Animated Films
- Grug and Gran from The Croods do not get along at all. Their animosity throughout the movie is a Running Gag.
- Shrek 2 Fiona's father King Harold treats Shrek like utter crap when they first meet, insulting him and even putting a hit out on him. Turns out though, Fiona's marriage to Shrek disrupted a complex plan that Harold made to repay the Fairy Godmother for turning him human in order to marry Fiona's mother decades prior. Eventually, he has a Heel–Face Turn after he sees how strong Fiona's feelings are for Shrek and seeing how low the Fairy Godmother was willing to stoop.
- In Turning Red, Wu doesn't think highly of her son-in-law Jin. Jin reveals that Ming got into a fight with her because of her disapproval when they were dating, which led to Ming panda-ing out, forcing a terrified Wu to back down in order to pacify Ming's rage. While she still doesn't seem to like Jin, she's at least civil towards him.
Live-Action Films
- A Christmas Carol (1999): During one of the Christmas Past scenes, Mr. Fezziwig sings about a song about a man who wants to marry his beloved Rose, but does not want to marry her uncle and her brother and her sister and her mother and fat-headed cousins "all in rows, rows, rows, rows, rows."
- Crazy Rich Asians: According to Eleanor, Ah Ma was this to her once, disapproving her being married to her son because she didn't come from the right family. If Rachel eventually comes around to wed Nick, then Eleanor will no doubt become this to her as well, although she still respects her at least.
- Eat Drink Man Woman has Madam Liang, who spends almost all of her screen time berating her daughters as burdensome and insulting the men they married. She is visibly elated when her daughter in America gets divorced, and vows to mount the divorce papers over the toilet.
- Fargo has the obnoxiousness of Jerry Lundegaard's father-in-law Wade Gustafson be one of the primary ways that Jerry's Batman Gambit turns into a very dark "Fawlty Towers" Plot.
- Fatty's Tintype Tangle features Fatty Arbuckle being harassed by his domineering mother-in-law, who appears to live with them despite having her own house.
- An offscreen example in Get Smart. Dalip, The Brute working for KAOS, has a hellish sister-in-law who's constantly undermining his relationship with his wife and trying to break them up, which causes him endless grief at home. Max manages to keep Dalip from killing him by giving him advice on how to keep his wife and her sister from spending too much time together without looking like the bad guy.
- Guess Who features a white man dating a black woman whose father would rather have her dating a fellow African-American.
- In Hot Water, Harold Lloyd has to contend with three of 'em. Mother-in-law has "the nerve of a book agent, the disposition of a dyspeptic landlord, and the heart of a traffic cop," older brother-in-law is "so lazy he gets up at four o'clock every morning so he'll have a longer day to loaf," and bratty younger brother-in-law has "a skin you love to touch - with a strap."
- It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World has Milton Berle hounded by his harridan mother-in-law (Ethel Merman) and hipster-doofus brother-in-law (Dick Shawn). In all fairness, his own wife (Dorothy Provine), faced with the opportunity, shows a desire to flee them all.
- The mother-in-law of Julia in Julia Misbehaves is responsible for Julia's marriage falling apart with husband William, possibly due to her prejudices towards her daughter-in-law because she isn't from Old Money like their family.
- Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham: Yashvardhan disapproves his adoptive son, Rahul, marrying lowborn girl Anjali, defying a match he had planned for him. In a twist, Rahul sides with his wife, causing his father to disown him. Yash's biological son and Rahul's adoptive brother, Rohan, only learns about this years later, after which he vows to reunite the family together, setting off the plot of the film.
- In the Soviet comedy Kidnapping, Caucasian Style, one of the kidnappers breaks out into a Middle East-themed song titled "If I Were a Sultan". The song starts with him saying that, if he were a sultan, he'd have three wives, who would do all the housework for him. Eventually, though, he has a realization that this would also mean having three mothers-in-law and comes to the conclusion that, if he were a sultan, then he wouldn't get married at all.
- Robert De Niro's character Jack Byrnes in Meet the Parents and its sequels is this to the Nth degree, trying everything to ruin the life of his daughter's latest fiancé (including shooting him full of Truth Serum and leaving him to deal with the subsequent Mushroom Samba embarrassment) because he's a hyper-paranoid Jerkass. It gets to the point that you wonder why she doesn't say or do anything to stop it, particularly when it's mentioned he does this with every boy she brings home and that he constantly keeps secrets from his own family and never fully trusts them, yet he keeps enforcing his "Circle Of Trust" system as a way to keep them from hiding secrets from him in the first place.
- This is basically the plot — as its title implies — of the 2005 movie Monster-in-Law.
- Nobody: Hutch's father-in-law acts friendly to him but there is a sense that they can't quite connect. Meanwhile, Hutch's brother-in-law gives him a gun for protection but does so in a swaggering, Condescending Compassion way after first taunting him with the weapon.
- The Nutty Professor (1996) and its sequel Nutty Professor II: The Klumps show this type of relationship between Cletus Klump and his mother-in-law Ida Mae Jenson. They do nothing but insult each other and threaten to bodily harm each other and there's absolutely no indication that they truly care about each other deep down.
- On Over the Top, we have grandfather Jason Cutler, who hates Lincoln and while in the right that Lincoln (a simple trucker and estranged father) cannot provide to Michael in the way that he (a millionaire) can, especially once Michael's mother dies and leaves Lincoln with the kid's custody, still tries to invoke Screw the Rules, I Have Money! (trying to buy Lincoln off, hiring an army of lawyers to try to find a legal loophole to take Michael away from Lincoln), Screw the Rules, I Have Connections! and makes a continuous barrage of Kick the Dog moments (every conversation he has with Lincoln including a "The Reason You Suck" Speech, keeping the letters Lincoln wrote to his family locked away and telling Michael that Lincoln never cared for him and hiring people to kidnap his grandson and rough Lincoln up) on his single-minded quest to keep father and son apart. Even after Lincoln signs off Michael's custody to Cutler, Cutler still flies to Las Vegas and tries to bribe Lincoln into disappearing forever from the Cutlers' sights, apparently because he disliked the fact that Michael disobeyed him to go cheer Lincoln at the arm wrestling competition.
- Edward from Please Turn Over doesn't mind his wife Janet's sister, Gladys, too much, but she does frustrate him when he isn't able to get to the bathroom before her.
- The French comedy Quest Ce Quon A Fait Au Bon Dieu (Roughly "Lord, what did we do to deserve this?") has the interactions between its various in-laws as the driving source of conflict, as the Verneuil couple have four daughters. The first one marries a Muslim lawyer, the second a Jewish entrepreneur, and the third a Chinese banker. The final daughter Laure is getting married to a Catholic man (to the relief of the parents and the local priest), named Charles... who, it turns out, is black.
- Oddly enough, the main conflict is the one between the two fathers: a very traditional Catholic upper-middle-class lawyer (equivalent to a WASP) and an equally stuffy ex-military man. Fortunately, towards the end of the movie they both get drunk together and discover they have the same conservative political opinions
. - The three brothers-in-law can't stand each other at first, but overcome their differences to spy on Charles, capturing what they think is evidence of him cheating (he was actually taking his sister on a tour of Paris). They immediately apologize for their behavior and start getting along with him, culminating in a moment when all four of them show up to the police station to get both fathers out of the drunk tank in time for the wedding and are promptly thrown out.
- Charles' mother and sister get on splendidly with Laure's mother and sisters and provide much-needed sanity.
- Oddly enough, the main conflict is the one between the two fathers: a very traditional Catholic upper-middle-class lawyer (equivalent to a WASP) and an equally stuffy ex-military man. Fortunately, towards the end of the movie they both get drunk together and discover they have the same conservative political opinions
- Invoked for some spectacularly Black Comedy at the very end of Ready or Not, when first responders find Grace, drenched in blood and gore and sitting shell-shocked in front of a burning manor, having just survived her new husband's family attempting to sacrifice her to Satan.Officer: Jesus Christ, what happened to you?
Grace: [Wryly lighting up a cigarette] In-laws. - In The Ref, this is played straight with the mother-in-law from hell Rose Chasseur, but subverted with both of her sons' families. Brother and sister-in-law Gary and Connie Chasseur initially seem like classic obnoxious in-laws, but they become slightly sympathetic characters when it turns out they're as fed up with "Mother Rose" as everybody else. Plus, even though the main couple (played by Kevin Spacey and Judy Davis) get the Sympathetic P.O.V., it's clear that they could just as easily be considered obnoxious in-laws themselves.Gus: (holding a gun to Mrs. Chasseur's head) Nobody move or I'll shoot!
Connie: Go ahead, kill her. - In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), Maddie's sister Rachel doesn't like Tom, to put it nicely. Even before he became a fugitive, she would jump on any flimsy excuse to tell Maddie to divorce him. She becomes so obnoxious that she has to be tied up to a chair to stop her from being a nuisance. Her daughter Jojo on the other hand is a sweetie who loves her "Uncle Tommy" very much, perhaps even more than her mom, since she doesn't seem to particularly care that her aunt and uncle tied her mom to a chair.
- Sorry, Wrong Number: Not only is Leona overbearing, but her father is too, managing to outmanoeuvre Henry whenever he tries to make a name for himself.
- Tevya: Khave comes to dislike how Fedye's family treats her after the marriage, to the point where she tries to go back to her own family.
