Chekhov's Exhibit

"If you want to fight a war, you gotta wear a uniform."

Lady Holiday: He’s not to be trusted. I wouldn’t even put it past him to steal my most valuable and largest jewel, the fabulous Baseball Diamond. [...]
Miss Piggy: Why are you telling me all this?
Lady Holiday: It’s plot exposition. It has to go somewhere.

— The Great Muppet Caper

Some fancy object is sitting out in the open at a museum, carefully protected by velvet ropes and laser-security systems. Sometimes it's encased in a carefully monitored glass case. Fat chance it'll stay there for the entire movie.

In caper movies, objects like this are just asking to be stolen via a "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop. Rest assured, if a tour group is looking at it in Act One, expect it to be stolen by Act Three. In horror movies, the object will be Sealed Evil in a Can. In action films, nearly anything is possible: the object might need stealing, or it might be a bomb... it all depends on the plot. Often overlaps with Break Out the Museum Piece, although that trope often is usually legally done as opposed to illegally.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Lupin III: The First: The first scene post-prologue establishes that the Bresson Diary is part of a brand-new museum exhibit. Five minutes later, it has already been stolen.

Comic Books

• In Superman storyline The Girl with the X-Ray Mind, a fake Golden Kryptonite rock can be seen on a display in the background as Lex Luthor is looting the Superman's Museum. Seven pages later, Luthor reveals he used that fake Kryptonite to fool the criminals of the Phantom Zone into believing they had removed their enemies' powers.

Fan Works

• With Strings Attached: The first piece of the Vasyn is in New Zork's Museum of Natural History. Since no one there has any idea that the thing has value to anyone besides geologists, or that anyone could possibly steal it—it's 20 feet of solid rock, weighing at least 90 tons—it's not guarded at all.
• The Cloud Horn in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World. Tipaanese security just dares you to try to steal it. The four, who want it, figure out another way to get it.

Films — Live-Action

• Superman Returns includes an early shot of a kryptonite shard sitting under glass at the Metropolis Museum of Science. Naturally, Lex Luthor shows up eventually to steal the thing.
• The Declaration of Independence in National Treasure.
• A lot of people forget that The Pink Panther was originally a diamond targeted by thieves, and not the cartoon cat. It was kept in a glass case, naturally.
• The Etoile de Joie diamond in Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo is on display in a museum.
• The DaVinci Journals in Hudson Hawk.
• In the film Sky High (2005) Steve Stronghold makes a point of showing Royal Pain's pacifier to his son during Will's first trip to the secret sanctum. Of course, its theft is important to the plot.
• Sammael is mystically imprisoned inside a sepulcher, on display at the Machen Library of Paranormal Artifacts in Hellboy (2004).
• In Ocean's 8, the heist is set at the Met during an exhibit on European royal jewelry. The target is the Toussaint, around Daphne's neck, but Debbie and Lou set up a heist inside a heist to steal the exhibit pieces as well.
• Moonraker featured an entire museum full of glass artifacts. Not thirty minutes later, we get to see every last bit of it trashed when Bond fights The Dragon, a Kendo champion who insists on going after him with a shinai. Bond manages to repel him with a glass-handled sword that was shown earlier.
• In the film The Phantom one of the Skulls of Touganda that the bad guys (and the good guys, for that matter) need can be found at a museum exhibit. One that both the bad guys and good guys happen to visit at the same time.
• Get Smart has the shoe-phone and the car, although the car is a subversion.

• Ghostbusters II: A painting of the tyrant Vigo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art sets off the chain reaction that fuels the plot.
• The Cellini Venus, in How to Steal a Million.
• In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, we're given a look at Steve's WWII uniform on display at the Smithsonian Museum. After spending half the flick as a fugitive, guess where he goes when he needs gear for the final confrontation?

Literature

• A boy called Kevin in Matthew Reilly's Area 7. He's in a carefully monitored glass case, that is in the military's version of out in the open — that is in a very open position in a secret underground labratory. The President goes on a tour of said laboratory, including the case, at the start of the book. That boy is not going to stay in his case for long.
• In Against a Dark Background the Crownstar Addendum is the most valuable piece of jewelry in the solar system. It's kept in a glass case... in a heavily-secured vault guarded by the entire military force of a city-state. And in a subversion, the thing in the glass case isn't actually the real Crownstar Addendum: the genuine article is kept hidden behind a random metal panel wrapped in oily rags.
• The Panarch's museum in the fourth Wheel of Time book contains a few ancient magical artifacts along with mammoth bones and other random junk. One of the magical artifacts happens to be one of seven seals binding the Dark One's prison closed.
• In the Discworld book Men at Arms, the Assassins lock up the Gonne, it gets stolen, and the rest of the plot follows from there.
• The Dresden Files: the dinosaur skeleton in the museum in Dead Beat becomes important later. Awesome ZOMBIE DINOSAUR!
• During Galaxy of Fear: The Doomsday Ship, Tash mentions a menagerie. Later Zak passes through it and recognizes a handful of exotic harmless animals and three dangerous ones, including a vornskr - a creature that hunts Force-Sensitives. Guess what happens later on, passing through with Force-Sensitive Tash.
• In The Shattered World, Beorn's character is introduced when he steals an exotic gemstone which was displayed in this way.

Live-Action TV

• The Hans Christian Anderson manuscript in the Hustle episode "Law and Corruption".
• The Highlander episode The Lady And The Tiger featured a McGuffin under glass that the immortal cat burglar Amanda Devereaux wanted to steal before her former-partner-turned nemesis Zachary Blaine (played by Jason Isaacs, very early in his career) got to them.
  • Another episode saw MacLeod asking for Amanda's assistance in retrieving the Cross of Saint Antoine from the house of the Evil Immortal of the Week. The EIOTW kept the cross in a big glass case in his foyer.
• Sherlock, "The Great Game": When Watson sees the news report about the Baker Street explosion, there's also a news item about the new Vermeer painting at the museum. It doesn't get stolen, but it does turn out to be important.
• The pilot Mini Series of Battlestar Galactica (2003) prominently featured a recently-set-up museum exhibit in one of Galactica's hangar pods, centered around a lineup of Viper Mk IIs. The mechanics end up refitting them for action after their entire complement of modern fighters is wiped out in the opening Cylon attacks.
• On the season one finale of Leverage, this is subverted as they steal the rest of the art surrounding the Two Davids exhibit and leave that exhibit alone. Their motive was to cause the CEO of the insurance company to be fired, and the rest of the art in the exhibit was insured by his company, as opposed to the Two Davids exhibit which he owned personally.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: "Inca Mummy Girl". The beginning of the ep shows the mummy in its coffin in the museum exhibit, and she revives when the seal is broken. Later, it's that seal that Giles and company have to reassemble to stop her from mummifying people.

Tabletop Games

• A d20 Modern adventure, No Man's Land, occurs within the namesake World War I exhibit, which contains all the tools and weapons and even a tank (either re-activated by magic or somehow not deactivated even when it's the law that they must in Real Life (although a note to the Game Master advises to let it slide for the sake of Rule of Cool)) to outfit a bunch of World War soldiers reanimated by a necromancer and the heroes that must fight them.

Video Games

• Ghostbusters: The Video Game: An exhibit at the Natural History museum regarding Gozer worship triggers a shockwave that re-awakens all kinds of booby traps and leftover followers Ivo Shandor left behind.
• The Mayan Talisman in The Labyrinth of Time plays with this. In a futuristic Lunar Museum, the display where it would be is empty. Then, later in the game, you are able to alter time to allow archaeologist Martin Garrett to actually find it. Then you steal it from the museum after it's put on display.
• The Expel Mirror in Persona is introduced as the centerpiece of a museum exhibit. It turns out later that you need the mirror in order to fight a boss; however, the only obstacle to the protagonists finding it is that going to the museum in the first place is entirely optional, so many players will have no idea where to look for it. While Philemon does tell you what you need, you have to make the leap of logic that "artifact = museum" yourself.
• The seemingly useless stone in the museum in Pokémon Black and White. It is actually a legendary Pokémon, which you must catch to advance the plot.
• Ultima:
  • In Ultima VII, all eight of the original moonstones are sitting unsecured in a museum in Britain, waiting for the Avatar to take them.
  • In Ultima IX the Avatar Museum held dozens of past games' MacGuffins under glass, and seemed the obvious repository for puzzle-solving implements to be taken by the player or seized as weapons by the Big Bad. Inverted and subverted; the heist already took place before the player arrived at the scene, and none of the rest of the exhibit becomes relevant again.
• Happens in the introduction of Wario Land: Shake It!, with the globe containing the whole mini universe seen in a museum, stolen by Captain Syrup and sent to Wario (So that she could get Wario to enter, beat the Shake King and bring the Bottomless Coin Purse to the outside world.)
• Wario: Master of Disguise has a variation: in the third level, Wario sneaks into a museum searching for a lead on the Wishstone. When he walks by an exhibit, Goodstyle gives exposition about everything in it. Later into the level, Wario must answer riddles to unlock doors, and then so the Sphinx lets him leave after the latter learns he's a thief. The answers to the riddles? The objects in the exhibits.
• The golems on the exhibit grounds in Wild ARMs. Inverted that you're going to fight them later in the game.

Web Original

• In the Whateley Universe, some people are smart enough to think about this. After Team Kimba stops a team of mutant ninjas raiding the campus, the school has the secret device the ninjas were carrying, and the headmistress shows them the glass case in the school museum. But it's a hologram of the real thing, which is locked up a lot more securely. Still, they pull this trope out at Halloween when the headmistress is fighting Deathlist.

Western Animation

• A few of the Talismans in the Jackie Chan Adventures were like this.
• Happens in The Real Ghostbusters, notably in a Lovecraft tribute episode where, once again, the Necronomicon was on display to the public. You'd think they'd learn after a while.

• Superman: The Animated Series: Clark Kent goes to a museum early in one episode and hears a tour guide say that the culture that made some of the artefacts on display succumbed to "metallic poisoning." When kryptonite shows up later in that museum, Superman realizes that those artefacts must be made of lead and therefore able to block the radiation.

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