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Hilarious In Hindsight / Live-Action Films
aka: Film

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Films with their own pages:

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/panam-cropped.jpg
...and by the time 2001 rolled around, they had been out of business for 10 years.

Other Examples:

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    # 

    A 
  • At the end of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Bud and Lou, having survived Dracula (played by the original screen Dracula, Bela Lugosi), the Wolf Man (played by Lon Chaney Jr., the one and only Wolf Man), and Frankenstein's Monster (played by Glenn Strange, who'd played the Monster in two previous films, after Boris Karloff passed on the project), run into the Invisible Man in the film's closing gag, who is unmistakably voiced by horror film star Vincent Price. But at the time this film was made Price was not known as a horror film star (although he did play the title role in The Invisible Man Returns in 1940). It would not be for another five years before Price did his first real horror movie (House of Wax), and not for another ten years that he began doing them regularly (with Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe adaptations beginning in 1958). Today, that closing gag with Abbott & Costello is both a hilarious and touching passing of the torch from one generation of horror film stars to the next.
  • In Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, Benjamin Walker played the 16th President of the United States. In the Broadway rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, he played the 7th president of the United States. Both of these were deliberately unconventional takes on the lives of those historical figures.
  • Early in Aces Go Places, Hongkong local Officer Nancy Ho refuses to act as expert Detective Albert "Kodojak" Au's wife for a case, what with how he acted when she got to know him immediately before. Similarly early in the second movie, she marries him for real, although it partly seems to be in order to henpeck him into someone more bearable.
  • Disney's Adventures in Babysitting features a character named Sara, who is a massive fangirl of The Mighty Thor In 2009, Disney would buy Marvel Comics and by association Marvel Studios... who in Thor: The Dark World had Thor sliding down a skyscraper window just like Sara. Doubly so, given the character of Dawson, who Sara mistakes for Thor, is played by Vincent D'Onofrio, who'd play The Kingpin in Daredevil (2015).
  • A sight gag from Airplane II: The Sequel showed a movie poster featuring a 90-or-so-year-old man in boxing trunks and gloves with the caption "Rocky XXXVIII" became funnier with the release of the sixth film, Rocky Balboa, a full 30 years after the original Rocky and 16 years after Rocky V.
  • Alaska features a poacher played by Charlton Heston. He would go on to become president of the NRA from 1998 to 2003.
  • Documentary production company Prometheus Entertainment (established in 1999) is behind the series Ancient Astronauts and also a behind-the-scenes documentary about the Alien films. Now, the Alien prequel is named...Prometheus?!
  • In Altered States, in a scene at an airport, the "background noise" voice at the scene's start (56:45) announces "Paging Daniel Craig..."
  • The Amazing Spider-Man:
    • Irrfan Khan plays Dr. Rajit Ratha, who worked with Peter Parker's father Dr. Richard Parker prior to the latter's disappearance. Later the same year, Irrfan Khan would appear in Life of Pi as the adult Pi, who as a teenager was stranded on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named...Richard Parker.
    • Sticking with Life of Pi, the author was going to be played by Tobey Maguire, who portrayed Spider-Man in the Sam Raimi-directed films. He was replaced due to director Ang Lee's concerns that he was too well-known and would be distracting for the audience.
    • When Andrew Garfield took on the role of Spider-Man, much was made of him being a British actor. He's actually played a New Yorker before, in the Doctor Who episodes "Daleks of Manhattan" and "Evolution of the Daleks".
    • Garfield has also said that if Sony ever made Peter Parker gay and gave Mary Jane a Gender Flip, the only actor he'd want in the role was Michael B. Jordan. Jordan has since been cast in the Fantastic Four reboot as the Human Torch, a character well known for his Ho Yay interactions with Spidey in the comics.
  • In American Beauty, directed by Sam Mendes, Lester is upset that he has to miss the James Bond marathon on TNT to go support his daughter, a cheerleader at the basketball game. Guess who ended up directing the Bond films Skyfall and Spectre.
  • When the American Film Institute compiled their list of "100 Years... 100 Heroes & Villains" in 2003, Hannibal Lecter was named the #1 movie villain of all time, while Darth Vader was #3, James Bond was named the #3 movie hero of all time, and two different characters from Star Wars (Obi-Wan Kenobi and Han Solo) both made the heroes list. Fast-forward 16 years: if you still believe that list, then Mads Mikkelsen may very well be the King of the Villains. He not only is Hannibal Lecter, he's also the very first bad guy that James Bond ever fought, and the man who built the Death Star to boot.
  • In An American Werewolf in London, David runs in public and shouts various obscenities in attempt to get arrested and locked up before the next full moon, one of them being "Prince Charles is a faggot!" Charles would announce his engagement to Diana Spencer a few months after the scene was shot, and the film was released a month after their wedding; to save face, the filmmakers included a congratulatory message to them in the credits. Said message has since become Harsher in Hindsight, given how their marriage turned out...
  • In the 1993 film on AIDS, And the Band Played On, a conference leads to Ken Jenkins asking this question, sure to inspire much inappropriate laughter in those who recognize him as Dr. Kelso on Scrubs:
    Dennis Donahue: When the doctors start acting like businessmen, who do the people turn to for doctors?
  • Three words: Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.
    • From Demolition Man:
      (Context: Huxley has just told Spartan that she did some research at the "Schwarzenegger Presidential Library")
      John Spartan: Stop, he was president?
      Lenina Huxley: Yes! Even though he was not born in this country, his popularity at the time caused the 61st Amendment, which states —
      John Spartan: I don't want to know.
      • The list of convicts in Demolition Man also included one Scott Peterson, about a decade before the real-life murder case.
      • It's also mentioned that Jeffrey Dahmer is held there, even though in real life, he was killed in prison a few years after the film was made.
    • From Last Action Hero:
      Nick: There's lots worse things than movies. There's politicians and wars and forest fires and... and famine and plague and... sickness, pain, warts, politicians—
      Jack Slater: You already mentioned them.
      Nick: I know I did, they're twice as bad as anything else.
    • Also from Last Action Hero:
      Mayor: This is the Lieutenant Governor!
      Jack Slater: [punches the Lieutenant Governor] When the Governor gets here, call me.
    • The fight scene between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura in the movie version of The Running Man. Tell anyone back then that both men would be elected as US Governors and they would have called you nuts.....heh. Arnold's character even says "I'm not into politics, I'm into survival!". And it gives new meaning to the "running" in the title.
      • Both men are also together in Predator (which even has a failed gubernatorial candidate in Sonny Landham) and Batman & Robin (where Ventura is Arnold's guard in Arkham, no less).
      • Even the T-shirts Minnesotans started wearing after Ventura's election, that claimed "My governor can beat up your governor", became ironically amusing in hindsight when Schwarzenegger won California.
    • This goes all the way back to his second (uncredited) American film appearance. In the 1973 movie adaptation of The Long Goodbye, Philip Marlowe yells at a cop that he'll go to Ronald Reagan, then-governor. In the very next scene, he walks into a room flanked by two mute strong guys, one of whom would later be the governor. Marlowe, it seems, was really serious about making sure that cop got reported.
    • At one point in Are You Being Served?, Cesar says, "Listen very carefully", which would later become part of Michelle's catchphrase on another David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd sitcom, 'Allo 'Allo!.
  • The film version of Arsenic and Old Lace opens with a scene of a major league baseball game being played on Halloween, something which would have been ludicrous in 1944,note  but has happened several times since the Turn of the Millennium.
  • In the forgotten skiing film Aspen Extreme, one of the main characters mentions that the Detroit Red Wings never win and aren't worth watching. Four years later, the Red Wings won the Stanley Cup and began over two decades of being one of the NHL's more dominating teams.
  • In Austin Powers, the title character laments his opponent's poor choice of weapon with the words "Who throws a shoe?! Honestly!" Now, remember what happened to President Bush when he was giving an interview to the press... though he did dodge that shoe.
    • This is even funnier, as an Israeli man got thrown into prison for three years after he threw a shoe at Supreme Court President Judge Dorit Beinish. Even funnier when you think about all the hype both cases got...
    • Though the above mentioned "attack on the U.S. president" could be looked at more as more Harsher in Hindsight.
    • It seems someone over in the James Bond writing department was taking notes, because Spectre takes a plot point Austin Powers plays for laughs, namely, that a world-famous spy and his greatest nemesis are brothers, and plays it for drama instead.
    • In addition to Austin and Dr. Evil, Mike Myers plays THE Fat Bastard, an overweight, ill-tempered Scotsman with grotesque eating habits and bowel movements that were potentially fatal to a donkey. Who does that sound like?
  • An Empire magazine article from 2006 on the film that would become Avatar (then named Project 880) included descriptions of seven major characters (from a casting notice that had been leaked online). The magazine included casting suggestions for each of them and were dead-on in predicting Michelle Rodriguez as Trudy.

    B 
  • A simple Alice Allusion in Baby's Day Out when one character says "Hey, Eddie, maybe he went down a rabbit hole" becomes hilarious when you realize that the scene also has Joe Pantoliano, who would star in another movie that famously used the same reference.
  • The scene from Back to the Future Part II where Marty shows two future kids how to play Wild Gunman, and they deride it because "you have to use your hands". This is funnier given some fanboys' reaction to motion-control systems like the Wii, the Kinect, and the PlayStation Move.
    • 80s nostalgia a big thing in 2015? Check (not to mention how much influence it is). Flying cars? Check (although not in mass production), Self-lacing shoes? Check (although just as a working proto), Endless sequels? Check (though Jaws didn't get a 19th movie), Shiny downtown vs. Grimy suburbia? Check (although few suburban areas have become as bad as Hilldale), Interactive glasses? Check (even if Google Glass wasn't a success).
    • In 2015, Marty notices the Chicago Cubs winning the series against Miami (depicted by an alligator mascot). A few months later plans were announced for a Miami ball team, and the Marlins began playing in 1993. The 2015 Marlins didn't really amount to anything, while the Cubs clinched their first-ever NLCS that year (their first chance to a Fall Classic in seven decades), only to be crushed by the underdog New York Mets exactly on October 21. In 2016, the Cubs actually won the damn thing after overcoming a 3-1 deficit in the World Series. The filmmakers justified themselves by remarking that in the film's timeline, the 1994 MLB strike never happened in the first place.
    • Also in 2015, Pizza Hut seems to have changed their pizzas into dehydrated discs. 1 year prior in real life, Pizza Hut did something new by introducing specialty pizzas with different flavored crusts and sauce drizzles.
    • Oh, there's more. By 2015, Statler Toyota has become Statler Pontiac. GM cut its Pontiac line in 2009. Meanwhile, predictions that Japan would dominate the world went as wrong as that about fax succeeding mail (however, the message about 2015!Marty being fired reaches every machine in the house instantly, just like an e-mail will reach any device linked to the receiving account).
    • Lea Thompson has this line in Back to the Future Part III: "Sure'n I hope you're considerin' the future, Mr. Eastwood". 22 years later, she has a cameo in J. Edgar.
    • In The Fly II, Eric Stoltz plays Martin Brundle, son of Seth Brundle aka "Brundlefly". So, as Obscurus Lupa points out in her review, Stoltz goes from almost becoming Marty McFly to becoming... Marty McFly.
    • Word of God said the Biff Tannen of 1985-A was inspired by Donald Trump. According to the Biff Tannen Museum video, Biff's marriage to Lorraine was his third ("Third time's the charm"). In real life, Trump also got married three times.note 
  • Nicolas Cage co-starred with the original Bad Lieutenant, Harvey Keitel, in the National Treasure films. Cage would go on to play the Lieutenant himself in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
  • Bananas - in the courtroom scene, a large black woman takes the witness stand and identifies herself as J.Edgar Hoover, explaining that security required appearing in disguise in public. Already funny, this was some time before someone started a rumor that Hoover was a secret cross-dresser.
  • Barbara the Fair with the Silken Hair was filmed in 1969. In one scene of the film, the underwater king tells his Rebellious Princess daughter that he is constantly finding wonderful potential bridegrooms for her – "and what bridegrooms! Pureblood wizards!" Hearing this line now is a lot more funny.
  • Batman Forever
    • Jim Carrey's Riddler says "if knowledge is power, then A God Am I!" Several years later, he ends up playing a man endowed with all of God's powers, in Bruce Almighty.
    • Nicole Kidman played Batman's Love Interest in this movie. She then went on to play Aquaman's mother in his debut solo movie for the DC Extended Universe. Adding onto the hilarity is that Ben Affleck, who plays the DCEU's Batman, had similar jokes made about him previously starring alongside Diane Lane, who plays DCEU Superman's adoptive mother.
    • Back in its day, this movie notably deviated from canon by having Dick Grayson already be an adult by the time he's taken in by Bruce, with them having a bit of Adaptation Relationship Overhaul going on. Fast forward fifteen years later, Captain America: The First Avenger is released and rather than being a Kid Sidekick like he was in the comics, Bucky is reimagined as an adult contemporary to Captain America/Steve Rogers as well. For bonus points, Tommy Lee Jones who played the villainous Two-Face in Batman Forever stars as Colonel Chester Phillips, a character who's on the same side as Steve and Bucky.
  • Batman Returns was originally supposed to have featured a modernized version of Batman's Kid Sidekick (played by Marlon Wayans), who would go unnamed (and without a costume) for most of the film before revealing at the end that he's known by the name "Robin". Christopher Nolan ended up using an eerily similar idea in The Dark Knight Rises decades later, with Batman teaming up with a young cop named John Blake, whose Embarrassing First Name is revealed to be "Robin" at the very end of the movie.
    • In an additional bit, Wayans' portrayal of Robin obviously would've been a Race Lift. While that didn't pan out, Wayans did go on to play a Race Lifted version of the character Ripcord in G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
    • Michelle Pfeiffer's portrayal of Catwoman went on to become one of the most memorable and recognizable depictions of a female supervillain in Western pop culture. Decades later, Pfeiffer would get cast as a superhero in Ant-Man and the Wasp.
  • Batman: The Movie:
  • In Bean, Mr. Bean ruined "Whistler's Mother,"◊ with hilarious results. In 2012, a woman ruined an ancient Spanish fresco of Jesus, also with hilarious results.
  • Beetlejuice features Michael Keaton playing the title role, an evil ghost with a Joker-like appearance and personality. A bit later, Keaton played Batman in a movie where the Joker is the main antagonist.
  • Before the Devil Knows You're Dead features two Aunt Mays — Rosemary Harris and Marisa Tomei, playing in-laws.
  • The 1993 film version of The Beverly Hillbillies had repeated jokes involving the absurdity of rich high schoolers all owning cell phones (in one such scene, a phone rings and all the students check their backpacks), which got huge laughs at the time of the film's release. Nowadays, it goes without saying that most high schoolers - of nearly all income brackets - own a cell phone.
  • In Big, Josh pitches the idea of an "interactive comic book", which, these days, would be interpreted as a cartridge-based e-reader. Back then, it was a stupid idea that got shot down; these days, with digital comics and self-contained e-readers (like Nooks and Kindles), it's a cash cow. Even in the 1990s, there was a substantial market for "interactive comic books" on CD-ROM.
  • Big Fan is about a die-hard football fan who gets beat up by his favorite player, Quantrell "QB" Bishop, after hassling him at a strip club. Around eight months after it was released, Tennessee Titans QB Vince Young got into a fight under nearly identical circumstances.
  • Blade Runner 2049 has Mackenzie Davis as a replicant prostitute who at a certain point mocks protagonist K by saying "Oh, I see. You don't like real girls." Two years later, Davis was again in a sequel to an 80s sci-fi, Terminator: Dark Fate, and again she was not a fully "real girl", changing from Artificial Human to cyborg.
  • In The Blind Side, Sandra Bullock plays a woman who adopts a very underprivileged black boy in The Deep South. In Real Life, Sandra adopted a black (infant) boy from New Orleans.
  • Almost anyone who's seen the original version of The Blob (1958) after about 1990 will find some humor in the film's final line, "We're safe as long as the Arctic stays cold."
  • In Boogie Nights, Dirk Diggler mangles "The Touch" from The Transformers: The Movie when he embarks on a singing career. 17 years later, Mark Wahlberg, who played Diggler, would take the lead role in Transformers: Age of Extinction.
  • The film Brothers starred Tobey Maguire, the actor best known for his portrayal of Spider-Man in Sam Raimi's Spider-Man Trilogy. His co-stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman would later join the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Quentin Beck/Mysterio and Jane Foster respectively, a decade after the release of the movie.
  • In Bull Durham, "Crash" Davis, played by Kevin Costner, gives a well-known speech (video NSFW) in which he declares "I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone!" A few years later, Kevin Costner was playing Jim Garrison in JFK.

    C 
  • Everyone knows that James Cameron had been writing Avatar since he finished Titanic (1997). The hero's name is Jake Sully. Did you think he counted on another hero named "Sully" rising to prominence shortly before his film finally premiered?
  • Bruce Jenner's character in the (mostly fictional) Village People biopic Can't Stop the Music is little more than masculine Fanservice. In real life, Jenner identifies as female and underwent a highly-publicized sex change in 2015.
  • Captain America (1990): Both Captain America and his arch-enemy, Red Skull are voiced by Kenyū Horiuchi and Akio Ōtsuka respectively. Years later, they end working alongside, this time voicing the heroes, who happen to be also super-soldiers too.
  • Axel Braun's porn parody of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which was released well before Winter Soldier was in theaters) included the real film's characters such as The Falcon and Agent 13, but also randomly featured other Marvel heroes who had nothing to do with the original movie like Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch. Then a few months later, it came out that Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch would be featured in The Stinger for The Winter Soldier. Looks like Braun had some serious foresight there.
  • In the Japanese dub of the Carrie's 2013 remake, both Keiko Han and Megumi Han voice Margaret and Carrie respectively, who are also mother and daughter respectively both in film and in real life. The hilarious part is Keiko (Margaret) dubbed Carrie in the Japanese dub of the original 1976 film. Even more hilarious is the fact Mrs. Han voiced Lalah Sun. And everyone knows how Lalah and Carrie died in their respective series.
    • The rest of the 2013 remake dub's voice cast are not better: Excluding Miss Desjardin's Japanese VA, the rest of the voice cast has some odd relation with the topic: Hiroki Yasumoto (Billy Nolan) and Yoshimasa Hosoya (Tommy Ross) already worked respectively in some titles dealing with rampaging beings. In this movie, they are now the victims of one. Saori Hayami (Sue Snell) is a bigger one: She previously voiced Yurin L'Ciel who is the victim of another super-powered freak. The difference here is Sue survives the events of the film, compared with Yurin, who dies at the end of her story.
  • Carry On... Series:
  • In Casino Royale (1967), it was mentioned that the Secret Service keeps installing new instances of James Bond 007 ever so often since the original James Bond 007 (David Niven) quit by renaming and renumbering other agents. Two years later, Sean Connery was replaced as James Bond 007 by George Lazenby (before he returned for another movie). Even later came Roger Moore, yet another return of Connery, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, and you might also want to include Daniel Craig on the list.
    • A James Bond movie that ends with Bond being killed in an explosion. Am I talking about Casino Royale or No Time To Die?
  • At the end of Cecil B. Demented, Michael Shannon's character has a guy kneeling in front of him, blowing him. Fast forward thirteen years, and now Shannon is playing General Zod in Man of Steel.
  • Charlie Sheen's old movie The Chase (1994) has a throwaway line where Sheen's character remarks, "Yeah, the public will adore me. Maybe I'll get my own sitcom."
    • From another angle, the overhyped media coverage of the high-speed chase is how most high-profile real-life chases are covered now. As an added bonus, the film came out just three months before O.J. Simpson's famous white Bronco chase.
  • Stacy Keach played a narcotics officer in the Cheech & Chong films, Up in Smoke and Nice Dreams. In 1984, he was arrested in England and served six months in prison for cocaine smuggling.
  • Children of Men features a scene in which characters discuss tinnitus ("You know that high-pitched ringing sound you hear?") The film also features a suicide pill called Quietus. Not long after, someone released a homeopathic remedy for tinnitus...called Quietus...
  • In Chocolat (2000) when a band of boat-dwelling gypsies arrives in the town, heroine Vianne's feisty, imaginative daughter sees the sight and runs home to tell her mother that "Pirates!" have arrived. Vianne embarks on a romance with one of the gypsies...who's played by Johnny Depp! (For that matter, this wouldn't be Depp's only encounter with chocolate confections...)
  • In Chronicle, Dane DeHaan's character Andrew telekinetically splits a spider apart in an Establishing Character Moment. DeHaan would go on to play Harry Osborne, friend-turned-nemesis of Spider-Man, in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
  • Cloud Atlas: Timothy talks about Herman Melville and Moby-Dick at the beginning of his story. Fast-forward to 2015, In the Heart of the Sea stars Ben Whishaw as Herman Melville.
    • The Kona are a tribe of all-male lawless marauders in a post-apocalyptic future who notably wear war paint that makes their faces resemble skulls. Are we talking about the cannibal tribes of Hawaii or the War Boys?
  • In Clueless, Cher (Alicia Silverstone) is unimpressed by the celebrity guest at a tree planting event: “Oh how fabulous. Getting Marky Mark to take time from his busy pants-dropping schedule to plant trees." Since the film's release in 1995...
    • The supposedly washed-up Mark Wahlberg has become an Oscar-nominated movie star (involving actual pants-dropping in Boogie Nights) while Alicia Silverstone has undergone essentially a whole career arc from nothing to being the next big thing, to being semi-forgotten. (Although Wahlberg’s music career did indeed end shortly after the film's release.)
    • In The Happening, Wahlberg plays a professor in a world where all plant life is trying to murder people with neurotoxins. Apparently planting trees wasn’t a good move for him.
  • Sissy Spacek originally planned to be a singer and at one point auditioned for Decca Records, only to be turned down due to her style being too similar to country legend Loretta Lynn. Fast-forwerd to 1980; and Spacek gets cast in the movie Coal Miner's Daughter as...Loretta Lynn.
  • From The Color of Money:
    • Eddie's comments about Vincent (Tom Cruise) being a natural flake are funnier given Cruise's subsequent erratic habits.
    • Similarly, the scene where Vincent is jumping up and down on his hotel bed brings to mind Cruise's couch-jumping bit on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
  • Before he was famous, Samuel L. Jackson appeared in Coming to America as a robber holding up a restaurant. In his Star-Making Role in Pulp Fiction, his character would stop a robbery at a restaurant.
    • Eddie Murphy's character asks his boss if he saw the New York Giants defeat the Green Bay Packers with a last-second field goal on tv the previous night. This ended up being the exact finish to the 2007-08 NFC Championship game played 20 years after the film's release.
    • When King Jaffe Joffer, played by James Earl Jones, arrives in New York City, he's seen wearing a lion skin over his suit. Jones would go on to star as Mufasa in The Lion King (1994), and Madge Sinclair, who plays Queen Aoleon, would again play Jones' queen, Sarabi.
    • A fast food restaurant obviously ripping off McDonald's, barely staying out of legal trouble with the real deal? It was McDowells in the film, and MaDonal in the real world's Kurdistan in the following decade. The founder wanted to bring a real McDonalds to Kurdistan but was refused a franchise.
  • The 1996 movie Crash:
    • It came out five years after renowned screenwriter and director Joseph L. Mankiewicz likened modern movies' treatment of sex to "two cars hitting each other."
    • Holly Hunter plays a woman with a chestnut bob haircut who just so happens to be named Helen.
  • The 1990 film Crazy People, starring Dudley Moore, had the premise of someone in advertising being sent to a mental institution because they accidentally let print a set of really "honest" ads, such as saying Volvo's are "boxy, but they're good". Amusingly, most of the ads shown in the film are similar to the tongue-in-cheek advertising around today.

    D 
  • In the RiffTrax for Daredevil, Mike riffs "I would become...Batman. At least until some rich clown in Gotham sued me for naming rights". A little later, an "I'm Batman" joke is made. Ben Affleck, who played Daredevil, would go on to play Batman in the DCEU.
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy:
    • The Dark Knight:
      • Among those suspected to be the Batman early on in The Dark Knight is Abraham Lincoln. Guess which one of Lincoln's relatives once wore the cowl?
      • Alfred tells Bruce "Some men just want to watch the world burn.". The very next day audiences got to see Fire Lord Ozai trying to burn the entire Earth Kingdom to the ground. It was like they knew the movie would be premiering on the same weekend! It gets better! Fire Lord Ozai is voiced by Mark Hamill, who voiced the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series.
      • Stephens being taunted into attacking the Joker. Considering the person playing him would later voice The Joker was able to outsmart Harbinger long before Shepard did and the cop even refers to hurting someone how ironic is that looking back at the Dark Knight now.
      • We now have Batman: Arkham Origins, released five years after the film came out, and the game's plots become strikingly similar to the plots of the film.
      • Way back in Two-Face's first appearance in the comics, it's briefly mentioned that there was a particular surgeon who could've fixed Harvey's face, but he died in a concentration camp during World War II. The name of this doctor? Dr. Ekhart, one letter removed from the name of the actor who plays Harvey.
      • The Joker kills the Chechen by having him fed to his own dogs, claiming that a dog is not loyal to anyone when it's hungry. This is exactly how Ramsay Bolton dies in Game of Thrones, specifically because he starved his dogs.
      • The line "you either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain" is this now that Michael Keaton, who played the Caped Crusader in the Tim Burton films, plays the Marvel villain The Vulture in Spider-Man: Homecoming.
  • The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) (the original one) shows doctors wondering how Klaatu can heal so marvelously fast, soon coming to the conclusion that his medical science must be far more advanced than theirs. And then they all light up their cigarettes.
  • Wes Craven's Cursed features a werewolf named Jake.
  • The Dead Zone features Martin Sheen as a local politician. At one point, he passionately shouts that he will be the President of the United States one day. He later starred in The West Wing as the President of the United States.
    • On another level, the psychic protagonist predicts he will become a President Evil if allowed to take office, while the President on The West Wing was very much a President Personable.
    • In Machete Kills, Martin Sheen's son Charlie played the President of the United States. Cue "George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush" jokes.
  • In Deep in the Valley, Denise Richards plays Autumn Bliss, a fictional porn star. While Richards had already made a career out of playing Ms. Fanservice characters in Hollywood films and doing nude scenes, she became a literal sex worker when she started an OnlyFans page in 2022 after her 18-year old daughter by Charlie Sheen did the same.
  • In the 1992 Eddie Murphy film The Distinguished Gentleman, Murphy plays a con man who gets elected to Congress. In his victory speech, he says "We campaigned on the issue. The issue is change. Change for the future!". Gee, why does that sound familiar?
  • In Doctor in Clover, Miles offers Dr. Grimsdyke a job on a Mediterranean cruise. The next film in the Doctor... Series, Doctor in Trouble, involved Dr. Burke (also played by Leslie Phillips) stowing away on a Mediterranean cruise ship.
  • Towards the end of DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story, Peter the main character starts to doubt himself and runs away before the final game, then gets a lecture on morals and perseverance from ... Lance Armstrong of all people!
  • In the Doom movie, Karl Urban plays a marine who said: "They're Marines, Sam, not poets." Very close to Dr. McCoy's classic I'm a Doctor, Not a Placeholder. Later, in Star Trek (2009), Urban plays Dr. McCoy.
  • Dracula Untold:
    • In Victor Vran, the title character has a backstory similar to Dracula's in Dracula Untoldnote . What makes it a true example of Hilarious in Hindsight is the fact that, beside his background, Victor Vran isn't supposed to be an expy of Dracula or Vlad the Impaler... He is a Gabriel Van Helsing-esque monster hunter.
    • The second season of Rise of Empires: Ottoman also covers the clash between Vlad Dracula and his stepbrother/arch-enemy Sultan Mehmet while also improving on a lot of the They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot complaints that were directed at this film. Dispensing with the supernatural angle entirely, it's instead a protracted battle of wits between two of the best strategic masterminds of their time. Mehmet is also Rescued from the Scrappy Heap, having already spent an entire season building up his character during the Siege of Constantinople before Vlad is introduced. For extra irony points, Charles Dance, who played the Elder Vampire, is the narrator for Rise.
  • The 1946 drama Dragonwyck has Vincent Price as the sinister Nicholas Van Ryn. At one point he sardonically asks the heroine if she expected to find in his room velvet drapes, pagan idols, and altars to human sacrifice. The movies he appeared in afterward tended to have elements like those in them regularly. It was like Price had looked into his future...

    E 

    F 
  • In The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), Michelle Pfeiffer's character, Suzy Diamond, smokes a brand of French cigarettes and says, "$3.50 a pack, and I go through 'em like toothpicks."note  As of 2016, American cigarette smokers would kill to get them at $3.50 a pack.note 
  • Face/Off, the movie in which Nicolas Cage and John Travolta exchange identities thanks to plastic surgery, becomes freaking hilarious once you read about more than a century old photos of two dudes who look JUST like them.
  • The Fast and the Furious:
    • The spin-loff film, Hobbs & Shaw sees its main villain, Brixton Lore, compare himself to Superman. Idris Elba, who played Lore, would go on to play Bloodsport, an enemy of Superman, in The Suicide Squad.
  • The poster◊ for Final Destination: "NO ACCIDENTS. NO COINCIDENCES. NO ESCAPES. FINAL DESTINATION◊."
  • In what may be an amazing example, on the DVD commentary for Field of Dreams, director Phillip Alden Robinson shared that while making the movie based on W.P. Kinsella's novel "Shoeless Joe," the studio decided to change the name of the film to its eventual title: "Field of Dreams". Robinson, upset, called Kinsella to tell him the news, not telling him the new title, and had this conversation:
    Robinson: They want to change the name from "Shoeless Joe."
    Kinsella: Oh that's alright, that wasn't even my title. That was the publisher's title.
    Robinson: What was your title?
    Kinsella: "Dream Field."
  • The Fly (1986):
    • In Charles Edward Pogue's original draft of the screenplay, the Doomed Protagonist's name was Geoff.
    • In a bonus interview for the retrospective documentary Fear of the Flesh, Geena Davis recounts reading novels to her co-star/lover Jeff Goldblum during the hours he spent in the makeup chair for his character's later scenes. One of them was the just-published The Accidental Tourist, and she became frustrated that she wasn't enough of a name to be in the running for the juicy role of Muriel Pritchett in the already-planned film adaptation. After The Fly was released, she was...paving the way for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar win.
  • Twice in Forrest Gump, Lieutenant Dan (Gary Sinise) says something to Forrest (Tom Hanks) regarding the space program. The first is when he insults Forrest's plans by saying "The day you become a shrimp boat captain is the day I become an astronaut!" At the end of the movie, he tells Forrest that his prosthetic legs are made of the same stuff used in the space shuttle. A year later, Hanks and Sinise co-starred as astronauts in Apollo 13, with Sinise playing a character who (initially) planned to fly on the Space Shuttle.
    • Also a Shout-Out to the fact that in the novel Forrest did become an astronaut.
    • One could also argue that Forrest's remark how "He [Lt. Dan] got me invested in some kinda fruit company" is even more hilarious today.
      • An investment worth an estimated $6 billion as of mid-October 2013.
    • One of the historical figures Forrest encounters is Alabama governor George Wallace. A few years later, Gary Sinise starred as Wallace in a TV Bio Pic.
  • In a deleted scene from Friday, Craig (played by Ice Cube) is taking out the trash and his father says he must think he's Wilt Chamberlain or Shaquille O'Neal, while also erroneously believing that Shaq played for the Miami Heat. About nine and a half years later, Shaq actually does ending up playing for the aforementioned team.
  • Friday the 13th films:
  • While obviously meant to be a satire of news media, Billy Wilder's 1974 remake of The Front Page becomes a lot funnier when you remember that just seven years after the film's release, Carol Burnett sued the National Enquirer for libel.
  • In Full Metal Jacket, Sergeant Hartman warns Private Joker, "You had best unfuck yourself or I will unscrew your head and shit down your neck!" Then there's Duke Nukem 3D, when Duke not only says that to an Overlord before killing it, but he also means what he says, and he does it literally, keeping true to his word.

    G 
  • The Game (1997): You are now playing THE GAME.
  • Galaxy Quest:
    • The film shows how the Show Within a Show Star Trek parody achieves its Screen Shake with a hydraulically shifted set. This method would later be used for the production of an actual Star Trek film.
    • Jason has trouble fighting a rock monster, and when advised to look for its weak points, he irritably snaps back that something made of rock can't possibly have any. In Metroid Prime, Samus fights a rock monster, but she has no problem with it because her power suit has a built-in scanner which can find its (ever-changing) weak point!
  • In Ghostbusters, the doorman says to Peter Venkman, "Someone brought a cougar to a party and it went berserk." When the film was made in 1984, this line was probably not meant to be a joke. But since the late 1990s, the word "cougar" has become slang for older women dating younger men.
  • In Girl, Interrupted, Winona Ryder's opening monologue becomes rather funny after Ryder shoplifted US$5,500 of stuff on December 12, 2001.
    Have you ever confused a dream with life? Or stolen something when you have the cash? Have you ever been blue? Or thought your train moving while sitting still? Maybe I was just crazy. Maybe it was the '60s. Or maybe I was just a girl... interrupted.
  • The Goal series of films followed a Mexican footballer by the name of Santiago Muñez, who joins English club Newcastle United. In February 2021, 16 years after the first film's release, Mexican club Santos Laguna handed a debut to an 18-year-old Mexican player named... Santiago Muñoz. One letter off, but still close enough to catch Newcastle's attention.
  • Godzilla:
    • In Godzilla (1998), the news announces that "The Warner Bros. and Disney stores have been totally cleared out by looters", as a Take That!. The studio producing Godzilla (2014) is Warner Bros.
    • Godzilla (2014):
      • The casting of Aaron Taylor Johnson and Elizabeth Olsen as husband and wife, considering the fact they were also cast as Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Especially when you remember Ultimate Marvel.
      • Back in 1985, Warner Bros.'s Pee-wee's Big Adventure featured a brief scene where Pee-wee rides through a film set where Godzilla is fighting King Ghidorah. 29 years later, WB is now making an actual, full Godzilla movie.
      • Speaking of Warner Bros., this isn't the first Godzilla movie they've been involved with, though thankfully they're handling things better than they did last time.
      • The leaked SDCC teaser reveals that one of the monsters Godzilla will fight is a red, multi-limbed, centipede-like creature. The Godzilla Power Hour and Marvel's Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1977) had Godzilla face off against similar-looking◊ monsters◊.
      • This◊ image making fun of the 1998 film with Snickers' "You're not you when you're hungry" campaign is funnier now that there is an official Snickers commercial made to promote this film.
      • Godzilla's feet are rounder, sauropod-like and with relatively short talons, which is what they were like in Bambi Meets Godzilla.
      • In The Amazing Spider-Man, Captain Stacy jokes about not being "the mayor of Tokyo" in response to Peter Parker's claim that Dr. Connors has turned into the giant lizard monster roaming around New York, in a Shout-Out to Godzilla. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ended up being a direct box office competitor with the old menace of Tokyo himself in May of 2014.
      • In Lilo & Stitch, a scene featured the titular alien Stitch (while in Hawaii) making a scale model of San Francisco then smashing akin to a kaiju rampage. Godzilla would eventually come to both Honolulu and San Francisco in the movie. Additionally, both films feature Elvis' "(You're the) Devil in Disguise".
      • When Godzilla's appearance was more clearly revealed to the Japanese by the Asia trailer, Japanese fans complained that he looked too fat. While this led to the obligatory jokes about him eating too many Snickers' bars (see above), a Fiat commercial released soon after these complaints first popped up implies that it's more because he had been "craving Italian" lately.
      • In the prologue of the film, one of the toys young Ford is shown playing with is a Lego Star Wars Snowspeeder set, from The Empire Strikes Back. Gareth Edwards has been announced as the director of the upcoming Star Wars spin-off movie Rogue One.
    • Godzilla: King of the Monsters! features Raymond Burr as an American journalist sent to Japan to cover the events of the film. His character is named Steve Martin - a name that by the time Burr had a Role Reprise in The Return of Godzilla, was associated with a real person, forcing him to only be called "Mr. Martin". And adequately, Steve Martin also starred alongside stock footage from other movies in Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid.
    • Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991):
      • In a subplot, evil foreigners from the future change history and create King Ghidorah to prevent Japan from economically taking over the world. Around the time the movie came out, the Japanese economy collapsed; almost thirty years later, it has yet to completely recover.
      • When the Futurians go back to a tropical island in 1945, their arrival is witnessed by two soldiers. The officer mistakes them for aliens and tells Private Spielberg next to him that it would be something to tell to his son. This is an obvious Shout-Out to Steven Spielberg, director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. But two years later, Steven Spielberg would direct a movie about dinosaurs wreaking havoc on a tropical island. He really must have liked his father's wacky wartime stories! Better yet, since Legendary Pictures entered a deal with Universal and helped to produce Jurassic World, Godzilla is now a sister franchise to Jurassic Park.
    • King Kong vs. Godzilla: The film has an infamous and long-persisting urban legend, where it's stated that in the Japanese version, Godzilla wins, and in the American version, Kong wins, but it's false; although there are numerous edits made in the English dub, the ending is the same: Kong is (ambiguously) the winner in both versions. Ironically, as of Godzilla vs. Kong, the opposite is true; Kong wins in the Japanese version of the fight and Godzilla wins in the American version.
  • In Gold Diggers of 1933 (guess what year it came out), a Broadway producer is trying to talk a talented amateur composer into starring in a show with his (the composer's) girlfriend, a chorus girl. The producer tells the composer, "You could be a famous song-and-dance team, like the Astaires," referring to the popular brother-and-sister act of Fred and Adele Astaire. In that same scene is another chorus girl the producer keeps noticeably snubbing. This chorus girl is played by Ginger Rogers who, by the end of 1933, will become part of an even more famous song-and-dance team...with Fred Astaire.
  • Deliberately played in Good Night, and Good Luck., which used stock footage of a '50s interview with Liberace where he's asked why he remains a bachelor despite being handsome, famous and wealthy. We now know he wasn't just waiting for the right woman.
  • The Goonies. As pointed out by the star himself (Corey Feldman) in the DVD's commentary, the scene where Mouth is telling Rosalita, in Spanish, "Always separate the drugs" fits this trope to a T.
  • This real-life scandal involves a Mrs. Robinson having an affair with a 19-year-old boy, i.e. the premise of The Graduate. And yes, they're aware of the irony.
  • Gremlins 2: The New Batch, a film released by Warner Bros. with synergetic gags, had a character based on Ted Turner and his cable TV stations. Guess who joined Warners' parent company just a few years after the film's release?
  • In Groundhog Day, among the people Phil ends up helping is a young couple who are supposed to be getting married that day. The bride is played by Hynden Walch, who'll later go on to voice Starfire in Teen Titans while the groom is played by Michael Shannon who'll later go to play General Zod in Man of Steel, two superstrong aliens in The DCU. Perhaps their wedding is a political alliance between Krypton and Tamaraan?
  • In the 1967 movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Dr. Prentice, a black man engaged to be married to a white woman after meeting her in Hawaii, is asked by the father of his fiancee if he has "given any thought to the problems [his] children are going to have". In the ensuing conversation, he mentions that his wife thinks all their children will grow up to be President, but that he thought it was "optimistic" and would settle for Secretary of State. In 2008 (and again in 2012), the dream of a half-black, half-white U.S. President from Hawaii now doesn't seem like wishful thinking.

    H 
  • An acting career spanning seven decades is bound to yield some of those. In L'Enigme de Pise, an episode of the historical TV series La Caméra Explore Le Temps telling the story of a famous impostor, Michel Piccoli jokes that just because he was often told he looks like the current Pope, doesn't mean that he is the Pope. Half a century later, he played the reluctant Pope in Habemus Papam.
  • Hamlet II was actually predated by this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic. Which in turn is predated by Last Action Hero doing a gag trailer.
  • Zach Galifianakis attended North Carolina State University, home of the NC State Wolfpack athletic teams. Come The Hangover films, he became part of the Wolfpack.
  • In Happy Gilmore, Adam Sandler is making fun of golfers wearing plaid shorts, remarking "if I were wearing stuff like that, I'd have to kick my OWN ass." Fast forward to 2009, where a close approximation of that look can be seen adorning 20-something hipsters and included in LL Cool J's clothing line.
  • In Harsh Times, Christian Bale snaps when learning his LAPD job offer was refused, snapping at a driver next to him. Since the incident when Bale snapped at a Director of Photography, that incident has become funnier than first intended.
    • Likewise, any scene on the movie where the rant was recorded (Terminator Salvation) where Bale yells at someone turns somewhat funny.
    • Really, this works for any time he ever yells in a movie. The Machinist is full of examples.
  • How about Cedric Diggory's ghost sparkling in the movie of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, after Robert Pattinson placed another famously sparkling character?
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Bellatrix's actress, Helena Bonham Carter, was trying to Hide Your Pregnancy in a few early scenes and not really succeeding. According to Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Bellatrix actually was pregnant around this time, which fans decried as an Ass Pull since it's not hinted at all in the books.
  • The premise of the comedy Head of State, namely a younger, relatively inexperienced African-American candidate running for president vs an older war veteran, has become much funnier after the election of biracial President Barack Obama. The candidate in the movie is even subject to a smear campaign including the allegation that "He's half white!"
  • In the rockumentary Heavy Metal Parking Lot a metalhead chick talks about how she would "jump his bones", referring to Judas Priest singer Rob Halford. This was before Halford came out of the closet.
    • Around the time Priest started to break in the U.S., Cheryl Rixon (who had a memorable part in Used Cars) was Penthouse "Pet of the Month", and mentioned them as a favorite band. Not long after, she and Halford were a couple, and promotional material was issued of the two together. Whether they were truly linked or it was just an act, the band's management certainly wasted little time taking advantage.
  • In Barbra Streisand's classic starring roles in Hello, Dolly! and Funny Girl, the overbearing narcissism of her characters is played for laughs. While it's true that Streisand was developing her reputation even then, it's only gotten progressively funnier...
    • From Hello, Dolly!:
      Dolly: I have always been a woman who arranges things
      Like furniture and daffodils and lives.
  • Towards the end of Help! by The Beatles, while at an airport, the Beatles dress up in disguise to avoid the myriad of people chasing them. In what was meant to look comically ridiculous, John Lennon puts on a long beard and granny glasses, the same image that would later define him, Ringo Starr has facial hair like the one seen in our page image here, Paul McCartney has the same mustache from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, and George Harrison also adopted the bearded with sideburns look.
  • Hitler's rant over Steiner in Hitler: The Last Ten Days is impossible to take seriously knowing that thanks to a later film, the same scene will be spoofed so much in the future.
    • During one scene at his birthday party, Hitler (played by Alec Guinness) is handed a cigarette and says "Thank you, Fegelein." He won't be getting along with him so well in the parodies...
  • The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies:
  • In Hollywood Shuffle, one of the movie parodies is of Rambo, called "Rambro". Meanwhile, the original Inglorios Bastards (not the Tarantino movie), was in this country edited to make actor Fred Williamson the star, in order to cash in on the Blaxploitation genre, and re-titled G.I. Bro.
  • In the 1991 film Homicide, Joe Mantegna's character moans about how the FBI are a bunch of incompetent morons. It's also ironic Joe Mantegna's character would say that, considering that one of his more memorable roles is as Fat Tony (Springfield's premiere mobster and career criminal) on The Simpsons.
  • In Hocus Pocus, Sarah Jessica Parker plays a witch who was hung in Salem, Massachusetts. In 2010, Sarah Jessica Parker found out that an ancestor of hers was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts. Similarly, Emma Watson plays Hermione Granger, a witch, in the Harry Potter films. In 2009, it was discovered that a 16th-century ancestor of Watson's was tried and convicted of witchcraft in England.
  • Honeymoon in Vegas, a silly 1992 Romantic Comedy starring Nicolas Cage has one iconic scene: Cage skydiving with the Flying Elvises to save his marriage, and then re-marrying with them in the audience. Ten years later, he actually married Elvis' daughter.
  • In Steven Spielberg's Hook, Robin Williams plays a lawyer who is very irate about not being able to proceed with a land development deal because endangered owls are nesting there. He asks "does anyone miss the Tyrannosaurus Rex?" Spielberg's next film Jurassic Park was indeed about people who missed the Tyrannosaurus Rex, and the consequences of bringing it and other dinosaurs back from extinction. Jurassic Park even included a line where they talked about using the technology to create whole flocks of endangered condors. Not only that, but the T-Rex's only human victim in that film was... a lawyer.
    • The inability to "proceed with a land development deal because endangered owls are nesting there" is doubly hilarious after the film release of Hoot.
  • Hot Tub Time Machine:
    • Blaine is a Type 2 Eagle Land Jerk Jock who is always freaking out about how the protagonists are secret Russian spies in their midst. Fast forward to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, where that's exactly what he is (or so it seems). And yes, you did just see that guy from The Daily Show beat the ever-loving shit out of the Winter Soldier.
    • In the scene parodying the Denver Broncos' game-winning drive in an AFC Championship game, Mark Jackson drops a pass due to a squirrel distracting him. In the 2011 National League Division Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the St. Louis Cardinals, play was temporarily halted because a squirrel ran onto the field. Cardinals fans gave it the nickname "Rally Squirrel" as their team went onto win the World Series that year.
  • Humboldt County has Jeremy Strong play an awkward sadboy who cries a lot, gets involved in drugs and can't stand up to his father. Ten years later, his Star-Making Role is Kendall Roy from Succession, an awkward sadboy addict who can't stand up to his father.
  • In The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1, Haymitch protests on the make-up they put on Katniss for the propo shoot, point out that she's a teenager but they made her look 35. Jennifer Lawrence who plays Katniss has made three films with David O. Russell, all in which she plays women older than herself, including American Hustle (mid-30s) and Joy (2015) (30s and 40s).

    I 

    J 

    K 
  • Kick-Ass:
  • This one could be either hilarious or Harsher in Hindsight, in The Kid Spencer Breslin utters the line "Let me get this straight, I grow up to be a loser!". Now that Spencer is grown up, no one's heard from him in a while and his career has been eclipsed by his sister, Abigail.
  • Kids: The character played by Chloë Sevigny comments that she hates performing oral sex. Eight years later she controversially performed unsimulated oral sex in The Brown Bunny
  • The film The Kid Stays In the Picture features the anti-drug "Get High on Yourself" show, which Evans hilariously labels "the Woodstock of the 80's", resembling a cheap "We Are the World" vanilla hamfest. Even funnier (or sadder), one of the actresses singing this anti-drug message is Dana Plato.
  • Lucy Liu played O-Ren Ishii in Kill Bill, an assassin who is incredibly talented in kung fu and is codenamed "Cottonmouth" after the snake. "Cottonmouth" is translated into Chinese as Hundred-Step-Snake or Bai-Bu-She, which is the term used for "viper". Four years later, that becomes the name of the character she voices in Kung Fu Panda.
  • In the 1956 film The Killing, an early Film Noir effort by Stanley Kubrick, a deep-voiced narrator comments on the characters' actions from time to time. This becomes incongruously amusing when one of the character's names is Mr. Unger, something that may put many people in mind of this.
  • Kingsman: The Secret Service:
    • In this movie, Samuel L. Jackson plays an over-the-top Well-Intentioned Extremist Bond-esque villain with plans to reshape the world to his designs and is opposed by the Kingsmen, a group of a top-secret special force dedicated to protecting the world from the shadows. Compare this with his role of Nick Fury in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where he's a level-headed, no-nonsense leader of SHIELD, a secret peace-keeping organization no different than the Kingsmen, and is archenemies with HYDRA, another group of Well-Intentioned Extremist villains also with plans to reshape the world to their designs.
    • Speaking of Marvel, an episode of Agent Carter that aired just a few days after Kingsman's US release featured the villains using a device with remarkably similar effects to Valentine's SIM cards. They even test it on a large group of civilians.
    • Also, precisely one week after the release of Kingsman, The Order: 1886 came out for PS4, which happens to feature an order of Knights who take their monikers from Arthurian legend and induct new Knights into their Order only when another dies in the line of duty. You even play as one Sir Galahad!
  • Krull: Liam Neeson's character's Final Speech resembles another movie a little too closely. "Promise me you will train the boy. He is the chosen one. He will bring balance. Train him."

    L 
  • Last Action Hero
    • Slater's interaction with Schwarzenegger still works now that he is governor.
    • It gets worse/better - while the projectionist is listing things that are worse than being a fictional character, along with floods and wars, he mentions politicians. Twice.
    • Also, Last Action Hero did a lot of what TV Tropes does today—years before there was TV Tropes. This website actually makes the movie a lot more hilarious than it was before.
    • "When the governor gets here, call me."
    • A climactic scene ends with a bomb exploding in a tar pit surrounded by dinosaur models. Last Action Hero itself wound up bombing due to the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. Twenty-two years later another Arnold Schwarzenegger film will bomb against another Jurassic sequel.
    • When Slater reminisces on how depressing his life outside of his movies is, he says, "Danny, do you think I would marry someone so stupid that doesn't know my real voice from a taped one?" In True Lies, Schwarzenegger's character Harry Tasker does a tape recording to fool his wife.
    • Slater punches a car window in the real world, then complains how much it hurts. In True Lies, Arnold accidentally punched a real car window instead of one made of break-away glass, and didn't notice.
    • Benedict has a dummy in the shape of a stag in his room. Charles Dance would go on to play Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones, where he fought against characters who used the stag as a coat of arms.
    • Here, among the villains Benedict threatens to release is King Kong. Come Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Kong is the only MonsterVerse kaiju not on the loose because of the Charles Dance-played Jonah Allen.
  • Lady and the Tramp: Both Clancy Brown and Tessa Thompson previously appeared together Thor: Ragnarok, only here, it's Valkyrie who goes head-to-head with Surtur.
  • In The Last Boy Scout, Bruce Willis' character Joe says that all the makeup his daughter wears makes her "look like a goddamn raccoon". Fast-forward to 2006 and in the animated film Over the Hedge, Willis actually provided the voice for a raccoon.
  • When Nick Rice and his boss talk to a shady CIA guy in Law Abiding Citizen to find out more about Clyde Shelton's CIA past, they're told a story of someone the Company wanted to kill, but couldn't seem to take out with airstrikes or anything else. So they talked to Clyde, and he rigged up a self-winding garrote hidden in the target's necktie (he had a thing for nice ties). In 2010, narcoterrorist Mono Jojoy was killed when Columbian intelligence implanted a tracker in his custom bootsnote  after intercepting his order online, and bombed his camp to bits.
  • In Lean on Me, Morgan Freeman's character Joe Clark holds a baseball bat in his hand and proclaims "They used to call me Crazy Joe. Well, now they can call me Batman!" Freeman would go on to play Batman's gadget guy and technical advisor, Lucius Fox, in The Dark Knight Trilogy.
  • Leif, a Swedish musical comedy from 1987, ridicules a Swedish arms manufacturer which bribes foreign governments. While the film was recorded, the Bofors Scandal was surfaced.
  • Les Misérables (2012): At the 2011 Oscars, future Fantine Anne Hathaway sang a parody of "On My Own" to playfully curse a certain "Hugh Jackass" (and future Valjean) for bailing out of singing a duet with her. And of course, they did sing together in the 2009 Oscars.
  • Leslie Nielsen's role in Airplane! has made most of his previous roles much funnier in hindsight. Examples include Nielsen captaining the S.S. Poseidon in The Poseidon Adventure and Project Kill, wherein he plays a rogue, drug-addicted CIA assassin who has a climactic martial arts battle with 2001: A Space Odyssey's Gary Lockwood. Indeed, Airplane was deliberately casting with actors like Nielsen, Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, etc., to send up their earlier roles in "straight" disaster films.
  • In Lethal Weapon 4, a rabbi presided over Mel Gibson and Rene Russo's characters' "spur of the moment" wedding just as Russo is about to give birth. The idea of a rabbi aiding Mel Gibson of any kind is hilarious now knowing about Gibson's Real Life anti-Semitic feelings.
  • The 1975 comedy flick "Linda Lovelace For President" starred Linda Lovelace as herself embarking on a political career. Later, fellow porn actress Marilyn Chambers twice attempted to embark on a political career by running for vice president (2004 Personal Choice Party, 2008 as a write-in candidate).
  • In the Japanese dub of Little Miss Sunshine, Daisuke Ono voiced Dwayne, whose dream is becoming an Air Force pilot and failing to do so. A few years later, he ends voicing Woolf Enneacle, who is an ace Mobile Suit pilot and he loves to brag about it.
  • 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 sad/funny part (depending on your point of view) 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 al-Qaeda.
  • In Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Shaggy and Scooby tear Matthew Lillard a new one for his performance as Shaggy in the 2002 film adaptation. Several years later, Lillard became the official voice of Shaggy, a role he continues to this day.
  • In The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Bilbo complains "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." In the 2010s, his story, The Hobbit, was stretched into an 8-hour three-movie saga, with many criticizing the attempt to drag out a short children's novel into an epic saga by packing in bits from the Tolkien apocrypha, an interspecies love triangle, and overlong action sequences.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,
    • One scene involving a conversation between Treebeard and the Hobbits Merry and Pippin. "There was a time when Saruman would walk in my woods. Now he has a mind of metal...". Fast forward to the year 2010, when Christopher Lee, Saruman's actor, released his first studio album "Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross". Guess what genre it is.
    • This wiki's page for Translation Train Wreck links to a set of poorly translated subtitles for "The Two Towers." Many are very funny on their own, but this one◊note  is especially hilarious now.
  • Fans of Lost and Person of Interest must get a chuckle if they've ever seen The Lost Boys which has one of the main characters named Michael Emerson...
  • In Love Actually, Hugh Grant, the actor known for his boyish face, plays the British Prime Minister. Several years later, David Cameron is PM, with the help of Nick Clegg.

    M 
  • The first two Major League movies certainly qualify. In them, the crappy Cleveland Indians went from worst to first. Not long after the second one came out, the Indians had gone from perennial doormats to perennial contenders.
    • More to the point, in the first Major League movie, the bitchy owner of the Indians plots to put together a team that's so bad, that she could justify moving them to Miami (which didn't have a Major League Baseball team in real life in 1989). Eight years after Major League was released, the real-life Cleveland Indians lost the World Series in seven games to the Florida Marlins.
    • In Major League 2, cash strapped owner Roger Dorn covers the outfield wall in advertisements to try to squeeze every last penny he could out of his team. It was only a couple years later when all Major League stadiums had advertisements all over the walls. Some even more obtrusive than even Roger Dorn could ever have imagined. Though advertising never completely went away from baseball; in the early 20th century, such advertising was commonplace on outfield walls, but by the 1980s, most ads had been limited to the scoreboard and signage on the periphery. It wasn't too long after this movie, however, that corporate advertising in ballparks exploded (in contrast to the local businesses Dorn had to settle for in the movie), with whole seating sections being sponsored, and ads being strategically placed behind home plate (prime TV real estate).
  • In Mallrats, Stan Lee has a scene where he's advising Brody to get back together with his girlfriend, doing so by saying there was this one girl who got away from him when he was younger and his success as a comic writer has done little to ease the pain of losing her. There's something funny about the guy who created Spider-Man saying, "I'd give it all up, just for One More Day with her."
  • The obscure 1972 film "The Man" (written by Rod Serling and originally intended as a Made-for-TV Movie by ABC before moving to the big screen) has a couple of examples of this in its plot.
    • The story begins with the President of the United States and the Speaker of the House both being killed at a summit in Frankfurt, West Germany when the building holding the summit collapses. With the Vice-President terminally ill, the Secretary of State explains that due to the Presidential Succession Act of 1947 the Senate President pro Tempore is next-in-line for the Presidencynote . The Senate President pro Tempore happens to be a black Senator named Douglass Dilmannote . Keep in mind this is 1972; 36 years before Barack Obama was first elected President.
    • In addition to Dilman becoming the first black President in the story; this also made him the first President not elected as either President or Vice-President. Just over two years after the movie's release date (July 19, 1972); on August 9, 1974, Gerald Ford would become the first President in real life to ascend to the office without being elected President or Vice-President thanks to the aftermath of the Watergate scandal forcing incumbent President Richard Nixon to resignnote .
  • Man of Steel:
    • Russell Crowe once had a song called "I Want To Be Like Marlon Brando". Now he's playing Superman's birth father Jor-El, who was previously played by Brando in the Richard Donner.
    • There's brief footage of a polar bear, calling to mind producer Jon Peters' rabid insistence that Kevin Smith include a polar bear fight scene in his 90s Superman script.
      • When Tim Burton worked on the script for Superman Lives!, part of the plot involved Lex Luthor and Brainiac merging together. Come Justice League Unlimited...
    • Amy Adams, who plays Lois Lane, served as a Smallville Monster of the Week back in 2001.
    • The first full trailer debuted with The Hobbit, after the teasers used music from The Lord of the Rings.
    • Henry Cavill was previously cast as Clark in J.J. Abrams and McG's 2004 Superman movie Superman: Flyby before it was canceled and became Superman Returns.
    • John Cleese's 2004 comic Superman: True Brit, which shows a world where Superman was raised in England, is kind of funny now that Superman's actor is British.
    • With Superman's battle with the World Engine, producer Jon Peters' technically has a Superman film in which Superman battles a spider-like creature. Kevin Smith points this out in his podcast review of the film.
    • In light of screenwriter David Goyer's comments about Clark's religion, this joke:
    Q: Who is Superman's most religious nemesis?
    A: Lex Lutheran!
  • Christian Bale played the role of Jesus in Mary Mother of Jesus. Twenty years later he sarcastically thanked Satan for helping him give an award-worthy performance in Vice.
  • In The Matrix, Morpheus takes Neo out of the Matrix by covering him in a mercury-like substance (due to the reality-warping abilities of the hackers). Laurence Fishburne, in a different role, would later do the same thing in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer.
  • In The Maze Runner, Will Poulter's character misses out on getting lost in the wilderness after his death. In The Revenant he's finally included in a trek across the wilderness.
  • In Me, Myself & Irene, one of Charlie's genius sons says "Man how the hell can they call Pluto a planet? No motherfucking planet has an elliptical orbit. This shit don't make no sense." (All planets have elliptical orbits, just not as markedly elliptical as Pluto's.) Fast forward six years to 2006; after ongoing debates stretching as far back to 1992, Pluto finally got demoted to a dwarf planet.
  • Mean Girls:
    • The Alpha Bitch informs her new best friend (Lindsay Lohan) that she dumped her original best friend because she couldn't afford the stigma of being seen to be friends with a lesbian (the friend was not in fact gay). Four years later and with Samantha Ronson in the picture, the line takes on new meaning.
    • The mean girls are dubbed the Plastics. Come the film's tenth anniversary, and out of heroine Cady (Lindsay Lohan) and the Plastics (Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert) guess whose actress is the only one of the four to have had plastic surgery?
  • In the WWII pro-Soviet propaganda film, Mission to Moscow, Roosevelt's ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joe Davies, says to Stalin: "I believe that history will remember you as a great builder for the benefit of mankind." In all seriousness.
  • Moneyball:
    • Moneyball is a 2011 film starring Brad Pitt about the successful rebuilding of the 2002 Oakland A's baseball team. The following year in 2012, the Oakland A's would be a surprisingly good team - after years of having a losing record - and make it to the playoffs again.
    • Billy's line about the A's financial situation — "There are rich teams, and there are poor teams...then there's fifty feet of crap...and then there's us" — became disturbingly literal in 2013 when a stadium plumbing backup filled the Oakland locker rooms with raw sewage.
  • Many scenes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, especially the scene with the Frenchmen taunting King Arthur and his men, have an added dimension to humor to them now that Michael Palin has received a knighthood.
  • The Muppets:
    • In The Muppet Movie, Kermit and Fozzie pick up Gonzo and Camilla. Gonzo states that he's always wanted to move to Bombay, India, to become a movie star. Fozzie retorts "You don't go to Bombay to become a movie star. You go where we're going: Hollywood!". Thirty years later, when the Bollywood film industry is outputting more movies than Hollywood is, Gonzo doesn't look so crazy. Bollywood was well-known as a global movie capital even then, so Gonzo really wasn't all that prophetic.
    • Also in that film is the Electric Mayhem song 'Can You Picture That?', which has Dr. Teeth singing the line 'Aurora Borealis'.
    • In The Muppets Take Manhattan, Rizzo the Rat and friends are working at a Greasy Spoon, decades before Ratatouille. For more fun, that was a Disney/Pixar movie and Disney now owns The Muppets.
    • In Muppets Most Wanted, Kermit is replaced by a criminal doppelganger named Constantine. In 2017, Constantine's performer, Matt Vogel, would take over the role of Kermit when Steve Whitmire left the group,
  • In Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, they riff on the movie This Island Earth. During a scene where Brack communicates via interocitor, Tom sings a fictional theme song that goes, "It's the Brack show, starring me - and Brack! It's the Brack show, and I've got lots of good guests..." Four years later, The Brak Show would come into existence (which was preceded by two specials, both entitled Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak, the second of which was a variety show that - indeed - had guests).

    N 
  • Ichirō Nagai (Better known as the voice of Happosai) caused this twice: The first time as voicing Yoda and the second time as voicing Albus Dumbledore. And anyone who watched the Star Wars films, the Harry Potter films and Ranma ½ already known there's a world of difference between Happosai, Yoda and Dumbledore (other than being the mentor figure in the three cases and being a miniature mentor between Yoda and Happosai). This is even more hilarious between Happosai and Dumbledore: The former is a Dirty Old Man who likes beautiful girls and the latter is gay.
  • The Naked Gun series featured O.J. Simpson as an accident-prone detective named Nordberg. While this may count as Harsher in Hindsight for some, seeing O.J. being fed through the wringers in the movies can be strangely cathartic.
    • An even better O.J. example: Simpson was once considered for the role of the Terminator, but the director changed his mind, on the basis that he wouldn't be convincing enough as a determined killer.
      • Probably still holds true, the key word being "determined": Ax-Crazy yes, but "determined" requires a certain amount of mental focus that Simpson has yet to exhibit.
    • Yet another O.J. moment occurs in Ruthless People when a dozen police cruisers are slowly following Ken through Los Angeles.
  • The Naked Gun 2 1/2 was released in 1991, just after it was discovered that the Hubble Space Telescope's primary mirror was flawed and it was taking fuzzy pictures. In the movie, a picture of the Hubble appears on a "Wall of Failures" next to the Titanic. It's not considered much of a failure anymore...note 
  • In The Nanny Diaries, Scarlett Johansson, dressed in an embarrassing Red White and Blue Colonial Era-style costume for a Fourth Of July party, runs into her crush played by Chris Evans. He teases her, saying "You look very patriotic." Watching this and Captain America: The First Avenger (with Chris Evans as the title character) makes this funnier than it should be.
  • Robert Altman's 1975 film Nashville revolved around the campaign of an unseen third-party presidential candidate who had unexpectedly become a serious contender. Throughout the movie he can be heard giving speeches in a thick Southern accent, criticizing the Washington elite. In 1992 a third-party candidate from the South unexpectedly became a serious contender in the presidential race. This was actually Ripped from the Headlines ... from the then relatively recent 1968 election, when third-party ("American Independent") candidate George Wallace was not only a serious contender but actually won several states in ... you guessed it ... the Deep South, which is also where he was from.
    • Of the 24 principal characters the "Tricycle Man" — the only one with no dialogue — is played by Jeff Goldblum in his third film role. At the same time, even though his famous speaking cadence and speed are absent he's the most eccentric character, something definitely in line with many of his later roles.
  • Zavulon in Night Watch was seen playing a video game with his cellphone. Whatever he did with his phone, his in-game character did with his sword. Looked cool back in 2004. Then came the Wii...
  • Now You See Me 2: Daniel Radcliffe graduated from a wizarding school to become a stage magician.

    O 
  • In Ocean's Thirteen, which came out in 2007, the fictional owner of the Bellagio declares that he hates another casino owner, whose own hotel is called The Bank. In real life, the Bellagio opened a nightclub called The Bank in 2008.
  • The 1999 Christian film The Omega Code contains a couple of instances within the first 10 minutes:
    • First, Dr. Gillen Lane (the main protagonist) arrives on a talk show to hawk a book on the supposed Bible code. He makes his entrance doing a "raise the roof" gesture and jumps over the couch. Just fast-forward to 2005 and Tom Cruise infamously jumping on a couch during an interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show.
    • Later he breaks from the interview to get the crowd to briefly chant "change". Sound familiar?
  • On the Buses films:
    • On the Buses: The casting of Pat Coombs as Vera, one of the new female bus drivers hired by Blakey, becomes a lot funnier once she was cast as Blakey's sister in On the Buses' short-lived Spin-Off, Don't Drink the Water.
    • In Mutiny on the Buses, Blakey mutters a defeated "D'oh" after learning Stan will be taking the Windsor Safari Park tours.
    • Holiday on the Buses:
      • The Butlers left Little Arthur behind from their holiday years before the same happened to Kevin McCallister. The only difference is that the Butlers went back for Little Arthur almost instantly.
      • The film features an Italian sibling duo called Maria and Luigi.
  • The two major villains of the neorealism classic Open City are named Major Bergman and Ingrid. The film's director Roberto Rossellini later married actress Ingrid Bergman. Did she know about this?
  • Our Friend Power 5: The turtles in this movie come from the planet BattleStar, making them aliens. Already pretty funny in context, even funnier when the turtles were rumored to be from space in the 2014 movie...
  • The thriller Outbound has Matilda, played by Ana Ularu. In the movie, Matilda is a prisoner for the crime of prostitution, and one of the people she ends up finding is her ex-pimp. Fast-forward to Emerald City, where Ularu plays Mistress West, the owner of a brothel.

    P 
  • Pacific Rim:
    • Most likely unintentional, but the fact that the giant bots share the name Jaeger with the main protagonist of Attack on Titan who fights a different kind of giant.
      • Doubly hilarious if you know that Eren actually "pilots" one of those Giants to battle, as Giants are revealed to essentially be organic mecha that grows around the user.
      • Triply so when you find out that the governments were building giant walls to protect them from the Kaiju... which fail miserably.
      • Quadruply so, even; the similarities between Newt and Hanji Zoe, the perky, titan-obsessed mad scientist of that series, are not lost on fandom.
      • In Hong Kong, Kaiju bones are used as part of a building, while Colossal Titans line the inside the walls.
    • The Jaegers also share a name with a MechWarrior mech.
  • In the 1998 version of the The Parent Trap, Dennis Quaid plays a recently divorced father whose kids want him to get back with his wife. Seven years later, Quaid starred in the 2005 remake of Yours, Mine, and Ours where he plays a widowed Coast Guard with eight kids, who marries a widowed handbag designer (Rene Russo) with 10 kids. But the kids' goal in that film is the total opposite of the twins' goal—They want the parents to split up!.
  • In yet another Mel Gibson example his gangster film Payback was marketed with the tagline "No More Mr Nice Guy".
  • A shot◊ from the 1922 Charlie Chaplin movie Pay Day bears a striking resemblance to the 2017 "Distracted Boyfriend" meme.
  • On the 2004 teen-flick The Perfect Score, Chris Evans leads a six-man group that includes Scarlett Johansson with red hair. Eight years later, we'd get the same movie, only it's now called The Avengers.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean: Will Turner is voiced in Japanese by Daisuke Hirakawa, whose his most (in)famous role is Makoto Itou, and everyone who watched the films and also School Days will know how both Will and Makoto end in their respective works: Will gets his girl and ends in a nice ship as the captain, with his heart in a box; Makoto doesn't get the girl and he also ends in a NICE BOAT without being the captain of that boat... with only his head inside of it.)
  • In Planet Terror, Muldoon (played by Bruce Willis) mentions that he killed Osama bin Laden with a shot to the chest followed by a bullet to the head. Pretty funny in 2007. It became even more funny in 2011, as that was how bin Laden actually died.
  • Power Rangers (2017):
    • In 2015, a professional-level Fan Film named Power/Rangers was released as part of the "Bootleg Universe" that specifically parodied the idea of a Darker and Edgier reboot of a cheesy '90s property aimed at kids, which gained enough traction for several former cast members of the show to comment on it. Not only is the "gritty reboot" played completely straight here, but some of those same people even made cameo appearances.
    • Near the end of the film, Jason has his Zord step on a yellow and black Camaro and throws it at some Putties, shouting "Sorry Bumblebee!" A year later Hasbro, which owns Transformers, would buy Power Rangers from Saban.
  • The President's Analyst, from 1967, has the title character (James Coburn) excitedly talking about his first session with his girlfriend: "You'd think he'd spend all his time worrying about China, or Russia? ...hasn't slept in eight nights worrying about Libya!"
  • If you read the comments from the trailers of Pretty in Pink, you'll find out that the character Iona is compared to Lady Gaga due to her outrageous outfits and hairdos. These comments get even funnier now considering Iona's first lines in the movie: "Applause, applause, applause".
  • Stan Lee made a cameo in The Princess Diaries 2 a few years before Marvel would be bought by Disney.
    • Also during The Princess Diaries 2, when Chris Pine's character is shown the "easy way" to win at darts, he objects with "That's cheating!". In Star Trek (2009), Pine plays James T. Kirk and he gets accused of cheating because of his unique approach to the Kobayashi Maru scenario.
  • Python: William Zabka, here playing a Sheriff's deputy, feuds with a dark-haired guy he knew from high school (who also happens to be a sports enthusiast) over a girl, before making up and joining forces against a bigger threat. All set in a clearly Californian town. It's strangely prophetic of Cobra Kai, where he plays much the same role as Johnny Lawrence.

    Q 

    R 
  • In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indy establishes his fear of snakes by saying "There's a big snake in the plane, Jock!" Naturally, this resulted in his freakout being referred to on the Internet as "The Original Snakes on a Plane" when a certain memetastic horror comedy starring Samuel L. Jackson was in the works.
  • Raising the Wind features a barman called Mike many years before Only Fools and Horses would have their own Mike the barman as a recurring character.
  • Rambo: Last Blood ends with Rambo killing Hugo Martinez by ripping his heart out, Mortal Kombat style. Rambo has now been announced to be featured as a downloadable Guest Fighter in Mortal Kombat 11.
  • Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window was released in 1954, and featured the character of Stella questioning how the suspected murderer, Thorwald, would've killed his wife. "Of course, the bathtub! It's the only place he could've washed the blood!" Six years later, Hitchcock released his most famous film: Psycho, which is famous for the shower scene.
  • The Recruit: While playing cards, James refers to a fellow CIA trainee, a former Miami cop, as "Sonny Crockett" in reference to Miami Vice. Three years later, his actor Colin Farrell would play Sonny Crockett in the film adaptation of the show.
  • Reign Over Me has a scene where Don Cheadle's character expresses pleasant surprise after reading over an old Captain America comic and seeing that the character has a black partner, The Falcon. Cheadle would, of course, go on to play the black partner of another famous Marvel superhero.
  • It is rather hard to think of Remember Me without laughing if one recalls the meme Metroid: Other M spawned with those two words.
  • Reservoir Dogs: Mr. Pink suggests that he be called Mr. Purple instead so that he doesn't sound gay. Purple later became heavily associated with gay and lesbian symbols.
  • One of the characters in Return of the Killer Tomatoes! is trying to con women into dating him via a phony competition offering a date with a movie star. The character is played by future movie star George Clooney.
    • Similarly, one of the other actors in that film, Rick Rockwell, would later become the titular rich man in the reality show Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire? — which, as it turned out, was as much of a scam as what Clooney's character tries in the film.
  • Rifftrax:
    • In the commentary for Raiders of the Lost Ark, Bill Corbett made a joke about Indy being suspect for communist ties. Guess what happened one year later when Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was released?
    • In the Rifftrax for Avatar, Bill jokingly compares Pandora and Home Tree to Disney's Animal Kingdom. Disney and Cameron later announced the addition of a Pandora-themed land to that very park.
  • In RoboCop (1987), Murphy drives a modified 1986 Ford Taurus, while the villains steal the notoriously fuel-inefficient "6000 SUX", an obvious Brand X Expy of the Pontiac 6000, made by GM. In 2009, guess which brand went bankrupt, and which one didn't?
  • Roger Ebert film reviews:
    • In his 1976 review of the movie Cannonball, Roger Ebert glibly remarked that "there seems to be some sort of insatiable desire among moviegoers this summer to see high-speed car chases and flaming wreckage. The only things more popular on the nation's screens are the Good Ol' Movies (extensively discussed here in recent weeks) and films of demonic possession. If we can get Burt Reynolds into a Trans-Am with the devil in the back seat, we've got a winner on our hands." One year later, the Burt Reynolds-in-a-Trans-Am movie Smokey and the Bandit became the second-highest-grossing film of 1977, after Star Wars. If director Hal Needham had thought to incorporate Satan into the movie, maybe it would've been #1; the same studio (Universal) also made The Car — about a demonic coupe — in '77 but that flopped.
      • Another film based on an illegal cross-country road race, The Cannonball Run, was released in 1981, starring — you guessed it — Burt Reynolds.
    • In his original review of Clue, Roger Ebert wrote, "Here's my suggestion: Since this movie is so short anyway (88 minutes), why doesn't the studio abandon the ridiculous multiple-ending scheme and show all three endings at every theater? It would be more fun that way." From the original VHS release onward, this was actually done, with title cards used to transition from one ending to another (paraphrased, "That's one way it could have happened, but here's another way", etc.).
    • In his review of Jurassic Park, Roger Ebert ponders how special effects advances have altered storytelling in films: "I have the uneasy feeling that if Spielberg had made Close Encounters [of the Third Kind] today, we would have seen the aliens in the first 10 minutes, and by the halfway mark they'd be attacking Manhattan with death rays." Three years later, Independence Day might not have shown the aliens themselves that early on, but it wasn't far off the mark as far as substituting effects for substance goes.
  • In Role Models, upon seeing Augy (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) in his LAIRE cape for the first time, Ronnie remarks, "What are you supposed to be, a superhero or something?" Mintz-Plasse would go on to play a super in Kick-Ass.
  • Romulus, My Father stars Eric Bana (as Romulus). A few years later, Bana was cast in Star Trek (2009) as Nero, a Romulan, like ''from Romulus''.
  • Romy and Michele's High School Reunion got some amusing real life resonance with Elizabeth Holmes, who like Romy is a blonde low-voiced entrepreneur in black who turns out be quite the faker. Actress Mira Sorvino even regularly likes tweets comparing Holmes with Romy.
  • In RV, Robin Williams tells his son played by a young Josh Hutcherson that he bet him $1000 that he'd grow up to be bigger than him. While Williams was not very tall at 5'7", Hutcherson only reached 5'5".

    S 
  • Saturday Night Fever: John Travolta's character, Tony, stops having sex with Annette because she doesn't have a diaphragm and he doesn't want to get her pregnant. (She might have wanted him to get her pregnant.) At the beginning of Look Who's Talking Too, Travolta's character, James, has sex with Mollie while she's wearing her diaphragm. She gets pregnant anyway.
  • The entire scene in Scanners where one of the titular psychics is hooked up to a computer. "Nobody's ever shut down a scanner before."
  • Scarface is a fictionalized account of notorious gangster Al Capone. Al Pacino, who starred in the remake, is almost an anagram of Al Capone. Brian De Palma, who directed the remake, would later direct The Untouchables, which was about how Capone was caught.
  • Fans have jokingly noted that Scott Pilgrim vs. The World features both the future Captain America (Chris Evans) and the future Captain Marvel (Brie Larson).
  • Scrooged have a fake TV special called "Old Fashioned Christmas in the Bayou", very much like all those Swamp Christmas specials we have now.
  • In the movie School of Rock, there is a scene where Dewey Finn is auditioning singers in his Horace Green Prep class for his new rock band. One of the kids (quite horribly) sings "Memory" from the musical Cats. Years later, this scene was made 100x funnier because of the stage musical of the same name. And guess who not only wrote the music, but kept the joke in?
  • The third act of John Waters' Serial Mom deals with the media hoopla surrounding the title character's trial. The film came out a full year before the O.J. Simpson trial.
  • In Shakespeare in Love, producer Philip Henslowe (played by Geoffrey Rush) becomes increasingly confused as Shakespeare's comedy Romeo and Ethel the Pirate's Daughter becomes the tragedy Romeo and Juliet over the course of the movie (without anyone telling Henslowe). His shouts of "Where are the pirates?!" are even funnier now. Bloody pirates.
  • Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It featured a group of minor characters who weren't given proper names, but were simply listed in the credits and script as "Dog" followed by a number. Erik Todd Dellums was among the "dogs", which means the actor who played Three Dog had his first credited role as "Dog 3".
  • Had Shin Kamen Rider: Prologue been successful enough to receive a sequel, the titular rider would've had his design "evolve" into one more akin to that of a traditional Kamen Rider (he would've had a belt and armor)...which is exactly what ended up happening in Ultraman: The Next and Ultraman Nexus! Somewhat amusing, Shin's actor would later appear in Ultraman Gaia and Ultraman Mebius.
  • The Scottish football film A Shot at Glory features several real footballers as the players in the teams seen throughout. One of these is Didier Agathe, who played for Raith Rovers when the film was made and appears as a Rangers player in the film. By the time the film was released, he had signed for Rangers' deadly rivals Celtic.
  • Mako, who was in Sidekicks, said "And then, the Turtles will dance." Mako would later go on to voice Splinter in the 2007 TMNT movie.
  • Mel Gibson's character in Signs has issues swearing to scare off invaders. Pretty funny the first time around, then it becomes absolutely hysterical after his widely publicized, coarsely worded behavior.
  • The Engulf and Devour logo from Mel Brooks' Silent Movie has a disturbing resemblance to the infamous Goatse image. The movie was made a good twenty years or more before the site was started.
  • From The Singing Cowboy (1936):
    Gene Autry: It's the same old story. The broadcasting companies say there's not enough color in the cowboy orchestra to appeal to the audience anymore.
    Smiley Burnette (sidekick): Well, if it's color they want, we can all put on red shirts.
  • In Singles, Matt Dillon's rock singer character gets a review that says he sucks, but his backing band is pretty good. His backing band? The members of soon-to-be-famous Pearl Jam, playing themselves.
  • In the otherwise mediocre 1994 romantic comedy Sleep With Me, Quentin Tarantino's character has an unforgettable monologue (that he wrote himself) where he explains, at length, his theory that the movie Top Gun is actually an extended metaphor for homosexuality. This would be funny enough considering the many gay rumors that have swirled around Tom Cruise over the years, but the clincher of hilarity comes when Tarantino's character Sid insists that Kelly McGillis's character represents heterosexuality. Now consider the fact that McGillis herself came out as a lesbian in 2009.
  • Sleeper, a Woody Allen film, is about a man who is unknowingly cryogenically frozen in the 1970s and wakes up 200 years later. He is quizzed by scientists about the mysterious 20th Century. When they show him a picture of Richard Nixon, they say they've theorized that he was president, but that he did something horrible, as he doesn't show up in the history books, on stamps, money, etc. Woody Allen's character quips that the Secret Service had to count the silverware every time Nixon left the White House. While the film was released at the end of 1973, at the height of the Watergate scandal (as it related to Nixon), it was written and produced before the scandal broke.
    • Though Nixon was already "Tricky Dick," at least in reputation, by the time he was first elected president.
    • While Allen's character is coming to grips with being asleep 200 years, he realizes "Hey, you know, I bought Polaroid at 7; it must be up millions by now!" ...or not.
  • In the 1966 Soviet live-action adaptation of The Snow Queen, Natalya Klimova portrayed the titular character. Two years later, she starred in a live-action adaptation of The Snow Maiden — as Spring Beauty, who laments the harsh winters of the northern regions and who gives the Snow Maiden the ability to feel love, leading to the latter melting.
  • In the 1982 action movie The Soldier, a war game is mentioned involving a simulated attack on Iraqi oil fields by US troops, which predicts that the Iraqis would kick the ass of the attacking US forces. The movie was made after the failed attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages when faith in US military strength was at an all-time low.
    • It was also made before much of the modern US arsenal that went to war in 1991 came into service or was present in significant numbers. Betting that a large, prepared force could take conventional US forces in a ground war at the time was a decent bet.
      • It was also before the Iran-Iraq war had ground the Iraqi military into a bloody pulp. Certainly, the US military of 1991 would have been likely to prevail against the Iraqi military at its peak, but the cost in American lives would have been exponentially higher.
      • Actually entirely backward. The Iraq army before the war with Iran was rather tiny, about 200,000 men. The war was what pushed its massive growth and military spending and by the time it ended the Iraq army was bloated to well over a million men and stocks of all weapons and equipment were far above pre-war levels even after attrition. It also provided huge numbers of nominally combat-tested troops and officers. Indeed a fairly big deal was made of how the Iraqi army was "battle hardened" in the lead up to the war. Without both of those, the Iraq army would have been a joke even on paper, but of course, the conflict wouldn't have happened anyway as Iraq wouldn't have been looking to weasel out of war debt via the expediency of just invading the people it owed it too.
  • Even though unintentional, Something Awful predicted that a Monsters, Inc. prequel would be made. In one of their Photoshop Phriday contests back in 2004, one of the submissions for "Unlikely Movie Prequels" was a poster for "Monsters, LLP." Nine years later, we are treated with the release of Monsters University.
  • Spaceballs:
    • The quick joke about "Rocky Five...Thousand" became even funnier when Rocky Balboa came out, continuing the Rocky series 16 years after the previous installment.
    • The joke about the sequel, Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money, is much funnier now that the prequels were made.
    • Rick Moranis' voice as Dark Helmet got even funnier with the release of the Star Wars original trilogy on DVD and its documentary Empire of Dreams, where it's revealed that David Prowse, the man in the Darth Vader suit, has a remarkably similar voice.
    • As Lone Starr gives Princess Vespa his jacket, he says "The cold never bothers me."
    • Spaceballs features a character named Colonel Sanders. In 1999, there was an advertising campaign in which Colonel Sanders was depicted as a Jedi.
    • Lone Starr and Dark Helmet's confrontation is a lighter version of Han Solo and Kylo Ren's confrontation in The Force Awakens. The similarities between Dark Helmet and Kylo Ren don’t end there. They both wear voice-changing masks not because they need them but because they think it looks cool, talk to inanimate objects in their rooms about their evil plans (Kylo Ren to Darth Vader’s helmet, Dark Helmet to his action figures) and throw hissy fits when they don’t get their own way. The scene with Kylo interrogating Rey whilst she’s strapped to a metal frame is also reminiscent of the scene in Spaceballs where Dark Helmet has Vespa tied up in the same way.
    • In this Spaceballs scene, it's shown that almost all the Stormtrooper expies are related. Almost fifteen years later, Attack of the Clones revealed that the original Stormtroopers were clones of a single man and thus related.
  • One of Sil's victims in the 1995 movie Species was named John F. Carey. The Democratic Party nominated John F. Kerry for President of the United States in 2004; he didn't quite get to the top office, and his political career to that point was more or less a victim of the Swift Boat movement's disinformation campaign.
  • Spider-Man Trilogy:
    • The plot of Spider-Man 2 can be summed up by the preexisting meme "How Do I Shot Web?".
    • On the subject of Spider-Man, in the first movie, when the Green Goblin is trying to trick Spidey into letting his guard down at the climax of the film, he said, and I quote, "Believe in me, as I have believed in you." Not exactly the same as in the linked series, but it was hilarious.
    • Spider-Man 3 ended with the death of Harry Osborn. While the subplot of Peter planning to propose to MJ is the opposite, given One More Day, that story ended with comics!Harry coming back after dying in the lead-up to The Clone Saga.
    • In Spider-Man, the Green Goblin persona told Norman to attack Peter's "heart", advice later given to Harry by a hallucination of Norman in Spider-Man 3. Are we sure that the Green Goblin personality really isn't Ryuk?
  • In Spies Like Us, Dan Aykroyd's character responds to a question of his abilities by rattling off a list of things he's skilled in, concluding with "I'm Mr. Hands!"
  • Frank Miller's version of The Spirit:
    • Officer Morgenstern is frequently told that she will "make detective in no time." Morgenstern was played by Stana Katic, who would later go on to play Detective Kate Beckett in Castle.
    • There's a bizarre sequence where Silken Floss (played by Scarlett Johansson) wears a kimono and uses a Japanese-style umbrella while ordering a henchman to commit Seppuku. Johansson would, of course, go on to play the lead in Ghost in the Shell (2017), where she was heavily criticized for playing a Japanese woman.
  • In Splash, when Madison picks her name by looking at a street sign, Tom Hanks's character declares that "Madison's not a name!" Well, thanks to this very movie, it is now.
  • One of the most remembered aspects of Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over was Elijah Wood's appearance as "The Guy", the UltimateGamer386 of the video game who ends up getting killed less than a minute after he appears. Everyone say it with me: GAME OVER - PRESS R TO TRY AGAIN.
  • Star Trek films:
    • Star Trek: The Motion Picture:
    • In Star Trek IV, Scotty attempts to use an early Apple Mac lead to him saying "The keyboard? How quaint!" when advised to use it instead of the mousenote . Dr. Nichols thinks he's unfamiliar with the use of mice and GUIs, which were cutting-edge at the time. In the modern day, touchscreen-based devices are almost literally rendering keyboards quaint. Life Imitates Art?
    • In Star Trek: Generations, after meeting Demora Sulu, Chekov wistfully says "I was never that young...", to which Kirk replies, "No, you were younger." In Star Trek (2009), everybody is younger, but Chekov in particular stands out. This sadly became Harsher in Hindsight in 2016, when Anton Yelchin died in an auto accident at age 27, even younger than Walter Koenig was when he started playing Chekov.
    • A Meta example: in the commentary for Star Trek: First Contact, Ron Moore discussed the difficulty of RetConning the Borg Queen into earlier Borg episodes, and made a comment to the effect that whoever took over the franchise next should just throw out the continuity and start over. This is in essence the premise of Star Trek (2009) and its sequels.
    • Star Trek (2009):
      • Kirk's family is quite amusing when you consider the actors' subsequent work: His dad, who died after investigating a lightning storm in space, is now Thor. His mom names him James after her father—in Once Upon a Time, her father James is better known as Prince Charming and played by the same actor as Thor's Fandral the Dashing. So, Fandral's daughter married Thor and they eventually had a kid in space. Finally, Kirk's actor Chris Pine plays Prince Charming in the film adaptation of Into the Woods, making one Prince Charming, aka James, the grandson of another.
      • In Star Trek (2009), Eric Bana plays a time-traveling man who misses his now-dead wife. The Time Traveler's Wife (2009), starring Eric Bana, was released shortly after.
    • Various scenes in the films have become funnier now that we know George Takei is gay.
      • In Star Trek III, when they bust McCoy out of the jail, Sulu holds a (male) guard up against a wall and seems just a little too close and low...and he seemed to be thrusting a bit...and if one pauses and really looks for it, Sulu's eyes seem to be staring at the guard's crotch. In the same scene, a phaser-packing Uhura orders the transporter beam operator to "get in the closet".
      • In Star Trek IV, Sulu sure does love San Francisco, doesn't he?note  In addition, Takei mentioned in 2006 that he first met his partner Brad Altman "about 20 years ago", i.e., around the time that Star Trek IV was being made.
      • In Star Trek: Generations, Kirk is surprised to learn that Sulu has a daughter—one old enough to be an officer on Enterprise-B. Aside from Takei coming out, William Shatner has admitted the rest of the cast may have a point about him being completely self-absorbed. Whether one attributes Kirk's surprise to his obliviousness about his crew moving on or to his perception of Sulu's sexuality, it's still pretty funny. And then, Star Trek Beyond shows Sulu having a daughter and a husband.
  • Disney's film Lilo & Stitch 2: Stitch Has a Glitch was advertised with a fake-out trailer warning for Revenge of the Stitch. Guess who owns Star Wars now?
  • The 1992 film A Stranger Among Us has a scene where Melanie Griffith's character sees the male lead, a Hasidic Jew and Kabbala student, listening to headphones and asks "Madonna?".
  • The Farrelly Brothers comedy Stuck on You, starring Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear as a pair on conjoined twins, becomes even funnier after Green Zone, where Damon plays a soldier who is pitted against Kinnear's unethical bureaucrat.
  • Summer Lovers. Michael (Peter Gallagher) tells Cathy (Daryl Hannah) that he's surprised to see her Skinny Dipping after they had only been in Greece two days. Cathy says, "I used to dream I was a mermaid." Fast forward two years later...
  • Superhero Movie, which parodies the Spider-Man Trilogy has two.
  • Superman Returns: Henry Cavill had auditioned for the role of Superman in this movie but lost out to Brandon Routh, only to later get the last laugh in his own way by getting a second chance at playing the role in a Continuity Reboot trilogy that made a bigger mark on comic book movie history - his first movie served as the springboard that launched DC's shared cinematic universe, his second movie had the first live-action crossover of Batman and Superman (as well as serving as Wonder Woman's big-screen debut), and his third movie had him teaming up with the Justice League.
  • A 1991 draft of the script for the Super Mario Bros. (1993) movie had Mario accidentally hatching a baby dinosaur, named Mario Jr., who mistakes Mario for his mother. A couple of months later, the Super Mario World episode "Mama Luigi", in which Luigi finds a baby Yoshi who mistakes him for his mother, aired. This is perhaps made even funnier by the fact that "Mama Luigi" is now an Internet meme.
  • Surf Ninjas was about two princes growing up as surfers. Prince William, second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, is a surfer. That and the binoculars and eyepatch gag are probably the two truly funny things from that movie.

    T 
  • Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby is about a NASCAR driver who loses his ride and sponsorship due to costly on-track activities and ends up returning with an underfunded independent team. It becomes Hilarious in Hindsight after Kurt Busch was fired from the powerhouse Penske Racing in 2011 for outbursts and ended up starting the 2012 season with underfunded Phoenix Racing.
  • In Team America: World Police, directed by Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the main character is named Gary Johnston. In 2012, the Libertarian Party candidate for President was named Gary Johnson. To make this reference even funnier, Parker and Stone are avowed Libertarians.
  • In Ted 2, Bobby Moynihan is seen portraying Ted in an in-universe Saturday Night Live sketch. This wouldn't be the last time he would play a bear.
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Michelangelo exclaims upon first seeing April O'Neil on TV "She's a fox!" In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) 24 years later, April O'Neil is played by none other than Megan Fox.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014):
    • In hindsight, the backdraft for the whole "the Turtles is aliens" twist after the recent cartoon (also produced by Nickelodeon) revealed that April is essentially an alien in that series.
    • To a lesser and more meta extent is the fact that the turtles look very similar to popular "realistic fanart". Another meta example is that the trailers have somehow caused people to ship Raph and April again.
    • A meta example comes in the supposed 99-Cheese Pizza Splinter temps Mikey with. Despite Donny's that such a pizza is a 'Culinary Impossibility', a famous pizza maker pulled it off.
    • "Ooh, look, he's doing his Batman voice." becomes funny when it was announced that the Ninja Turtles would have a crossover with Batman in the Fall of 2015. Adding to this is that Vernon's actor, Will Arnett, previously voiced Batman in The LEGO Movie.
  • More of an in-film thing, but one of Zoe Saldaña's early roles was as a TSA agent in The Terminal. Who happened to be a die-hard Trekkie. Five years later, she lands the role of Lt. Uhura in Star Trek (2009). And then, spinning on a few more years, Diego Luna - the actor so adorkably geeking about discovering the sci-fi nerdom of the girl of his dreams - would be cast as the male lead in Rogue One, the first "anthology film" other Mega Sci-Fi franchise, Star Wars (and being a shameless Star Wars Promoted Fanboy about it too).
  • In 1982's The Thing (1982), Keith David's Dr. Childs claimed he "didn't believe [in] voodoo bullshit". Come 2009, he's turned to conjuring voodoo bullshit.
  • In The Incredible Hulk Returns, Thor is introduced as a being entirely separate from Donald Blake, who in the comics was his Alter Ego. Flash forward a few decades to Marvel's Thor where Donald Blake exists entirely separate from Thor, although he is only mentioned several times as a Mythology Gag and never shown onscreen.
  • At one point during the car chase scene in THX 1138 a voice can be heard over a police radio saying "I think I ran over a Wookiee back there" - Terry McGovern was improvising and made up that term on the spot, and of course this inspired the name of the creatures in George Lucas' next movie, Star Wars. Hearing the line now, it's hard not to get the mental image of poor Chewbacca getting hit by a police car.
  • Tin Cup. Rory McIlroy, a Real Life golfer who comes out of nowhere to win Opens makes it even funnier to follow the adventures of the fictional Roy McAvoy.
  • In the late 90s, Leslie Nielsen was attached to star in a Titanic spoof called Titanic Too: It Missed the Iceberg, which would have been set in the present-day and centered around the maiden voyage of a replica version of the Titanic, but the project ultimately fell through after being unable to secure funding. In 2010, The Asylum produced the No Budget flick Titanic II, which had the exact same storyline except done in complete seriousness. And then two years after that, a plan to make a real-life Titanic II was announced...
  • In Tomorrow Never Dies, Elliot Carver discusses starting a Presidential sex scandal - shortly before Bill Clinton's own "Fornigate". Even before any scandals broke Clinton had a reputation as a womanizer, and a sex scandal was assumed to be political death for any sitting president.
  • Transylvania 6-5000 is a goofy Monster Mash comedy released in November 1985, one of many films to attempt to cash in on Ghostbusters (1984). Two of its performers met and fell in love during the shoot: Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis. Just as Transylvania 6-5000 hit theaters, they were up in Toronto to start filming on a very different kind of monster movie, the one that would provide them both with Star Making Roles. Goldblum even pointed out in an interview promoting The Fly that in Transylvania 6-5000 he played a journalist and she played a monster, and this time their roles were flipped!
  • A Trip to the Moon is funny enough in its own right. But its image of a bullet-shaped rocket is oddly prophetic, given all the shapes a rocket could be. Firing a satellite into space using a giant cannon is also something that has been and is still being seriously considered in certain circles, though doing so to a manned spacecraft would be unfeasible.
  • The main character in the original Troll film is named Harry Potter Jr.
  • Tropic Thunder:
    • Robert Downey Jr.'s character cautions against "going full-retard": playing a mentally challenged character who doesn't have special abilities because of it, and so turns off the Oscar voters you're trying to win over (he was nominated for an Oscar for his role). Robert Downey Jr.'s next film was The Soloist, which featured his character befriending a man with mental problems played by Jamie Foxx (he wasn't nominated for an Oscar despite portraying a Real Life mentally challenged yet ridiculously gifted person).
    • The fictional movie that led to said "full retard" discussion, Simple Jack, somehow got a real life counterpart 13 years later in Music, which also had a neurotypical actor as an Inspirationally Disabled character, and became infamous for portraying poorly-researched, offensive and harmful stereotypes about the mentally handicapped.
    • Some people in France should have paid more attention to Tropic Thunder. Less than two years after it was released, they hired the very white Gerard Depardieu to play the lead role in a biopic on Alexandre Dumas (whose grandfather was African, and who, when he was alive, was known as Le Negre) in makeup and a curly wig. Outrage ensued.
    • Robert Downey, Jr., plays a character who seems to be a parody of Heath Ledger. The following year he was nominated for an Oscar and lost. Guess who won.
  • In True Lies, Ahnuld's character, in the name of Obfuscating Stupidity, calls a nuclear warhead a "sno-cone maker". Hang on a minute, this reminds us of a later Ahnold role, in which his character's gimmick is snow, ice, and bad puns.
    • Taking it up to eleven, the character delivers the infamous one-liner "You're fired" to the villain before killing him. Two decades later, he was selected as the replacement host for Donald Trump in The Apprentice, a series known for using that one-liner.
    • In Last Action Hero, after Slater has come to the real world, he commandeers a car by punching through the window first, then lampshades the Soft Glass trope by pointing out that it really hurt. Arnold's next movie was True Lies, and while filming one scene in which he punches out a car window angrily while talking to Tom Arnold's character, he accidentally punched the wrong window... one that was real glass. Tom Arnold's shocked reaction, we imagine, isn't all fake.
    • The Femme Fatale of True Lies is Juno Skinner as played by Tia Carrere, an antiquities dealer who has attracted the scorn and ire of archaeologists for profiteering off priceless artifacts of great historical value. Carrere would go on to portray the Adventurer Archaeologist Sydney Fox in the TV show Relic Hunter.
  • Once upon a time, the premise of The Truman Show and EDtv were considered fictional. These days, we know them as "webcams", "livestreaming" and "reality TV."
  • In the 1985 film Tuff Turf, James Spader's character walks out of a bar in which Robert Downey Jr.'s character has been playing. Outside the bar, the words "The New Avengers " are visible in graffiti on the wall. Fast forward thirty years, and Spader is playing Ultron (with Downey, Jr. returning as Iron Man) in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

    U 
  • In Undercover Brother (2002), Lance (Neil Patrick Harris) has his Berserk Button pressed when a guard calls him a sissy, leading him to say "I am not a SISSY!" In November 2006, Neil Patrick Harris publicly came out as gay. For those not in the know, "sissy" was originally a slur against gay people.
  • United Passions, a hagiography of the FIFA and its leaders, turned out to be this due to its release timing coinciding with a major corruption scandal. The claim in the trailer that Sepp Blatter is "very good at finding money" took on a whole new meaning. The movie was not well received.
  • U.S. Marshals, where Wesley Snipes's character is wrongfully accused of crimes, becomes slightly silly now that Snipes has been convicted of numerous crimes. Really, most of his movies outside maybe the Blade series fall under this since he's usually typecast as a cop or other authority figure.

    V 
  • In Valentine's Day, the character Sean Jackson, is a football player who becomes the first male major sports athlete to come out as gay as he enters free agency. In 2013, basketball player Jason Collins became the real first male major sports athlete to come out, also as he entered free agency.

    W 
  • Wag the Dog, about creating a (fictional) war with Albania to cover up a presidential sex scandal, was released less than a month before the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and subsequent attacks against Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Yugoslavia, which is directly north of Albania.
  • In Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, there's a scene where Dewey Cox's song of the same name (which is a spoof of Johnny Cash's "I Walk The Line", to go with the early portions of the film spoofing the Cash biopic Walk The Line) gets sampled in a hit rap song in a very clumsy, incongruous way. A couple of years later, Snoop Dogg would do a remix of "I Walk The Line" itself, which amounted to a Snoop Dogg song with very awkwardly incorporated Johnny Cash samples.
  • Oliver Stone's Wall Street strangely presages Charlie Sheen's real-life descent into cocaine-fueled, manic self-absorption. Possibly doubles as Harsher in Hindsight depending on your point of view.
  • Chris Pratt had a small but memorable role in Wanted, where James McAvoy beat him across the face with a keyboard. Years later, both men would become Marvel superheroes. McAvoy went on to play Professor X in X-Men: First Class, X-Men: Days of Future Past and X-Men: Apocalypse, while Pratt went on to play Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy (2014).
  • Kenneth Connor's characterisation in Watch Your Stern as a wannabe electrician who mucks up whatever he tries to mend is eerily similar to his role in Nearly a Nasty Accident, which came out the following year.
  • The Waterboy features a rather dorky young man from Louisiana (Bobby Boucher) who leads an underdog team (the SCLSU Mud Dogs) against a previously-undefeated heavy favorite (University of Louisiana Cougars) with a coach renouned for being a strategic mastermind of the game (Red Beaulieu) to a three-point win (30-27) in the final bowl game of the season (the Bourbon Bowl), capped by a final-minute touchdown pass by that dorky young man to probably the team's best offensive player (QB Gee Grenouille). Ten years after the film came out, we had a rather dorky young man from Louisiana (Eli Manning) who led an underdog team (the 2007 New York Giants) against a previously-undefeated heavy favorite (the 2007 New England Patriots) with a coach renouned for being a strategic mastermind of the game (Bill Belichick) to a three-point win (17-14) in the final bowl game of the season (Super Bowl XLII), capped by a final-minute touchdown pass by that dorky young man to probably the team's best offensive player (WR Plaxico Burress).
  • In Water for Elephants, Robert Pattinson plays a character named "Jacob". This also happens to be the name of the romantic rival to Pattinson's character in a popular film series, also based on books.
  • A scene in Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally... shows Harry reading Misery. A year later, the novel's film adaptation was released, also directed by Reiner.
  • The 1954 Bing Crosby film White Christmas has a line about it being "impossible to find a Democrat in Vermont". Back in the '40s-late '50s, Vermont was very Republican, to the point where it was one of only two states (the other being Maine) that Franklin D. Roosevelt never won in his four presidential elections. Sixty years later, it's the only state George W. Bush never visited as President, probably out of fear for his life.
    • Vermont is very pro-gun for a "blue" state, however.
  • From the 1990 Clint Eastwood directed/produced White Hunter, Black Heart: (The clip was actually used in full for the montage that was made for his "Lifetime Achievements Awards")
    John Wilson (As John Huston expy): Oh Bill! I'll die broke in a downtown Los Angeles flophouse. And I won't be bitter! I'll have contributed maybe five-ten damn good pictures. They'll name a Special Academy Award after me. And you know something? All the wrong guys will get it. And I will be in Hell laughing my ass off!
  • Wild in the Streets, released in 1968, revolves around a 24-year-old rock star named Max Frost ascending to the United States Presidency. Over fifty years later in 2022, the similarly-named Maxwell Alejandro Frost, aged 25 at the time, would be the first member of Generation Z to serve in the House of Representatives — and likewise played in a band in high school!
  • In Without Warning (1980), Kevin Peter Hall plays an alien that has come to Earth to hunt humans. He would later play a similar role as the eponymous creature in Predator.
  • Overlaps with Totally Radical in The Wizard; "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad." Those of a certain age who remember that in circa-1990 youth slang, bad meant good will understand the intended meaning... It's even more hilarious now that the Wii has come out and been everything the Power Glove is not.
  • In the original 1941 film The Wolf Man, Sir Talbot (Claude Rains) makes an offhand remark about destiny and the werewolf legend. Lon Chaney's character, recalling something the old gypsy woman told him earlier, replies in all sincerity, "That's What She Said."
  • When Wonder Woman was released, some audience joked how it borrowed so much from the MCU movies like Thor. Just a few months later in the same year, Thor: Ragnarok happens to have an evil Omnicidal Maniac god who is the hero's previously unknown half-sibling destroying the hero god's weapon like it's nothing, yet the hero apparently manages to wield his inherent powers over thunder and lightning in a rematch, just like in Wonder Woman.
  • World War Z had Peter Capaldi as a W.H.O. Doctor. Fast forward a few months, Capaldi became the Twelfth Doctor.
  • Wreck-It Ralph isn't the only video game character that wants to be the hero.
    • Seeing RoadBlasters in an arcade can turn into this, after having seen the scene of Turbo crashing a RoadBlasters cabinet.
    • Sugar Rush looks like a candy-filled knockoff of Mario Kart. In 2014, Mario Kart 8 was released and one of its tracks is Sweet Sweet Canyon, which definitely seems to be inspired by Sugar Rush.
    • Ralph spies on a party in his home game and sees Pac-Man causing him to exclaim, "They invited Pac-Man?" Fast forward to 2014, and Pac-Man was confirmed for Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U.

    X 
  • According to The X-Files: Fight the Future, one of the Government Conspiracy's most powerful weapons is FEMA. After the New Orleans debacle...um...no. Deus Ex also made use of FEMA in this manner, claiming it had the power to 'suspend the Constitution in case of an emergency' thus allowing the conspiracy to take over. They probably lifted it directly from the X-Files film, since a member of the conspiracy uses literally that exact line. In reality, FEMA has no such powers whatsoever outside of the imaginings of conspiracy theorists.

    Z 
  • Pick any scene with Kristen Stewart in Zathura. It's about a zillion times funnier after Twilight. Especially when she sniffs her hair, and when she says that the astronaut obviously feels very protective of her.
    • This poster nails it.
    • At the beginning of the film, one of the brothers changes the channel from a sports game to SpongeBob SquarePants. In the Parenthood episode "Solace", the TV changes to SpongeBob during the middle of a sporting event some of the characters were watching.
  • In Zombieland, Jesse Eisenberg's character mentions that the best thing about the zombie apocalypse is that there are "no Facebook status updates." The year after the film was released, Eisenberg played the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, in The Social Network.
    • With Hostess going out of business and people actually quickly buying up remaining supplies of their various snacks, Twinkies included, Tallahassee's quest to find one last Twinkie "before they expire" is very much this (it also may count as Harsher in Hindsight to anyone who enjoyed Hostess snacks).

Alternative Title(s): Film

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