YMMV / The Boss Baby

• Accidental Innuendo:
  • The scene where Tim and Boss Baby suck on the pacifiers to head to Baby Corp. The less said here, the better.
  • In Boss Baby: Get that Baby!, there's a scene where Wendy lists a "Sucky thing" (the teleportation dummy) as something important.
• Adaptation Displacement: Granted, the film isn't much of an adaptation, but nonetheless, many people seeing, or even hearing of the film never realized that there was a picture book before there was a movie.
• Adorkable: Tim is wildly imaginative, cheerful and energetic, speaks to his alarm clock as if it was an actual person, and refuses to ride his bicycle without the proper safety gear, or for that matter, cross the street against a red light, even when the babysitter (who's really a henchman for the Big Bad) chases after him.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Eugene is the older brother of Francis Francis, the film's Big Bad. However, at the end, when Francis Francis has turned into a baby, Eugene picks him up and starts feeding him. He declares he will raise him right this time. It seems that he went along with Francis's plan as a way to look out for him.
  • Did the film's whole story even actually happen? While at first, the movie seems to play it straight on the whole Baby Co. incident and plot, one has to remember that it is a story being told by Tim to his daughter. Remember that he has a vivid imagination. Also, remember that he said in the end that it was how he remembered it.
  • The babies in charge of erasing Mr. and Mrs. Templeton's memories of Boss Baby and removing any traces of his presence in their house allow Tim to keep his memories. They did it either because they think he won't be taken seriously or because he earned Baby Corp's trust by helping Boss Baby.
  • At the very end, when Boss Baby decides to rejoin Tim's family, he goes into the control room and tinkers with the main keyboard, causing the pie chart on the screen to display the love granted to everything as 999%, before he leaves. While some entries on This Very Wiki say he actually managed to give them all that much love, it's also possible that he just made the display malfunction as his way of saying Take This Job and Shove It.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Most people wrote The Boss Baby off as a joke, and some predicted that it would be crushed by Disney's live-action version of Beauty and the Beast. To the surprise of almost everyone, the film barely edged out Beast to win the top spot of the domestic box office, and has grossed about $528 million worldwide. It has also spun off an animated series on Netflix that has done quite well and a sequel for the film itself came out in 2021.
• Awesome Music: Missi Hale's cover of "What the World Needs Now Is Love" for the closing credits.
• Critical Dissonance: The film scored very poorly with early critics, but eventually ended up with nearly a split down the middle, with 49% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes by the Saturday evening after its release. Audiences gave it an A- CinemaScore, while those under 18 gave it an overall A+. The film also toppled Beauty and the Beast, which had ruled the box office for two weekends.
• Fandom Rivalry: With Captain Underpants fans, who feel that their movie (which had gotten a better critical reception and was produced by the same studio) should have been a nominee for Best Animated Film at both the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards instead of this.
  • Also with both fans of The LEGO Batman Movie (which also failed to get a a Best Animated Feature nomination from The Annies unlike Boss Baby) and A Silent Voice for the reasons already stated above.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Animator Ralph Bakshi has an open hatred of DreamWorks, so it's amusing to know that his own grandson, Miles, is the voice of Tim. In addition to the fact that the film was directed by Tom McGrath, who is a friend of Bakshi. And in the last scene of the movie, Tim's elder daughter is voiced by Bakshi's granddaughter (and Miles' sister), Nina Zoe Bakshi.
  • The fact that Alec Baldwin voices a blond baby in a suit actually named Boss Baby has sparked a lot of Donald Trump jokes, especially in light of Baldwin frequently playing Trump on Saturday Night Live.
• Jerkass Woobie: Francis Francis. Yes, he's trying to destroy Baby Corp, but all this trouble started because the Baby Formula stopped working for him (due to him being lactose intolerant), and he got fired from Baby Corp as a result of getting older, something that was completely out of his control. Keep in mind that he was well-liked by the company before all this happened. Even Tim and Boss Baby sympathize with him.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • CALLING THE BOSS BABY (OMG HE ANSWERED!!!)^note After Boss Baby gave out his phone number, which was an actual phone number owned by DreamWorks, various YouTubers (notably Durv) have made videos calling the titular Boss Baby and talking to a voice actor playing him. People have since parodied this, notably Pyrocynical.
  • "Guy who has only seen The Boss Baby, watching his second movie: Getting a lot of 'Boss Baby' vibes from this..." ^Explanation A tweet going around in screenshots that has gained popularity for coining "The Boss Baby problem" in media analysis circles. It's become a joke about myopia, and proposes the sincere question if a parallel is objectively there or is only a false connection made from small reference pools.
• Moe:
  • Despite having Alec Baldwin's voice, Boss Baby is still an adorable kid. There's also a group of three babies, each dressed up in full-body animal outfits complete with furry ears. See here◊. And let's not forget the baby girl wearing a pink tutu.
  • Timothy is an adorable little boy with a big imagination and all the usual traits typically associated with a seven-year-old.
• Moral Event Horizon: Francis Francis crosses this when he threatens to terminate Tim's parents if he interfered with his plans.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Comedy aside, Steve Buscemi sounds genuinely unhinged as Francis E. Francis.
  • Some of Tim's imagine spots get kind of unnerving, like imagining the hall to Boss Baby's room as a hellscape with pictures of the baby morphing into devils, and Boss Baby's "every Christmas, every birthday party" speech being accompanied by pictures of his face appearing in all sorts of weird and creepy spots. And within this, the synchronized sung "I'll be there" when the Christmas tree ornaments become his head.
  • While not intentional on the filmmakers' part, the cleanup babies that hypnotically wipe the parents' memories of Boss Baby come across as this.
  • Tim almost catapulting the Boss Baby out the window.
• Paranoia Fuel: Some of the babies have memory manipulating wands, and those babies are wearing hazmat suits.
• Strawman Has a Point: Tim's parents grounding him for "three evers" may seem harsh, but keep in mind that he almost catapulted Boss Baby out the window, where there's a very good chance he would have landed on the road and got run over, just like the tape.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • During the montage of Boss Baby demanding things from his parents at the beginning, we hear a copyright-friendly version of Dance of the Knights. Given the similarities to The Apprentice, it's quite fitting.
  • The novelization does this with "Blackbird", replacing it with something rather generic, as they either couldn't get the rights to print lyrics or hadn't yet finalized the song for the film before the novel was written. As such, the Boss Baby's joke about Tim's parents being Lennon and McCartney is naturally dropped as well.
• Tainted by the Preview: Some people considered the concept to be rather ridiculous when the trailers first came out. When the film was finally released, however, it ended up doing better than expected (at least with audiences).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some viewers feel that the film would have been better if it solely focused on Tim's vivid imagination getting in the way of his own life situations rather than Boss Baby himself. With that said, consider the ending and how Tim explains it. See Alternative Character Interpretation.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: More divisive than outright bad, but Alec Baldwin gives the exact same performance in this as he does as Jack Donaghy and seems committed to portraying the character as a snazzy businessman as much as possible.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Tim comes across as unreasonably selfish throughout the first part of the movie, from enjoying the attention his parents give him too much to attempting to throw the newborn baby (who behaves like an adult, but still) out the window.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The animation itself is very expressive and fluid, similar to the original Looney Tunes. Especially with Tim's Imagination spots, which exploded with colour and are gorgeous to look at.

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