbook for the Recently Deceased.
• In Man With A Plan (1996), elderly Vermont hill-farmer Fred Tuttle played a man just like himself who ran for Congress against a well-funded city-slicker incumbent. Two years later, Tuttle sought, and won, the Republican U.S. Senate nomination against a rich city-slicker who had moved from out of state just to run. Then he turned around, bowed out and endorsed his general-election opponent (Democrat Patrick Leahy).
• Ghostbusters:
  • Stay Puft Marshmallows from Ghostbusters became a real product.
  • The iconic Ghostbusters theme song by Ray Parker Jr. also serves as their theme song in-universe, presumably as a catchy commercial jingle. Parker himself said he found the inspiration for the song from hearing commercial songs. In fact, several businesses have used the tune to promote themselves.
  • The firefighters at Hook & Ladder 8, the iconic New York City firehouse which was used as the Ghostbusters' headquarters in exterior shots, have adapted a modified version of the Ghostbusters "No Ghost" logo as their own; the cartoon ghost (now wearing firefighting gear) can be seen on their vehicles as well as painted on the sidewalk in front of the building. They also still have the prop sign from Ghostbusters II hanging on display in their garage.
  • Fans everywhere create their own Ghostbusters files, ranging from the 50 states to some foreign countries (though a few make sure to put a disclaimer on their website that they cannot do paranormal stuff exactly like the movie).
  • For Ghostbusters (2016), Erin and Abby's book "Ghosts of our Past" is available for sale (the Amazon.com author pages shown in the movie are even on the actual site), as is Tobin's Spirit Guide.
• Dolls based on Chucky and Tiffany from Child's Play are available in comic book stores. At least they're not marketed towards children...
• Wedding rings and piercing rings based on the One Ring from The Lord of the Rings are also available. There are many different versions of recipes for Lembas, books of songs, and a lot of other things.
• Gremlins:
  • Furbies are arguably defictionalized mogwai. Hasbro and Warner Bros. came to an agreement about the similarities between the two, and a "Gizmo: Friend of Furby" doll was released.
  • YouTuber wileyk209zback recreated the fire alarm from Gremlins 2: The New Batch.
• To promote the Speed Racer movie, NASCAR actually made the Mach 5. Its design is a mix between the car's actual design and NASCAR's traditional mold for cars.
• On the subject of NASCAR, in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the titular character drives the #62 car with a customized paint scheme - a mixture of orange and black tones, with a cougar painted on the hood with the word "ME", and the words "I Wanna Go Fast" under the rear spoiler. Six years later, Kurt Busch drove his #51 car with Ricky Bobby's #62 colors in the 2012 Aaron's 499 at Talladega Superspeedway. Ironically, given this was the year after Busch was fired from Penske Racing, many have considered Busch to now be an Expy of Ricky Bobby.
• To promote the film Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the Wreckers (whose car modes are as the NASCAR Chevrolets of Juan Pablo Montoya, Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. with heavy body armor) circled the track during the pace laps of the 2011 Daytona 500. In addition, both Bumblebee and Ironhide's alternate modes were available as actual cars that fans could purchase.
• The Talkboy from Home Alone 2: Lost in New York was originally conceived as a non-working prop for the film, one letter-writing campaign from 1990s kids later and it was Defictionalized by Tiger Electronics. It sold well enough that several variants were created.
• A Jumanji board game was produced when the movie came out. It plays much like the movie game, sans sucking in small children. Also features a few extra gameplay features using extra dice and an eight-second timer to stop the dangers from escaping into the outside world and, eventually, causing Armageddon. It featured additional nasty effects as well as those in the film, but one wonders how a player could finish the game if he or she were vaporized.
• A good deal of things seen (usually t-shirts) in Kevin Smith's movies are sold online.
• The red Swingline stapler from Office Space; originally a custom-painted prop made for the film, Swingline quickly started making real ones due to demand.
• One could debate this, but with the release of the Watchmen film, an animated version of the the comic within the film Tales from the Black Freighter was put out on DVD (and will apparently be available on a huge extended super mega long director's gigantic untamed unrated cut of the film).
  • The action figures of the Watchmen are another possibly debatable one, since superhero action figures are far from unusual regardless of the property. However, a set of them is featured in Adrian's office in the movie as part of a display of in-universe merchandise based on the team.
• Excerpts of Philosophy of Time Travel books started being released after Donnie Darko became a Cult Classic.
• Casablanca - There is a restaurant named Rick's in Casablanca, Morocco.
• Half credit given to Big, with the famous piano scene in FAO Schwartz. The floor piano itself was real, but wasn't made in the scale the movie required, being a smaller 6' version compared to the near 16' needed to have the notes and width for two people. After the movie, the company did actually make the longer version, and it was indeed set up in FAO Schwarz for people to play on.
  • Somebody also made a playable version of the game Josh plays early in the movie. It's almost 100% accurate to the movie, in that it's only one screen long and all you can do is fool around with the text parser until either the wizard kills you or you figure out the one command ("THROW POD") that defeats him. Still: neat, huh?
• There are no fewer than three formulae for Transparent Aluminium after Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
  • One of which, corundum, with the formula of Al2O3, is better known as rubies and sapphires. Aluminum Oxynitride may be a better fit, though, being entirely synthetic.
• There was a commercial for a real-life "Heart of the Ocean" necklace shortly after the release of Titanic (1997).
• The classic Preston Sturges movie Sullivan's Travels is about a filmmaker who wants to make a movie called "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" He never makes the movie, but several decades later someone else did. The movie features several nods to Sullivan's Travels.
• The set of Fried Green Tomatoes was purchased after the filming and made into an actual restaurant in Forsyth, Georgia. Eating here can be rather confusing as they kept all the memorabilia from the movie, including newspaper clippings about the restaurant dating to the 1920s. This can lead someone who isn't familiar with the real history of the restaurant to believe the movie was based on it, instead of the other way around. It also has some slightly bizarre connotations, given that a major plot point of the film was a Domestic Abuser's corpse being made into barbecue and served to unsuspecting customers.
• The midichlorians from Star Wars now have been used to name a species of bacteria that infect the mitochondria inside the cells of a species of tick.
  • This is odd, since the description in The Phantom Menace suggests that "midichlorian" is a collective term for mitochondria and plastids.
  • Various fans have naturally created varying replicas of the lightsaber. Physicist Michio Kaku went one step further and created a design for a functional replica of the lightsaber using real world materials and processes still in development. It's essentially a powerful plasma torch with a portable power supply using a theoretical super high capacity carbon nanotube battery. It's expected to be out in 50 years. As of January 2016, a functional lightsaber is now a thing, although it's less of a lightsaber and more of a lighter shaped like a lightsaber. And by December 2019, a practical lightsaber that can actually be used for cutting things has finally become a reality. This version is based on the Protosaber, a prototype lightsaber powered by an external portable battery box.
  • Even the Jedi have been gaining real-life followers. We're dead serious. And this is just one sect of it.
  • A real-life R2-D2 robot was made for The Force Awakens, and a fully-functional BB-8 was officially made after.
• The Shining: Jack Torrance's debut novel, All Work And No Play Makes Jack A Dull Boy, is just the title phrase repeated on seventy pages — but you can buy it anyway.
• The Turboman doll from Jingle All the Way was actually released through Wal-Mart for the 1996 Christmas season.
• As a way to add to the illusion of reality for the Japanese film All About Lily Chou-Chou, two singles and an album were released under the titular character's name.
• The band from The Commitments also toured as a real band.
• According to the IMDb trivia entry for Local Hero, "After the movie came out, many people went in search of the village with the phone booth. Since it didn't exist, they were always disappointed. The village where the movie was filmed finally decided to put up a phone booth for the sake of the visitors."
• Wilson Sporting Goods still sells a volleyball just like the one in Cast Away.
• The Fight Club soap is an exact copy of the one used in the film, very popular. It probably doesn't contain the "special ingredient" that Tyler and the Narrator used, though.
• In what may be the most widespread and disturbing versions of Defictionalization EVER, there are actually people who have "Truman syndrome", or "The Truman Show Delusion", is the stark belief that they are secretly being filmed all the time. Several dozen cases have been reported since 1998, the year The Truman Show was released.
• Since the release of Pineapple Express there have been several attempts by dealers & legal growers to market their own strains of marijuana under the name "Pineapple Express". The results, invariably turn out far more disappointing than as they were described in the film.
• A street-legal replica of the TRON: Legacy lightcycle.
• There are now real-life Soylent Green wafers, produced by the Parallax Corporation. Unlike the film, there are no Human Resources involved.
• There is a Bates Motel in Vale, Oregon.
• Blade Runner:
  • The police offices constructed in Union Station, Los Angeles for the filming of the movie still stand today, in use as station offices. The crew was able to get a little bit of a discount if Union Station officials agreed to keep the set for practical use after filming was over.
  • Some cities, particularly Shanghai, look more and more like Blade Runner every year.
  • Deckard's revolver, the prop of which is built around a firing revolver, is a popular custom project for gun smiths. Adam Savage has built numerous attempts to replicate it perfectly.
• Adam Banjo and Roy Sullivan were a pair of fictional country musicians in The Devil's Rejects. The same year the movie came out, a supposed Banjo & Sullivan Greatest Hits Album was also released. In reality, of course, Rob Zombie had commissioned real life country musician Jesse Dayton to write and perform the music.
• Apollonia 6's album was released about two months after the group's appearance in the Purple Rain film.
• Phil Coulson's beloved Captain America trading cards from The Avengers are now available for purchase by fans courtesy of prop collectibles company eFX.
  • A subversion happened when Ben & Jerry's said they wouldn't release the "Stark Raving Hazelnuts" and "Hunka Hulk Burning' Fudge" flavors discussed in Avengers: Infinity War (and with the latter featured in Avengers: Endgame), but fans still try to make said ice cream themselves.
• The 1989 movie The Blood Of Heroes, also known as The Salute Of The Jugger, features a violent gladiatorial sport named Jugger. A number of LARP systems across the world now have their own in-world version of the rules, and quite a lot play by a formalized INTERNATIONALLY RECOGNISED ruleset.
• Real Steel has been said to be the direct inspiration for the Syfy show Robot Combat League.
• The soundtrack of That Thing You Do! was released on the Play-Tone Records label. (Tom Hanks would also use the name for his production company.) The title track became a minor hit in its own right, making the Billboard Hot 100, and occasionally being heard on Oldies radio to this day.
• Played with in the case of Rocky III; while a "Rocky" pinball machine exists, it's different than the one that appears in the movie.
• The eponymous fighting arena in The Octagon inspired the shape of (what else) the Octagon in the UFC. Consequently, octagons have become the most popular shape for Mixed Martial Arts rings across all promotions.
• The Rutles: originally a film parodying the Beatles, the fictional band stepped completely out of fictional territory with the release of their CD Archaeology in 1996 (purely by coincidence paralleling the release of the Beatles' Anthology). While there had been an earlier Rutles release, it was not purported to be a "genuine" Rutles album; instead it was a soundtrack to their initial TV special. Although there was still a fictitious aspect to Archaeology (the new recordings were said to have comprised a 'lost Rutles album' from 1970), the three remaining members of the group not only thanked the Beatles in the booklet, but credited themselves under their own names. Even further, the lyrics of "Questionnaire" directly address John Lennon's murder, while "Unfinished Words" weaves in the titles of various Beatles 'outfakes.'
• Summer Lovers. The villa where Michael and Cathy stay is now a gift shop called "Summer Lovers."
• When fans of Free Willy found out that the star of the film was sickly and living in a small tank at a theme park, a campaign to free him into the wild was started and he was eventually released into the ocean. The release didn't go like it did in the movie, but it brought him back to health and he was able to roam the ocean as he pleased.
• The leg lamp from A Christmas Story became a real product in 2003. And yes, it comes in a crate marked "Fragile" and "His end up".
  • A fan of the film, Brian Jones, purchased the original house used for the film and designed it to look like the original sets as accurately as possible. He took it even further and created a gift shop where you can buy every single prop in the film.
• Destination Moon has one of the strongest examples possible. The movie contains Woody Woodpecker cartoons which were created by the space agency to explain the concepts of space travel and a journey to the moon to the general public. A decade later NASA actually used these cartoons for the same purpose.
• The crew from Kingsman: The Secret Service teamed up with real Savile Row tailors to make their own brand.
• Since part of Jurassic World's premise is that the titular park is now a reality, it's no surprise that the main marketing strategy for the film is to make the park seem as real and authentic as possible. In particular, we have:
  • The memetically awesome website, a site for the park instead of the film. It has such features as information on the park itself (such as a map, pages describing the attractions, info on the park's dinosaurs, etc.), schedules for attractions and wait times, the time of day, the current temperature and climate, a live webcam of the park and—as of the film's official release—a brief "We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties" message. The Facebook page also acted as one for the park for a while.
  • The Jurassic World "snap bands", which were used to identify park guests in the film.
  • An official Jurassic World "guidebook" of sorts entitled "The Park is Open" (though it's marketed as a children's sticker book), which also comes with Jurassic World visitor passes.
  • A Jurassic World brochure distributed by Best Buy and Samsung, along with some really neat trading cards.
• The horror film found. shows clips from a fictional Film Within a Film called Headless. Headless was later made into a full-length movie.
• Honeymooon in Vegas featured an iconic scene where Nicolas Cage parachuted into Vegas with a team of pro sky divers dressed up as Elvis Presley. Guess what these sky divers did later.
• A talking action figure based on Weebo from the movie Flubber was released to tie in with the movie.
• For the 25th anniversary of Home Alone the company Uber Eats announced they would begin to deliver a limited run of pizzas branded from Little Nero's Pizza.'
• The fucking Catalina Wine Mixer "featured" in Step Brothers has finally became a real event.
• Surprisingly enough, the idea of spring break for many colleges and schools originated from the movie Where The Boys Are, in which four college-aged woman go on a trip during the springtime during the school year.
• In honour of Dodgeball's mockery of its channels, ESPN actually rebranded their college-focused ESPNU as ESPN 8: The Ocho for twenty-four hours on August 8th (yeah, 8/8) 2017, dedicating the day to esoteric (kabaddi), unpopular (darts) or barely-qualifying-as (the moxie games?!) sports. It was so successful they've repeated the stunt every year since (on ESPN 2).
• Alan Moore has discussed how his upcoming film The Show (continuing from the Show Pieces shorts) is intended to have "reverse product placement", where the fictional products seen in the films suddenly turn up on real supermarket shelves.
• The featured team in the 1991 American football film Necessary Roughness is the Texas State Fightin' Armadillos. At the time, no school was named simply Texas State. From Banner Society: 'Texas State is now a real FBS school, after Southwest Texas State was renamed in the 2000s. The actual Texas State is like the movie Texas State without the past glory.' However, the mascots differ: Fictional Texas State are the Armadillos, real life Texas State is the Bobcats.
  • The real Southwest Texas State Bobcats actually appeared in the movie, as one of the fictional Texas State's opponents.
• The Hong Kong film The God of Cookery featured the "Sorrowful Rice", made with Cantonese-style barbecued pork, bok choy (a type of Chinese cabbage), fried eggs, onions, and fried rice, has since become available in some street restaurants in Hong Kong (the humble, hearty dish is not supposed be sorrowful itself, but to comfort those who are).
• One of the storylines in Love Actually was ageing rockstar Billy Mac's attempt to claim the UK Christmas No1 with a reworking of the Troggs' "Love Is All Around". The song would be entered into the real race for the UK Christmas No1 race in 2003. He fared less successful in real life - it peaked at No26.
• The comic book from Creepshow was released in 1982.
• All About Eve depicts the title character winning the Sarah Siddons Award (named for an 18th century British actress). There was no such award at the time, but theatre patrons in Chicago established a real Sarah Siddons Award in 1952, which is still being given annually.
• 1968 saw the release of the first movie in the Olsen-banden series, in which the protagonists regularly crack open safes from a fictional German brand called Franz Jäger. Then in 2014 a Norwegian company called Safe Direkte started selling safes with the Franz Jäger name imprinted on them. No word on if anyone calling themselves Olsen (or Jönsson) has managed to crack the real-world safes open yet, though.
• The Foo Fighters recorded an album as Dream Widow, the band featured in their film Studio 666.
• Saw 3D: Physical copies of Bobby's "S.U.R.V.I.V.E." book were released as rarity merchandise for the film, albeit with entirely blank pages. A number of the copies were autographed by Costas Mandylor.
• In the "Weird Al" Yankovic mockumentary The Compleat Al, the narrator mentions that the men's bathroom where Al recorded "My Bologna" is recognized as a historical landmark. In 2017, California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo recognized the men's bathroom as a historical landmark, complete with official plaque.
• Honeymoon in Vegas: the men who played Flying Elvises (Utah Chapter) had so much fun doing it that they kept on jumping out of planes while dressed as Elvis Impersonators in real life as the Flying Elvi.
• Kill Bill: The entire movie has been described as the defictionalization of Fox Force Five, the failed TV pilot that Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction starred in. They both star Uma Thurman (or a character played by her) as an Action Girl who is extremely gifted with bladed weapons, a knife in the case of Fox Force Five's Raven McCoy and a katana in the case of Kill Bill's Beatrix Kiddo. In both, she is part of a team of five people in a World of Action Girls; the titular team in Fox Force Five was comprised entirely of "foxy chicks," while the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad in Kill Bill was mostly female but had a token male member in Budd and took its orders from the titular Bill. What's more, from how Mia describes each member of the Fox Force, they all have loose parallels in the DVAS. Finally, Fox Force Five is described as a fundamentally lighthearted escapist action show that was clearly inspired by the famous '70s show Charlie's Angels, while Kill Bill is a Genre Throwback to '70s exploitation films that had no pretensions of being high art. Some fans, in fact, have speculated that Kill Bill is an in-universe movie within the broader Shared Universe of Quentin Tarantino's films.
• Singles: The Fake Band Citizen Dick, portrayed by actor Matt Dillon and the members of Pearl Jam, recorded a full version of their in-universe single "Touch Me I'm Dick" ^note actually a cover / parody of Mudhoney's "Touch Me I'm Sick", although only a little of it was heard in the movie - an actual single was released in 2015 for Record Store Day, complete with Stylistic Suck artwork of the band posing in character and feelies in the form of a flyer for one of the band's live performances.
• Little Golden Books published a real-life version of the fictional Baby's Day Out book in 1994 as a tie-in with the film of the same name.

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