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Freaky Friday Flip / Live-Action Films

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  • 18 Again! (1988): The whole plot of the movie revolves around Jack ending up in his grandson's body. While it's never really revealed if it is a full switch or not, it is generally believed that David is in Jack's body while Jack is in a coma.
  • All Cheerleaders Die: When Leena resurrected the girls, she inadvertently swapped Hannah and Martha's bodies with each other.
  • In the old Hong Kong spy flick, The Brain Stealers, the main villain, Professor Zero, has a brain-swapping machine (true to the film's title) which can switch the minds of two people by strapping them in chairs. Zero had one of his minions, Peter, swapping minds with the kidnapped son of a highly-qualified scientist, Dr. Li, in order to infiltrate the Li household and steal a powerful (and forbidden) growth formula.
  • The Change-Up: family man switches bodies with bachelor.
  • The Australian comedy Dating the Enemy has a fighting couple switch and experience life in the opposite gender's body, bettering each other's life in the process before getting their bodies (and their love for each other) back.
  • The Russian film Day Watch has this with two protagonists who do it to hide one of them.
  • Detention has a temporal version of this. Sloan Fisher wakes up in her teenage daughter Ione's body in the present day of 2011, while Ione wakes up in Sloan's body... in 1992, back when Sloan was in high school. This plays havoc on the film's Timey-Wimey Ball, and is one of the factors that almost leads to the end of the world.
  • 2015's The Christmas Trade has a magical stuffed bear who swaps the bodies of a workaholic lawyer (Billy Baldwin) with his 11-year-old son

  • 1989's Dream a Little Dream exchanges the minds of a senior citizen (Jason Robards) and a teenager (Corey Feldman), which throws a little bit of both Overnight Age-Up and Fountain of Youth into the mix.
    • Dream A Little Dream was a bit more complicated. The mind of Coleman (the old man) entered the body of Bobby (the teenager) and took over. Coleman's body was nowhere to be found. Bobby's mind was suppressed, but showed up to talk to Coleman in his dreams. Coleman's wife, Gena, also vanished. Her consciousness showed up inside Lainie, Bobby's would-be girlfriend, but Lainie's mind remained dominant.
    • At approximately the same time as Dream a Little Dream was released, three other body-swap movies with the same young/old theme hit theaters: Like Father, Like Son (1987), Eighteen Again (1988), and Vice Versa (1988). See Dueling Movies.
  • Face/Off more or less plays like a mind-switch. Sean Archer undergoes a plastic surgery that gives him the face and voice of Castor Troy to get information from Castor's brother Pollux about a big bomb called "Sinclaire". But Castor wakes up from his coma, forces the doctor to give him Archer's face, and stays that way for the rest of the movie. By making the surgery so perfect that the only way to tell them apart is a blood sample, we enjoy how the two lead actors must change their performances 40 minutes in and take on the personality of the other character. John Travolta as Castor Troy looks no different from John Travolta as Sean Archer, but allows for very obvious contrast between how the two characters behave.
  • Family Swap: The patriarch of a Dysfunctional Family of five (mom, dad, two daughters and one son) makes a wish that he had another family. They wake up the next morning to discover they've all swapped bodies with one another. Granny and a pet llama get added to the mix as the family finds there are nights where they swap again (with the swapping order being random) and others where nothing changes.
  • Freaky: Typical schoolgirl Millie Kessler swaps bodies with a Serial Killer, and has a day to reverse the switch or be trapped in his body forever. Appropriately enough, the film's Working Title was Freaky Friday the 13th.
  • Mary Rodgers's Freaky Friday has been adapted to film four times (1976 and 2003 theatrical films, 1995 and 2018 TV movies). The two main characters are switched after they coincidentally wish for the other to be in their shoes.
    • This is true for the movies. In the original book, the teenage daughter wakes up in her mother's body, but doesn't know that her mother is in her (teenage) body, because she is faking it to teach her a lesson...
  • The Mexican movie Dame Tu Cuerpo ("Give Me Your Body", Double Entendre intended) is about the fiancée and the best friend of a guy who switch bodies days before the wedding. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In The Hot Chick, the main character who is an Alpha Bitch is bodyswapped with a (male) criminal. In this case, the bodies change into the other person's body, so the main character goes to sleep and wakes up in her own bed with a man's body.
  • Identity Theft: Matt and Karen wake up in each other's bodies. Later, Rachel and Carrie.
  • The Brazilian movie Se Eu Fosse Você ("If I Were You") has a squabbling husband and wife changing bodies. It goes back to normal after the couple has sex. It warranted a sequel, when both are about to split up, their daughter is pregnant and thus needs to get married... and to make things worse, sex doesn't fix things, only gets the "husband" pregnant.
  • It's a Boy Girl Thing swapped the high-school jock and the unpopular geek girl.
  • Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle features four teenagers who enter a video game and are put into the bodies of the avatars they chose. The awkward nerd becomes a buff Adventurer Archaeologist, the gym-hating bookworm a hot Action Girl, the Jerk Jock a short Plucky Comic Relief sidekick, and the phone-obsessed Alpha Bitch an overweight man.
    • The sequel takes it further: there are more players, they don't end up in the same avatars, and at one point there's a trap that switches them around again.
  • The 2007 Singaporean comedy, Just Follow Law, have a salaryman and Struggling Single Father, Lim Teng-zhui and his bitchy, obnoxious supervisor, Tanya, unintentionally swapping bodies after a car accident between the two. The two of them wakes up, realize they're in each other's bodies, and then discovers the personal hardships in each other's lives - Lim struggling to raise a daughter after his divorce, and Tanya neglecting her parents from being Married to the Job - after some wacky hijinks. They ultimately reconciled, an unexpected romance occurs (with them in each other's bodies) and eventually they become a family with Lim's daughter referring to Tanya as "mommy". However, the ending, which is portrayed on a positive note, implies that they never managed to undo the body-swapping and will be stuck living in each other's bodies for the rest of their lives.
  • The Filipino TV movie Kuya and Me has a 5-year old boy wish to be like his Cool Big Bro, which is granted literally when both swap bodies with each other. Things are further complicated when a second swap impacts puts the big brother in the body of his girlfriend while she inhabits his younger brother's body.
  • Like Father Like Son (1987) has Dudley Moore (the father) and Kirk Cameron (the son) switching bodies through a Native American magic potion that requires eye contact for the bodies to switch souls.
  • The Magic Statue: Sam and Penny wake up in each other's bodies.
  • In The Man Who Changed His Mind, Dr. Laurience develops a means of swapping the minds and souls of people. After testing it on chimpanzees, he uses it to transfer the mind of his assistant Clayton from his wheelchair-bound body into the body of Lord Haslewood. He then uses it to swap bodies with Dick Haslewood.
  • The Korean comedy Miss Change has a bit of a spin on this. A lawyer discovers the body of a girl alone one stormy night, and accidentally swaps bodies with her. He and his friend later discover that anyone who kisses her body swaps with her. The end has the lawyer dumping the girl in a bus stop, as an old beggar swaps bodies with her.
  • Prelude to a Kiss has Alec Baldwin as a new husband who is somewhat disconcerted when his new wife's psyche and that of an old man are switched when he kisses her on their wedding day.
  • Pretty Cool: At one point, the protagonist's sister and best friend trade minds with her pet cat and his teacher respectively.
  • Scooby-Doo (2002) has a scene featuring a 4-way body swapping between Fred, Daphne, Velma, and Shaggy. The bodies rotate a few times before everyone gets back to normal.
  • Skin Deep (2022) is set on an island where characters voluntarily swap bodies. A young boyfriend and girlfriend swap bodies with a more experienced husband and wife, respectively. Later, the girlfriend swaps with an older man.
  • The Disney movie The Swap (Which apparently is a parody of Freaky Friday) features two students suddenly switching bodies thanks to using a magic app to text that they wish that they had each others' lives.
  • The Takeover, a 2013 short film directed by Shequeta Smith, features a black and a white woman, best friends, each of whom believes that the other has an advantage in the dating world. The barista overhears their conversation and sets this trope in motion for a one day period by serving them both a magical espresso.
  • The 1940 comedy Turnabout (later adapted as a short-lived TV sitcom) has a married couple inhabiting each other's bodies due to a spell from an enchanted statue. In the film (not the TV version), the voices go with the selves, so that the husband's body speaks with the wife's voice and the wife's with the husband's — as in more-recent animated cartoons.
  • Vice Versa is about an undersized preteen who swaps bodies with his workaholic father using a jewelled oriental skull. The boy has fun for a while but then the plot begins when he realizes he doesn't know how to change back....
  • 1996 Disney Channel television-movie Wish Upon a Star (starring Katherine Heigl and Danielle Harris... and weirdly enough, released on home video not by Disneynote ) concerns two very different sisters who unintentionally switch bodies while wishing upon a shooting star. They learn to love each other, do some math tutoring, go to the Big Dance, and get their bodies back.
  • The 1999 made for TV Wonderful World of Disney movie (boy, Disney sure likes to use this gimmick a lot) A Saintly Switch finds David Alan Grier and Vivica A. Fox switching bodies. For a rare complication, the wife was pregnant but too early on to be aware of it before the switch, which sees the husband having to go through the pregnancy on top of the usual issues with adapting to life in his wife's body.
  • In Xchange, this becomes the fastest means of cross-country travel for those who can afford it (usually "corpies"), although the technology is also abused both by "corpies" (the protagonist's boss uses it to exercise his body without actually exerting himself by swapping bodies with his personal trainer; the trainer exercises, while the boss works, then they swap back) and underground sex clubs (they have a bootleg mind swap machine). The protagonist ends up in a Grand Theft Me situation, when the man who swaps into his body ends up being a hitman, who absconds with the body, while his own new body is about to be returned to its rightful owner (the fact that he will end up dead is no one's problem).


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