Some movies are too complicated for their own good. Some others aren’t, but they still might leave some viewers puzzled or completely missing the point of the plot. (If a movie popped into your mind right now, I’m pretty sure you’re not the only one, if that’s any consolation.)
To show you that there is no shame in not getting the main idea of the plot and that quite a few people don’t, we want to shed light on this thread, started by the redditor ‘FinalDemise’, who asked fellow members of ‘Ask Reddit’ to describe the worst cases of people misunderstanding a movie they have ever seen. Scroll down to find the netizens’ stories on the list below and use this as a chance to expand your must-watch list – it’s always a good idea to have one on hand in case the mind goes blank when it’s time for a movie night.
#1
Watching Titanic in a cinema in the West End of Glasgow. Ship hits the iceberg, girl behind me says “Aw, it’s gonny sink.’
To which her date replied with absolute confidence ‘Na, it willnae’.
Image credits: ShakeUpWeeple1800
#2
Me and some friends were watching James Bond Spectre while extremely drunk and got really confused by the repeated and overlapping sections. We were talking about how great the Memento style use of non-linear time was a great addition to the Bond films only to realise I had been sitting on the remote and rewinding it all night. I think we were watching it for about 4 hours.
Image credits: cowboysted
#3
My FIL is a retired nuclear engineer and when he heard about the new show Big Bang Theory he literally canceled an appointment, prepared with snacks and drinks and sat down to watch “the science show.”
His face was indescribable. What was icing on the cake was that he and Sheldon share quite a few traits.
Image credits: BeanDom
#4
Watched Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers with an uncle. Asked him what he thought afterwards.
“Seems kind of far fetched.”.
Image credits: truejs
#5
It was me. I am not a fan of superhero movies but I liked the Xmen when I was younger. So I thought I would check one out. I downloaded one that featured one of my favorites. I started watching it, they messed his whole back story up, there weren’t any other mutants, basically no action. After about 30 minutes in I realized it wasn’t a superhero movie.
So anyways, Jake Gyllenhaal was really good in Nightcrawler.
Image credits: SayNoToStim
#6
My wife is a big history buff, especially US history. She also doesn’t like campy vampire/zombie/monster movies. I made her watch Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. 10 minutes into the movie she turned to me and said “I don’t think this actually happened”.
Image credits: platypus_farmer42
#7
I watched Les Miserables in the theater with my parents. At the very end of the movie my dad whispered “wait, Hugh Jackman was the prisoner at the beginning?!”
He had no idea…the whole movie why Javert had beef with this apparent random character.
Image credits: agentbauer
#8
My mom thought *Rogue One* had a happy ending because “they were hugging in front of a sunset” at the end of the movie.
Image credits: reality72
#9
When I was young I watched the first 15 minutes of Zoolander from the hallway when I was supposed to be in bed. For many years after, I thought people regularly died in freak gasoline accidents.
Image credits: TheDadThatGrills
#10
Somehow, my dad completely missed that The Princess Bride is a comedy.
Image credits: Flashy_Watercress398
#11
I watched the Fellowship of the Ring in the cinema when it first came out. As I got up to leave at the end, two teenage girls who had been sat behind me started talking to each other:
“So, did they get rid of the ring or not?”
“Yeah, they threw it in the fire right at the start”.
Image credits: TimmyMTX
#12
I remember someone once saying that “Scar from the Lion King isn’t evil because he is a lion. Wild animals can’t be evil, they’re just acting on their nature.” Bro kind of forgot the whole “anthropomorphic talking animals with human like thoughts and morals” part I guess.
Image credits: Heroic-Forger
#13
The BEST is the famous TV Guide plot synopsis in 1998 for “The Wizard of Oz”
# Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
Image credits: karatekate
#14
Someone once told me they thought *The Matrix* was about a guy learning to code and getting really good at VR.
Image credits: GreerKathi
#15
My sister in law asked if ‘The Martian’ is based on a true story…
Image credits: hpw84
#16
I’m reminded of that time Ricky Gervais said when he was in school they watched Animal Farm and were discussing fascism etc and one other guy said ‘you lot are ridiculous overthinking it, it was just a nice story about some animals’.
Image credits: hoginlly
#17
My friend being critical of Apollo 13 saying, “They just want their Hollywood ending with that finish”….WOOSH!!!!!!
Image credits: Delex31
#18
A girl I used to know went to see The Village and thought she figured out M. Night’s twist when she leaned over halfway through the movie and whispered to her friends “*I think she’s blind!*” about Bryce Dallas Howard’s character. She thought it was a secret because she wasn’t wearing sunglasses.
Meanwhile, she figured out the ACTUAL twist and thought it was “common sense”. People on the spectrum will always surprise and amaze me….
Image credits: TheLoneliestGhost
#19
My ex girlfriend only realised halfway through Schindler’s List that Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes were different people which I found so hilarious as the film must have seemed totally different in her mind. So yeah, the hero of a film about the Holocaust being an enthusiastic Nazi casually murdering people and being generally evil.
Image credits: Nothing_Is_Revealed
#20
My adult siblings were watching a movie at my mom’s house. My mom falls asleep, always. In the move they were going extract a person from someplace. My young niece asks what extract means, my mom wakes up briefly at that time and says” they are going to pull all his teeth out”. So from that point on, everyone was waiting for that to occur.
Image credits: Illustrous_potentate
#21
It’s not the entire plot, but when we watched the last Harry Potter movie a friend thought Snape wanted to see Harry’s green eyes again as he died because they were the color of Slytherin house.
Image credits: Scondiac
#22
Someone on here talked about his friend really hating on district 9. When he asked his friend why? His friend said they are just some disgusting bugs. Who cares if they die.
Image credits: 0BYR0NN
#23
In my high school history class we were talking about The Notebook one day. Someone mentioned the couple dying at the end and a girl started SOBBING. “They died?? I thought they fell asleep!” .
Image credits: girlwithdadjokes
#24
My friend’s grandad saw that Beethoven was playing in theaters whilst reading the newspaper. He thought it was a film about the composer. Well, he bought tickets to see it, and if you don’t know, it’s a movie about a dog. He was like the only adult there without a kid.
Image credits: mackedeli
#25
My mom with every movie ever. It would drive me and my siblings nuts. 10 minutes into the movie she would say, “I know what they’re gonna do. This, this and this. I can read movies like a book.” She would be wrong 95% of the time and being wrong never stuck with her. Did it our entire lives. She was also the type that would ask us 20 questions about the movie we’re all watching for the first time. Mom has been gone for a year now and these little annoyances become things you miss about them.
#26
Back when the first The Matrix was new, a group of us watched it in one of the science rooms. A girl in my class after it was finished said “yeah it was good but a bit unrealistic”.
I still think about this about once a year and get annoyed. .
#27
I don’t know if this counts, but my sweet angle of an aunt rented (years ago) Silence of the Lambs thinking it was a *Christmas* movie. This remains one of my favorite family stories.
When asked when she realized when it wasn’t a Christmas film, she simply stated “towards the end.”.
Image credits: graytiger
#28
when i was a kid and i saw Hunt for Red October and i didn’t know the definition of “defect” … i had no idea what was going on the entire time.
Image credits: JimmDunn
#29
My step-dad paid so little attention to Fight Club that he thought it was a murder mystery about who’d killed Robert Paulson.
Image credits: speckleshell
#30
Guy who said the hunger games series was about how evil liberals are because the people in the capitol have unnaturally colored hair.
#31
I knew someone that thought Thanos snapping his fingers just sent a bunch of people back to their home planet.
Image credits: xqlfg
#32
My mom watched Breaking Bad and then promptly forgot most of it, then watched El Camino. She thought Todd was a cop and Jesse was being imprisoned for selling meth, but didn’t understand why his cell was a hole in the ground instead of an actual prison.
Image credits: beansnchicken
#33
My father-in-law fell asleep while we were all watching Groundhog Day. Woke up at the end and said, “So the whole thing was a dream.”
Yes and no, I guess.
#34
One of my mom’s favorite movies is the 1997 adaptation of Lolita, which I always found a bit odd but she does love Jeremy Irons. I found out recently, about 3 years ago when she was watching it for the umpteenth time, that she was under the impression that the movie was about a college professor obsessed with one of his students.
she thought Lolita was supposed to be 18/19, and just finally realized that she’s supposed to be *a child*.
I have no idea how she missed that.
#35
My brother’s first in-theater movie was Disney’s “Pocahontas” and he thought it was a story about the first Thanksgiving and completely missed the themes of racial tension and colonization. Part of the reason he thought it was about Thanksgiving was that there were lots of references to food, like “the song about sandwiches.” The sandwiches song was his favorite and he sang it for weeks afterwards.
“Savages.” The song is called “Savages.”.
#36
One time we were watching O Brother Where Art Thou and my weed guy said that he liked the tint they shot the movie in. About five minutes later I said “I can’t believe they shot this whole movie in a tent” ? i still think about this occasionally and snort.
#37
Lots of people think Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street is a hero.
#38
Back in the ’80s, a “big event” TV movie was “The Day After,” a doomsday movie about the aftermath of a nuclear bomb being launched on the US. We were watching it with extended family. More than halfway through the movie, a relative suddenly said, “You mean there was radiation in that bomb?”.
#39
TV, but the people that watch antihero shows like Breaking Bad or the Sopranos and their only takeaway is “whoa! Walt/Tony is a badass!”.
Walter White, Tony Soprano, and characters like them are pieces of s**t. The entire story is about how their being a piece of s**t causes them to lose everything.
#40
Lord of the Rings, the two towers. My dad forgot most of the first movie. He didn’t realize there were 4 hobbits. He thought it was the same 2 hobbits in every scene. We didn’t take him with us to see the 3rd film.
Image credits: SMRTFireGuy
#41
I once watched Austin Powers with my much younger brother and at the end he said “This would be such a cool movie if they would just take things seriously.” He had never seen James Bond and thought the movie was real but everyone was just bad at acting.
#42
Years ago I took my nana to see “Failure to Launch” about a grown man (Matthew McCaughnehy) who still lives at home with his parents. So they hire this woman (Sarah Jessica Parker) who gets man babies to move out. For a living. My nana had a small drinking problem. And I’d come pick her up for the movies and she would be tipsy. Then she would always sober up halfway through the movie and be confused about the plot. This particular movie only had like 4 or 5 people in the theater. Including us. So when she sobered up and started asking questions, everyone could hear. This time she said.
“Oh I get it. She’s like a hooker?”.
#43
My wife and I decided to watch The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019, Dev Patel), and about halfway though, she turned to me and asked, “so when does he start doing magic?”
She thought the movie, which takes place in the 1800’s, was about the magician, not based on the novel by Dickens.
We will never forget that movie night.
Edit: movie year.
#44
All of the people calling Jenny in Forest Gump a villain.
#45
My mom spent all of Edward Scissorhands pointing out all of the things that were not available in the 60’s.
She missed that it was a satire of suburbia in general.
#46
On the Podcast This American Life, they told this story of a woman whose favourite movie was Sound of Music. Her family watched the VHS tape at a cabin that was left behind. Later as an adult, some friends were talking about Nazis in the movie and she replied, “what Nazis?” She had only seen the first half of the movie, up until the wedding. The second VHS tape was missing from the cabin. It was just a lovely romance to her.
#47
They had a statue of liberty too?
#48
Uncut Gems Spoilers:
Met a guy who thought the ending was “cleverly ambiguous” because Howard’s eyes are still open when the camera zooms in on his shot face. He figured that because his eyes were open he could still be alive and faking it.
#49
My teacher thought that zootopia didnt really have a plot . Rather, it being one to try and make animals look sexy.
Edit: for some of the people replying to u/Badloss ‘s comment, Jessica Rabbit is one of the hottest animal/animal like characters ever created.
edit2: Jessica Rabbit is bunny like. Especially in a Playboy sort of way. She is like 25% rabbit or so.
#50
A friend of mine on watching Dracula: “What’s the point, you know who the vampire is from the start”.
#51
People were throwing elaborate “Gatsby parties” after the release of The Great Gatsby. I’m sure they were fun but they were also the opposite of the point of the movie and book.
#52
When I was a kid, my mom fell asleep watching childs play. So I snuck out and started watching it, for some reason at first I thought it was home alone cause I was a kid, and just saw the kid character.
I was really shocked when Chucky killed the teacher in the closet. .
#53
I remember when Life of Pi came out, I was listening to an episode of Joe Rogan, and he was going off about how silly the movie was because there’s no way some skinny kid would be able to fight off a tiger.
While opinions can’t necessarily be wrong, having a strong opinion about something based on not understanding gets pretty close imo.
#54
When I was a child I watched the first tobey maguire spiderman and there’s a scene where after he gets his powers he has his shirt off for the first time and is muscular. My mum was like “I don’t think that’s his real body” and I thought that meant he wore another human’s skin over his so that he could have muscles for that scene. I thought it was literally a dead person’s preserved skin.
#55
I was in middle school when “Seven” came out, and the parents of one girl had seen it and given her the summary. They thought the baby was the 7th victim.
#56
My confused grandpa watching Finding Nemo and not understanding that Marlin’s ocean search and Nemo’s fish tank scenes were happening very far removed from each other:
“He’s lost, he’s found, he’s lost, he’s found…I don’t get what the big deal is!”.
#57
The people that think Blazing Saddles is “racist”.
Honestly, these people are as dumb as a bag of rocks…
#58
Watched Fried Green Tomatoes with my very conservative antiqued grandfather. He thought it was just a wholesome movie about friends. To be fair, the movie is pretty friendwashed, but I thiught it was funny how much the movie leans on your preconceived notions of what’s happening between the two mains. That I could watch a heartwarming/breaking movie about some lesbians, while he’s watching a movie about female friends empowering each other, and we’re watching the same movie. .
#59
I was once running late to see The Bourne Identity with friends. I came in about five or ten mins after it started.
I got most of the movie from context clues, but afterwards, I was completely confusing my friends with questions like, “Ok so why was he a hobo?” and “Why didn’t he remember anything?” My friends were like, what are you on about? I just didn’t realise that Bourne had been in the ocean in the first few mins, or that he’d been shot. I saw him first in Switzerland. He looked homeless. I just thought he was in a disguise, you know cos he’s a spy. I went back and forth between thinking he had some sort of unexplained amnesia, to thinking maybe he was faking the amnesia to escape from the government for some reason? (fake amnesia made sense to me since how else did he know about the safe deposit code? But also if he was faking then why was he so shocked to see the contents of the safe deposit box??) Maybe the government had made him go on a mission as a hobo but then he really became a hobo and so he was mad at them? (and later in the movie) What’s with the yacht, though? How do boats come into it? How did he get from being thrown off a yacht to being a hobo in Switzerland with amnesia?? It was very disorienting, and I spent most of the movie trying to puzzle through my lingering questions.
Lesson: If you ever think “surely the first five mins can’t be that crucial to the plot”, you might be wrong. Especially for The Bourne Identity.
#60
I saw the movie Outbreak at a dollar movie theater in my college town a few weeks after it came out.
The movie was entertaining but what I remember most is the woman sitting near me who couldn’t bear to actually look at the screen when there was any tension at all in the scene.
Highlights were her buying her face in her hands and screaming, at different points:
“THAT MONKEY GONE EAT THAT LITTLE GIRL!”
And, later:
“OH MY GAWWD! THEY GONE KILL THAT MONKEY!”
I wish sitting near that lady was an option every time I go to the movies.
