The Red Stapler / Films — Live-Action

A-E

• The Power Loader from Aliens. Caterpillar received inquiries on how to purchase one of the things, but they don't exist and the prop wasn't real.
  • In an unexpected turn of events, YouTube channel "Hacksmith Industries" has been developing a real-life version for years, and eventually word got back to a Caterpillar Marketing VP. They immediately went all in and donated a small skid-steer loader to the channel, which became the literal base for their now-completed and fully functional exoskeleton. They even supplied them with the official CAT paint, accessories, and permission to use the trademark and logos. It's not 100% movie accurate for engineering reasons, but damn close for current technology.
• Animal House:
  • The film did this for college fraternities. For much of the '60s and '70s, they had been in seemingly terminal decline, seen as obsolete relics of the days of elite privilege that were increasingly irrelevant in a world where credentials mattered more than rubbing shoulders... until this film crafted the modern Fratbro image of fraternities as social clubs of cool, hard-partying dudes who were always down to have a good time and thumb their noses at the Moral Guardians. On the other hand, it also made Greek culture seem more loutish in the eyes of those same Moral Guardians, especially as real-life fraternity members started imitating the antics of Delta House. James A. Cosby, writing for PopMatters, joked that the film singlehandedly lowered the GPA of every college student who saw it by 0.18 points per semester.
  • College toga parties had been a fad in the '50s and early '60s, one that this film recreated with its 1962 setting. As a result, they too saw a revival, and have since become a college/fraternity institution.
• The gauge piercing became more popular after the Na'vi in Avatar sported them.
• After Iron Man's memetic quote about shawarma at the end of The Avengers ("I don't know what it is, but I wanna try it"), sales in shawarma shot up dramatically, with some restaurants reporting increases of up to 80%.
• Baby Driver seems to have sparked a renewed interest in iPod classics, with sales going up by 929% on eBay.
• Back to the Future:
  • The DeLorean DMC-12 had been produced for less than two years and had a reputation for extreme unreliability, hence Marty's surprised comment that Doc Brown had, out of all automobiles, built a time machine out of a DeLorean. The car was discontinued and the company shut down years before the first film was ever made, but the movie caused secondhand prices to skyrocket. Eventually the car was brought back into low-level production by a new DeLorean company which acquired remaining part stock.
  • There's a thriving sub-community of enthusiasts who have converted their DeLoreans into replicas of the one from the film. Some fans have built up entire businesses sourcing and fabricating the various parts necessary for the mod and fully converting cars for enthusiasts who can afford it, and one such business was eventually contracted to restore an original car from the film.
  • Certain random devices and common items used in the film are now highly desired by collectors. The JVC camcorder used by Marty, a common enough item at the time, has since become a collector's item, and the Krups coffee grinder used as the base of the "Mr. Fusion" prop is now incredibly rare and sought-after.
• Back to the Future Part II:
  • There was a rumor that the Hoverboards were actually real, but had been banned due to inherent risk of lawsuits over injuries. According to Snopes, both Mattel (whose logo is prominent on the Barbie-pink hoverboard Marty McFly used) and the studio received a bunch of letters inquiring where you could get one of those wonderful toys. This was not helped when Robert Zemeckis, the film's director, gave an interview where he jokingly said they were real. This article suggests that Zemeckis owes an apology (or preferably a real hoverboard) to all the children who saw the film for the trauma brought on by the realization that they could not, in fact, buy a hoverboard.
  • There were also inquiries as to whether the coaster-sized dehydrated pizzas were real.
  • Interest in the relatively-obscure arcade game Wild Gunman rose after it featured briefly in the film.
• The Beach caused its filming location, Maya Beach, to be closed for a few months at a time and then indefinitely due to damage caused by filming and tourists.
• Around the same time that The Matrix (see below) popularized trench coats and Cool Shades in the West, John Woo's A Better Tomorrow came out and did the same in Hong Kong, leading to a joke in the sequel where Ken tells the neighborhood kids how dumb their taste in fashion is.
• Because Eddie Murphy wore a Mumford Phys. Ed. Dept T-shirt in Beverly Hills Cop, the T-shirt became a huge seller. Indeed, the shirts are sold pre-faded to match the original faded design he wore.
• The Big Lebowski:
  • The film's ascension to Cult Classic status in the 2000s has been connected to a rise in the popularity of White Russians, the Dude's favorite cocktail. In particular, it helped boost sales of Kahlúa, a Mexican coffee liqueur that's popularly used to supply the drink's coffee flavor.
  • The coffee tin used in the film is now sought after by collectors, who have to source two things: the specific make of vintage Folgers tin, and the mismatched blue lid from a different brand it was closed with.
  • In the mid-2000s grocery chain Ralphs began accepting requests for club card memberships online, only to find their system flooded with requests for "Jeffrey Lebowski" cards by fans who wanted their own version of the Dude's Ralphs card featured in the film's opening.
• Rather amusingly, Birds of Prey has created a demand for the "I Shaved My Balls For This?" t-shirt worn by Renee Montoya.
• This trope also has its dark side. The Birth of a Nation (1915) not only single-handedly revived the Ku Klux Klan after decades of dormancy, it codified most of the traditions of the "Second Klan" that emerged in its wake. The movie was based on a book called The Clansman, which contained the first example of a man burning a cross. Two weeks after The Birth of a Nation premiered, someone burned a cross atop Stone Mountain, and an old tradition was invented.
• From the second the first trailer for Blade Runner 2049 debuted, interest in K's specialty-made faux shearling jacket was piqued — enough to make replicas spring up overnight.
• After the success of The Blair Witch Project, tourism to the quiet little town of Burkittsville, Maryland skyrocketed. Since many, if not most, of the town's new visitors were loud, obnoxious young people (some of whom committed outright acts of vandalism, thievery, and the like, including stealing the signs to the town), the residents of Burkittsville were understandably upset.
• Braveheart was a boon to tourism in Scotland, so much so that in 1996 the William Wallace Monument in Stirling erected a new statue of Wallace called "Freedom" that looks suspiciously like Mel Gibson.
• The popularity of Ray-Ban Wayfarers goes back to The '50s, when Audrey Hepburn wore them in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Tom Cruise revived them in The '80s when he wore them in Risky Business and Top Gun.
• Hundreds of tourists visited Thailand to see the railway bridge in The Bridge on the River Kwai, but the railway never actually crosses the River Khwae^note Pierre Boulle, who wrote the original novel, had never visited the area and assumed that it did based on a not-very-detailed map. So the Thai government renamed a stretch of the Mae Klong river into the "Big Khwae", near its confluence with the original Khwae. The location used in the film is not in Thailand at all, but Sri Lanka.
• Bridget Jones's Diary:
  • After the success of the film adaptation, silver Elsa Peretti open heart necklaces became quite popular, as Bridget wears one throughout the series.
  • Inverted in another case. As Bridget's drink of choice is often chardonnay, sales of it decreased rapidly. One representative had this to say:
  "Before Bridget Jones, chardonnay was seen as really sexy. Afterwards, people were like 'God, not in my bar!'"
• Since the release of Cast Away in 2000, Wilson Sporting Goods now makes and sells special Cast Away edition Wilson volleyballs, with the smiling handprint-shaped red face printed on them, still on sale as a regular item to this very day.
• The My Buddy doll line never recovered from the release of Child's Play (1988), having been released about three years earlier. The line was designed to create a companion doll that appealed to boys, a risky venture in itself; however, the dolls took off to the level of Cabbage Patch Kids at release in part due to a catchy Ear Worm song. The writer Don Mancini claims that he was basing the movie on the Cabbage Patch Kids line (and it was also themed by 1980s consumerism), but later admitted the connection; initially, Chucky was even named "Buddy." The doll seen in the movie bears virtually no resemblance to a Cabbage Patch Kid and a strong resemblance to a My Buddy doll with a name more similar to it — namely "Good Guy" — it's understandable where the "confusion" could occur. After the movies became popular, sales plummeted due to the very close resemblance and while a redesign of the doll attempted to get away from the association, the brand never recovered especially as movies continued to come out. My Buddy eventually was discontinued in the early 1990s.
• The famous Red Ryder BB gun from A Christmas Story had it happen to it twice. The Red Ryder BB gun was named for a comic strip cowboy character from the 1940s and 1950s, and even after the comic was cancelled in 1963, it was already the most famous BB gun in American history, even outstripping the fame of the comic that inspired it. Then A Christmas Story caused a surge for the specific model of BB gun it described, which ironically did not exist in real life, even as a prototype, until after the movie (the gun with the sundial and compass in the stock at the time was the Buck Jones Daisy BB gun).
• Worldwide sales of Turkish Delight boomed after the release of film version of The Chronicles of Narnia in 2005. The official website even had a printable recipe for Turkish Delight while it was still in operation.
• A Clockwork Orange caused sales to go up for Beethoven's Ninth Symphony recordings.
• The Desert Eagle was a semi-automatic pistol built by three guys who thought it would be cool to fire .357 and .44 Magnum rounds in a semi-auto. Then Arnold Schwarzenegger used it in Commando as his sidearm of choice, a pistol big enough for the biggest Action Hero, making it the go-to weapon for fictional badasses in The '80s and, later, the protagonists of countless shooters despite its real-life impracticality. Today, the gun is hugely popular, which leads to Hype Backlash and angry gun enthusiasts.
• Contact created quite a bit of publicity for the SETI program. Even years later, it's usually how people know of it. This was probably intentional, given the book's author Carl Sagan's support for the program.
• In Death Wish 3, Charles Bronson's character used the Wildey Magnum, a semi-automatic pistol that fires rounds so powerful it rivals the Desert Eagle in muzzle energy. The company that makes the firearm was struggling at the time and close to bankruptcy, only for the movie to single-handedly increase the sales of the Wildey Magnum and rescue the company. It also counts as a Celebrity Endorsement, as it was Charles Bronson's personal pistol.
• Surprisingly, while Deliverance is often jokingly credited with killing the Appalachian camping industry, in truth it actually brought a lot of tourists to the region, as the documentary The Deliverance of Rabun County showed. While the film did depict its protagonists getting horrifically abused by the redneck locals (including sexually) on a rafting trip gone wrong, a depiction that many Appalachian residents found outright offensive, it also depicted the region as a land of beautiful, untouched scenic wilderness. Currently, the main economic driver of Rabun County, Georgia, where the film was shot, is tourism, and canoeing and rafting along the Chattooga River (which doubled for the fictitious Cahulawassee River) brings in about $20 million per year. That said, it did do a serious number to the camping supplies industry for a while - Coleman almost had to declare bankruptcy.
• The original Dhoom, aside from increasing the popularity of sports bikes and racing in general, canonized the Suzuki GSX1300R Hayabusa as the sports bike.
• Dirty Dancing caused masses of teen-age girls to rush into dance schools hoping to learn to dance like Baby Houseman or (especially) have a second Johnny Castle as their instructor. Guys, meanwhile, took dancing lessons because there were loads of girls, and a few hoped to one day be able to get chicks because they can dance like Johnny Castle.
• Dirty Harry caused sales of the Smith & Wesson Model 29, the famous .44 Magnum revolver that Harry Callahan used in the movie, to skyrocket. The ensuing popularity drove prices into orbit, where they would stay, making it nigh-impossible for real gun enthusiasts to get their hands on one. It's also a very heavy gun and probably not the best choice for a casual enthusiast anyway.
• After Charlton Heston tells the cop in Earthquake that his SUV has a custom transmission with eight forward speeds and three reverse, people flooded into Chevrolet dealerships to get one, but they couldn't. The custom transmission was built by the studio for that truck.
• Steven Spielberg initially went to Mars Inc. to ask them if he could have Eliot feed E.T. M&Ms. They said no. So he went to Hershey and asked about a little-known product of theirs called Reese's Pieces. Accounts are inconsistent — some say sales of the things tripled — but the product certainly got a boost.
• The Exorcist:
  • A broader socio-cultural version: it is often credited with spurring a revival of traditional Christian religion in The '70s, especially but not exclusively Catholicism, having been described as "the film that scared a generation back into church" through its depiction of heroic priests saving a young girl from Demonic Possession after modern science and medicine fail. While the '60s and '70s were already the era of the "Fourth Great Awakening" in the US that saw the rise of evangelical Christianity and growing mainstream acceptance of Catholicism (until then regarded as an "ethnic" religion by the WASP establishment), The Exorcist, and the many Religious Horror films that flourished in its wake, were not only symbols of that religious revival's impact on pop culture but also some of its best recruiting tools.
  • Tying into the above, after the film depicted Regan MacNeil first making contact with "Captain Howdy" through a Ouija Board, sales of the board took a hit, and more broadly, what was once regarded as a fun, harmless parlor game came to be seen as a gateway to malevolent forces.

F-J

• Sales of Vans shoes increased following the release of 1982's Fast Times at Ridgemont High, where Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) wore a pair of Vans black-and-white checkerboard slip-on shoes.
• Groundhog Day:
  • The film has led to many collectors of flip-style digital clocks and clock radios trying to obtain the exact same model of clock seen prominently in the film, a Panasonic RC-6025 that dates from the early '80s.
  • The town of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania had become a major tourist spot since the film came out, thanks to it popularizing the town's annual Groundhog Day tradition.
• Guardians of the Galaxy:
  • The first film and its sequel caused of a lot of interest in music from the '60s, '70s, and '80s, thanks to Peter Quill's beloved Awesome Mix Vol. 1 and 2 cassette tapes. So they went ahead and actually released it on vinyl, as well as digital. There was even a limited cassette release packaged to look like a homemade mix tape.
  • The films also caused prices of the original Sony Walkman, which Peter listened to those tapes on, to skyrocket on sites like eBay, selling for hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
  • The 2023 release of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 did the same for the Microsoft Zune, until then remembered (much like the DeLorean from Back to the Future) as an infamous flop that tried and failed to compete with Apple's iPod. In particular, the "poopy brown" Zune that Peter uses has gone for a high as $200-400 on eBay. What's more, the film caused a reevaluation of the Zune, as people who got their hands on them saw them as perfectly good mp3 players that just suffered from poor marketing and worse timing (the iPhone was only two months away at the time of its release).
• Rickenbacker Guitars already received a boost from The Beatles thanks to John Lennon using their 325 guitar on The Ed Sullivan Show (receiving a newer model afterwards), but once George Harrison used their 360/12 12-string guitar throughout A Hard Day's Night, demand for the latter skyrocketed. One band that watched the film, The Byrds, went out and bought similar equipment, having previously been acoustic folk musicians. Led by Roger McGuinn's 12-string Rickenbacker guitar playing, the band went on to help popularize folk-rock and pioneer Jangle Pop.
• Holiday Inn was the inspiration for the name of the popular real-life hotel chain.
• The Talkboy was originally a non-working prop for Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. In 1993 it was made into a retail version, brought on by a massive letter-writing campaign by fans of the film.
• The release of The Hunger Games, together with The Avengers (featuring Badass Normal archer Hawkeye), Pixar's Brave (about a young Scot who becomes a bow-wielding warrior), and the TV series Arrow, has led to heavy increase in interest in archery, to the point where it won't be shocking if, in the future, we will probably end up hearing an Olympic Gold Medalist credit these movies as their reason for getting into the sport.
• Indiana Jones:
  • The Fedora of Asskicking that Indy wears has been consistently popular since the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and is still being sold in costume shops and hat stores. The exact model is a high-crowned Herbert Johnson fedora, if you're interested. Australian hatmaker Akubra (of the eponymous slouch hat) also have a replica model they refer to as “The Adventurer”.
  • The boots worn by the character for the movies, made by Alden, received their own popularity bump, to the point that they now market their Model 405 work boot as the “Indy Boot”. (Oddly enough, the character was originally meant to wear Red Wing boots, but either they couldn’t get ahold of the right ones, or Harrison Ford wouldn’t wear them. Red Wing themselves offer a similar model as the “Girard” or the “1930s Sport Boot”, but only sporadically and usually as an Asian-market exclusive.)
• The 2013 film The Internship increased the number of people applying for internships at Google.
• The Ipcress File: A quadrupling of coffee bean sales is attributed to the opening scene, where Harry Palmer grinds some beans and brews them in a French Press.
• It Happened One Night, a 1934 Frank Capra Screwball Comedy, had one scene in which Clark Gable takes off his shirt to reveal he's not wearing an undershirt. The movie coincided with sales of undershirts dramatically declining, leading to a persistent interpretation that it involved this trope.
• After the release of The Italian Job (2003), sales of Mini Coopers, featured heavily in the movie, increased by 22%.
• Discussed in Jackie Brown, where Arms Dealer Ordell Robbie tells his friend Louis that most of his sales are driven by which weapons are wielded on TV or in the movies. Specifically, he notes that the Steyr AUG assault rifle is a good weapon, but there's no demand for it because it's never been in a movie,^note It was actually in Die Hard while The Killer (1989) caused a spike in demand for .45 pistols (which he considers substandard compared to the 9mm). Proving his point, he then proceeds to take a phone call from a customer who wants a specific make and model of the 9mm, because it's the kind that the protagonist on New York Undercover uses.
• The James Bond films caused all sorts of demand for the toys and gadgets the suave spy has used over the years:
  • Bond has used all sorts of Cool Cars over the years. After being featured in The Spy Who Loved Me, demand for white Lotus Esprits grew so much that customers were put on a three-year waiting list. In later films, car companies would maneuver to try and deliberately place their own products in the films, the most successful example being the BMW Bond drove in the Pierce Brosnan era. The coolest of all time, however, is the Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger. Everybody dreamed of owning one since that movie, but these people, including Top Gear's James May, were astonished to find out that the car had quite a spotty reputation in Britain, leading to low demand and massive depreciation. Then the Top Gear segment became popular and gave the DB5 another boost.
  • Despite being an outdated design from the 1920s chambered for the rather anemic .32 ACP round, the Walther PPK (or more specifically, its import-legal variant, the .380 PPK/S) still enjoys impressive sales numbers thanks to its association with the iconic British spy. Walther's later P99 line also saw an uptick in sales after Pierce Brosnan took over the role and Walther asked for Bond to carry what was then their newest weapon.
  • Penfold Golf Balls sells a special edition of the Penfold Heart golf ball, the ball used by James Bond in his iconic golf scene in Goldfinger, branded with the 007 logo.
  • In supplemental material for Thunderball, it is revealed that the military, upon seeing the film, were interested in acquiring the pen-sized device Bond uses to breathe underwater. Unfortunately, the device doesn't actually exist. Production designer Peter Lamont politely informed them that the effect was created in the editing room and that Sean Connery surfaced between takes.
  • Solitaire's tarot deck from Live and Let Die was eventually produced as a full deck, originally sold under the name "007 Deck" and later renamed "Tarot of the Witches". Its reception by actual tarot readers is mixed.
  • Omega, like many other Swiss watchmakers, saw their sales decline in the 1970s due to the "Quartz Revolution". Then in 1995, they partnered with the production team of GoldenEye, and the Seamaster model featured in the film became one of the most ubiquitous luxury divers in the world over the next few years. The success of that model led to them being able to fund several innovations, such as the Co-Axial escapement. Over the next 20 years, they would come to be one of the most recognizable Swiss watch brands in the world, second only to Rolex (which Bond also popularized back in the 1960s).
  • Skyfall caused a spike in the sales of old-fashioned straight razors (also known as cut-throat razors) due to the scene where Moneypenny seductively uses one to give Bond a close shave.
  • The Mexican Day of the Dead celebration doesn't traditionally involve a giant parade, like the one Bond encounters at the start of Spectre. But then in 2016, the year after the film came out, the Mexico Tourism Board decided that there was enough demand for such a parade, both from people abroad and in Mexico itself, that they organized one in Mexico City as a means of attracting tourists to the city.
  • No Time to Die: Mathilde's handmade wool baby toy ("doudou" in French) was made by a small French workshop called "Une Pelote de Laine". The demand for it increased significantly after the film came out.
• Jaws:
  • Jaws codified the Threatening Shark trope, and people took that to heart in real life. Beach attendance and other oceanic activities took a big hit, and there were serious stories of people being afraid to take a bath after seeing Jaws. It also caused a spike in shark hunting, as people would attack even harmless sharks, to the point of endangering them (especially the Great White). Peter Benchley, author of the novel Jaws, was so troubled by this that he devoted much of his later life to shark conservation.
  • A popular Asian Urban Legend also claims that Jaws increased the demand for shark fin soup.
  • Jaws 3D increased attendance at SeaWorld. Conversely, Blackfish decreased attendance.
• Juno caused what was, by all accounts, a staggering demand for hamburger-shaped phones, despite the main character's brief negative comment that it is awkward to talk into. According to a New York Post article just after the film's release, the burgerphone had a huge rise of 759% in a month.
• Jurassic Park:
  • The series was largely responsible for a colossal increase in the interest and popularity of dinosaurs. It led to the creation of books, toys, documentaries, clothing, an NBA team name (the Toronto Raptors), you name it. It gets a boost every time a sequel comes out as well, as shown with Jurassic World. In particular, the series took the Velociraptor — which had previously been an obscure genus of dinosaur compared to the other species every kid knew about — and transformed it into an instant icon.
  • The movie's popularity quadrupled the international price of amber. It also popularized fake amber with insects in it, which usually comes from China, is sold on auction sites, and outrages precious stone sellers everywhere.
  • The Chilean sea bass was reportedly nearly fished into extinction after its appearance as a dish early in the first film.

K-P

• Kick-Ass: Between the popularity of Hit-Girl and her mention of the Benchmade 42 balisong/butterfly knife, the fact that Benchmade had stopped producing the model a few years prior, and the fact it was already a somewhat sought-after knife in collecting communities, the demand far exceeded the supply. Prices for the knife used were nearly triple what they had been months prior for a like-new knife. Benchmade would retool and produce a very small number of new, limited edition BM42 knives, which sold for over $1000 each. To this day, even used Benchmade 42 butterfly knives still command much higher prices than they did before the movie.
• The HK USP Match, Lara's weapons of choice in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, became a very popular pistol for a time, so much so that even airsoft copies were selling for upwards of a thousand dollars. For context, for that much you could get a real USP.
• The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou:
  • The Adidas Rom track shoes made specifically for Team Zissou produced a demand for them in the real world. Although Adidas didn't make them at the time, blogs popped up with directions on how to retrofit a pair, and people started selling homemade versions on eBay. Eventually, because of the demand, Adidas did produce an official version in very limited and numbered quantities for release at the We Love Green festival in France in 2017, where Seu Jorge was performing. They sold out very quickly.
  • Red beanies also became quite popular after the movie was released, with companies selling Ned's traffic-light-adorned cap.
• The 2011 film Limitless and its 2015 TV adaptation spurred interest in nootropic drugs for cognitive enhancement, inspiring a transhumanist "biohacking" movement to maximize individual potential through drugs and better habits. Although there is no direct real-world analogue to NZT-48, nor is there likely ever to be, stimulants like Modafinil and Adderall have proven especially popular among Type-A college students and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Demand for true nootropics eventually trickled down to even the pharmaceutical industry itself.
• There was a huge spike in sales of heart-shaped sunglasses after they were featured in the movie poster for Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaption of Lolita.
• Before Lost in Translation, the Japanese whiskey industry was making a niche product for enthusiasts inside of the country. The movie kickstarted the industry into the global whiskey spotlight, and since you can't just "make more" whiskey to meet a sudden increase in demand (they have to barrel age for over a decade before they're ready to bottle and sell), it ended with Suntory being forced to retire their 12-year and 17-year offerings because of lack of supply.
• The Love Bug helped modestly boost sales of the Volkswagen Type 1 Beetle, even though minimal VW-related items are seen or heard in the movie. In the sequel, Herbie Rides Again, Volkswagen demanded they put Product Placement everywhere, including a herd of '60s Beetles in the ending.
• Mad Max:
  • The Ford Falcon XB, made by Ford Australia in the mid-1970s, was made iconic by the series throughout the world despite never having been sold outside Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, due to it serving as the basis for the protagonist Max Rockatansky's Cool Car. Many Falcons imported to North America and Europe are tuned specifically to resemble the "Pursuit Special".
  • Mad Max: Fury Road, together with Stranger Things the following year, has been credited with making it more socially acceptable for women to shave their heads in the late 2010s. Long hair has long been central to Western standards of feminine beauty, with shaved heads on women often associated with defiance and subversion of gender roles, so when Charlize Theron, who had been known as a sex symbol for her entire career, buzzed off her long blonde hair (at her own suggestion) to play the film’s Action Girl protagonist Furiosa, it was considered an extremely daring move that risked ruining her career if the film bombed.^note Many people still remembered when Demi Moore shaved her head on camera for G.I. Jane, only for that film to bomb with critics and moviegoers alike and, together with Striptease, mark the end of her run on the A-list, leaving many actresses leery of doing the same for decades after. Instead, the film was widely acclaimed, with Theron’s performance and commitment to the part singled out for praise. Afterwards, the idea that a woman can shave her head and still be feminine and even attractive became increasingly popular. Notably, Millie Bobby Brown, one of the other actresses credited with popularizing the look, cited seeing how badass Theron looked in Fury Road when describing how she worked up the courage to shave her own head to play Eleven on Stranger Things.
• Popular Martial Arts Movies will cause a spike in interest for the martial arts they feature, whether it's karate, tae kwon do, kung fu, jiu jitsu, or something else. The Karate Kid (1984) in particular did this for karate lessons.
• The Matrix:
  • The first film's release coincided with a spike in sales of long black leather coats and Cool Shades like the characters wore. However, this met a countervailing effect just weeks later when the Columbine killers wore trench coats at the start of their killing spree, and with popular concern over violence in the media, The Matrix wound up Mis-blamed by Moral Guardians. Between the film's action-packed shootouts and their association with a real-life crime, trench coats gained an indelible association with Spree Killers.
  • Before The Matrix came out, there were no phones anywhere that slid open like the modified Nokia 8110 seen in the movie. The original wasn't spring-loaded; you had to slide it open and closed manually. After the movie opened, people wanted the spring-loaded, flick-open version, and cell phone companies had to design one to meet the demand that suddenly appeared. One such model was the Nokia 7110, which some mistook for the modified 8110.
  • New Rock boots were popularized by The Matrix. Goths during the early '00s were the most frequent wearers.
• Will Smith helped sales of Ray-Ban RB 2030 Predator 8 Wrap shades after Men in Black. Ray-Ban tried to do it again with the anachronistic shades worn by Smith in Wild Wild West, but it didn't work nearly as well.
• In the special edition commentary of Napoleon Dynamite, it was mentioned that the blue unicorn t-shirt Napoleon wears in the movie had been discontinued when the film came out, but thanks to the popularity of the film, the shirt was reproduced.
• Night at the Museum:
  • Happens In-Universe when a few chaotic events one night at the American Museum of Natural History cause a small media frenzy, which results in a drastic increase of attendance at the museum.
  • The film itself also renewed interest in visiting the museum. This in turn led to the sequel Battle of the Smithsonian, where the museum directors couldn't sign on fast enough, in hopes that they could make lightning strike twice.
• After 2007's No Country for Old Men hit the big screens, there was an unnerving demand increase for shotgun silencers. Those things actually existed beforehand, though they don't have a particularly silencing effect.
• Office Space:
  • This trope is named after the red Swingline stapler. As the DVD Commentary mentions, the one in the movie was specially painted, since at the time the movie was produced, the company didn't make red office staplers, only black ones (although they had been making red mini staplers for decades). Due to the popularity of the movie, they do now.
  • The film also provided an inversion. Due to the Running Gag of the waitstaff at Chotchkie's being made to wear ridiculous amounts of "flair" (various buttons and lapel pins) and generally being ridiculed for it, T. G. I. Friday's management discontinued the trend of having their waitstaff wearing flair.
• Parasite led many people to seek the recipe for the Korean noodle dish jjapaguri (or "Ram-don", in the English subs), with added steak to resemble the one in the movie.
• An increase in prostitution was reported after the release of Pretty Woman.
• An inversion: Psycho caused the number of showers being sold to drop dramatically. However, you can now buy shower curtains with permanent fake bloody handprints. And shower curtains with images of "Mother" in silhouette.
• Pulp Fiction:
  • The film caused great demand for John Travolta's UC Santa Cruz Banana Slugs T-shirt.
  • Brown leather wallets with the words "Bad Mother Fucker" stitched on them are also available.
  • If you were in college in 1994 and smoked cigarettes, you had at least, by Christmas break, learned to roll them yourself, if indeed you hadn't switched to rolled cigarettes completely.
• The Purge inspired a new type of Halloween mask: the "Purge Mask", which has light-up LED wires woven into it to create a twisted, glow-in-the-dark smiley face with X's for eyes.

Q-S

• Rebel Without a Cause:
  • James Dean gave denim jeans, until then known primarily as work pants, an association with Greaser Delinquents and youth rebellion in The '50s, making them fashionable among teenagers. From there, they spread through mainstream culture such that, by The '70s, they were considered normal casual wear across the US and symbols of Eagleland Osmosis abroad.
  • Dean, together with Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (as noted below), also did the same with white T-shirts.
  • The movie also pushed the 1949-50 Mercury from just another used car into one of the most popular customizing platforms of the mid-late '50s.
• Roman Holiday:
  • The famous scene where Princess Ann takes Joe Bradley on a ride on her Vespa motor scooter through the streets of Rome, which was featured prominently on the posters, fueled sales of over 100,000 Vespas and turned the company into an icon of '50s European style. Soon after, the scooter became popular among actors more broadly as an economical mode of transportation on Hollywood backlots where you couldn't fit a car, which only increased its cultural cachet.
  • The haircut that Princess Ann gets became very popular in Japan, of all places.
  • The cigarette-lighter camera (which really existed) became so in demand for a time that its Japanese manufacturer could not keep up.
• Olivia Hussey's long hair in Romeo and Juliet (1968) inspired a lot of young women to grow theirs out to waist length.
• The 1977 film Saturday Night Fever created a nationwide craze for all things disco, from the music to the dancing to the nightclubs, known as discotheques. Before it came out, while there were disco songs on the charts, the genre's popularity was mostly confined to the New York and Philadelphia urban and gay club scenes.
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World made it more popular for women in the 2010s to dye their hair in unnatural colors like blue, pink, and green. Before, such hair colors had often been identified with punks, goths, and other "alternative" subcultures, a stereotype that the film relies on in using Ramona Flowers' technicolor hair to frame her as a free spirit. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, however, made that style look good enough that it became a fashion trend among young women as a whole.
• Scream (1996):
  • According to the movie's trivia section over at IMDb, the use of caller ID increased more than threefold after the film's release. The sequel even has a joke about this, with Sidney using her new caller ID to identify a prank caller posing as Ghostface and tell him off.
  • The movie also increased demand for Ghostface masks/costumes, which existed before, and which is actually a minor plot point in the first film. These days, the Ghostface costume is almost singularly identified with Scream, to the point that, when Dead by Daylight released a Scream-themed DLC, they didn't even need to get the rights to the films. The killer beneath the mask was wholly original to the game, with the Ghostface costume alone being enough to let everybody know what movie the pack was based on.
  • The Buck knife company put their 120 model hunting knife back into production after the first film used it as the model for Ghostface's weapon, leading to a surge in demand. Ironically, it had actually been discontinued a few years prior due to complaints that it was too big for its intended purpose of skinning and gutting animals — and one of the film's most famous scenes involves Ghostface telling a victim that he's going to gut her like a fish!
• The Japanese movie Shall We Dance? greatly increased the popularity and respectability of ballroom dancing in Japan. As the movie shows, it was regarded as a furtive, disreputable practice prior to the movie. The Japanese version of the TV show Dancing with the Stars was titled Shall We Dance? in homage to the movie, and Richard Gere starred in an American remake. Ballroom dancing owes a huge debt to that quirky Japanese comedy.
• Shirley Temple set several trends for girls.
  • The curls, obviously, were a fad, even though they were no easy hairdo to style. Shirley herself attested that it was a pain to set, as the vinegar rinse used splashed and irritated her eyes.
  • She wore a white rabbit coat in one film, and the popularity of such coats exploded for upper-class girls.
  • As noted under Baby Name Trend Starter, her first name was also extremely popular for young girls born in the 1930s.
• Sideways led to increased American sales of Pinot Noir, the wine favored by the main character. At the same time, Merlot sales declined in the US because he doesn't drink it, and says so in one scene. Ironically, this actually caused the average quality of both wines in the American market to switch places. Merlot had previously been overproduced to the point that it was regarded as rather déclassé by wine aficionados, hence Miles' dislike for it. In response to the change in demand, the market was flooded with mediocre Pinots, while the average quality of Merlots increased as fewer were produced.
• Smokey and the Bandit:
  • Together with the trucking song (later also a movie) "Convoy" by C. W. McCall, it caused such a spike in the popularity of CB radios that many of the restrictions on their use in the US were lifted in order to take advantage of this boom. The result was a Newbie Boom that lasted until the Internet and cell phones became popular. Sales of the Pontiac Firebird Trans Am also saw an upswing, with a CB becoming a dealership option in some places. The CB radio craze brought about by the two also resulted in the "mainstreaming" of much CB radio jargon. "What's your twenty?", "Ten-four good buddy", and "Put the pedal to the metal" all entered the popular lexicon as a result of this movie.
  • The Pontiac Firebird Trans Am also owes much of its enduring popularity to the fact that it was Bo "Bandit" Darville's Cool Car in the film. The Firebird and its Chevrolet sibling, the Camaro, were already known as two of the only American sports cars in The '70s that were worth a damn, but this film gave the Firebird's special edition Trans Am model a massive boost of recognition.
• Sales of tickets on Seabourne cruises oddly spiked after Speed 2: Cruise Control. Before the movie came out, Seabourne was asked what they were thinking, allowing a movie about people not having much fun on a cruise take place on their company's ship. Seabourne representatives just said it was free publicity. They were right.
• The success of J. J. Abrams' Star Trek (2009) reboot somewhat increased the value of various Trek merch and memorabilia. Interestingly, various car brands saw a brief spike in the sale of white-colored cars around that time.
• The Graflex 3-cell Flashgun handle, a popular accessory for 1940s cameras, is notoriously difficult to come across now despite how common they once were (they can be found on Ebay for almost $800). The handle's rarity and high demand nowadays comes as result of being used as the original prop for Anakin and Luke's lightsaber in Star Wars. No wonder vintage photography collectors are frustrated.
• A Streetcar Named Desire caused a spike in T-shirt sales because of Marlon Brando's sexiness while wearing one, and popularized T-shirts as outerwear in an era when they had been generally thought of as the undergarment men wore a buttoned shirt over.
• Strictly Ballroom had a similar effect in Australia as Shall We Dance had in Japan in popularizing ballroom dancing.

T-Z

• The Terminator:
  • Another gun example from Arnold Schwarzenegger: The Terminator made the Franchi SPAS-12 shotgun an iconic "futuristic" shotgun in American action movies in the '80s and '90s. In real life, it is an awesome-looking shotgun capable of firing both semi-automatically and in pump-action, but it is also a very heavy gun with a spotty reliability record, which limited its main market of law enforcement use and caused production to cease in 2000. What's more, the Federal Assault Weapons Ban meant that only guns imported before 1994 made it onto the market.
  • The Gargoyles ANSI Classic sunglasses that the Terminator wore also got a boost.
• In This is Spın̈al Tap, the band uses a custom-made amplifier which has its maximum volume setting at 11 instead of 10. Several companies now make amps with that same setting, the BBC iPlayer volume scale goes from 1-11, and the IMDb rating system for the film goes up to 11 rather than 10. "Up to eleven" is commonly used in regular speech as an analogy for something that's taken past the logical extreme.
• Titanic (1997) caused a lot of people to book cruise ship vacations. While the second half of the film is about how the ship sank, the first half is pure Edwardian luxury porn in its depiction of one of the finest ocean liners ever built.
• After the release of Top Gun, sales of Ray-Ban Aviators and bomber jackets skyrocketed. It also increased the number of people enlisting the Navy and Air Force, but that at least was intentional: the film was Backed by the Pentagon.
  • Ditto with Top Gun: Maverick, but with the added uptake on young men taking to growing their mustaches much like Rooster's.
• Transformers, being Merchandise-Driven, certainly tried to do it:
  • The films revitalized the Chevrolet Camaro line via Product Placement, but yellow Camaros in particular skyrocketed in popularity, with it becoming incredibly common to see the twin stripes centered on them, even though it's used on a Kid-Appeal Character. In fact, it completely revitalized the popularity of the color yellow for cars, especially sports cars.
  • The "Bee-atch!" scented air freshener also surged in popularity due to the movie. It ended up being backordered for months.
  • High demand led GMC to produce the Ironhide series of the Top Kick, the truck modified for the movie.
• Sales of the Dodge Ram pickup nearly doubled in 1996 thanks to a red model being featured as the hero vehicle in the film Twister. While Chrysler sold 280,000 Rams in 1995, sales skyrocketed in 1996 to nearly 400,000 units and stayed at that level through 1999. Even after that, the Ram remained popular enough for Chrysler to spin it off from Dodge into its own make.
• V for Vendetta caused a huge spike in sales of Guy Fawkes masks at costume stores. The mask's increased popularity probably contributed to its adoption by the nebulous group/movement known as Anonymous and has since become a populist symbol and staple at protests across the globe. While Guy Fawkes masks have been worn for centuries, they were typically homemade, and no one really standardized a design and thought to mass produce them until V for Vendetta came around. This is ironic for two reasons: first, the original Guy Fawkes was an ardent monarchist who wanted to get rid of the Protestant King James and restore Catholic supremacy in England, and second, people who use these masks to protest the tyranny of the rich cause Warner Bros. to get a small royalty with every mask they buy.
• Wall Street:
  • When Michael Douglas used a (now comically large) mobile phone in the 1987 film, it established the mobile phone as an essential business accessory, leading to the modern popularity of mobile phones. Nice Guy Eddie's enormous car phone in Reservoir Dogs (1992) may have helped too.
  • It increased the sales of a certain type of horizontally striped shirt. They were sometimes called "Gekko shirts" after the film's Corrupt Corporate Executive (although their popularity may have been prompted by the common Alternative Character Interpretation).
  • According to the DVD commentary, people have come up to Douglas for years and said that his performance inspired them to become stockbrokers. Douglas has had to remind them that Gekko is the villain.
• The 1960 teen comedy Where the Boys Are, about a group of college girls who head down to Fort Lauderdale, Florida for spring break, is frequently credited with both popularizing the spring break tradition in the United States, with the emergence of Fort Lauderdale as America's number one spring break destination, and with helping the Miami area rapidly grow in size. Fort Lauderdale's spring break heyday lasted until 1985, when a particularly out-of-control spring break sparked a massive backlash from locals and the mayor that saw the event driven out of the city.
• The World of Suzie Wong made many Westerners aware of the city of Hong Kong (it was filmed mostly on location there) and tourism increased due to the film's popularity.
• Zack and Miri Make a Porno created a demand for real hockey jerseys for the fictional Monroeville Zombies.

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