Adam Wears
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Spencer Thew
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E. Reid Ross
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Ryan Menezes
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Tolly Vellis
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Many directors and screenwriters spend both time and effort carefully linking their works to create entire shared realities out of clever subtext. But it turns out they were trying way too hard, as there are vast movie universes whose fictions merely overlap due to weird pragmatism, shenanigans, or downright laziness. For example ...
While there's no such thing as bad publicity, having millions of people watch one of your planes blow up in midair gets pretty close. That's why airlines tend to only lend their name to movies or TV shows that promise not to crash their planes. So when Hollywood needs some plane to take a nosedive, in swoops Oceanic Airlines, the ACME of the skies.
You may remember Oceanic from its Flight 815, the iconic plane that crashes into the mysterious island of Lost. And while that disappointing mystery box show propelled the airline to mainstream recognition, Oceanic has been around since the 1960s, when Oceanic Flight 17 crashed in the dolphin-friendly waters of Flipper, of all places.
Since then, countless writers and directors have chosen to crash, hijack, and commit murders of the week on planes from this fictional "just big enough to fail" airline without anyone raising a fuss. Oceanic flights pop up / go down in shows as varied as FlashForward and Fringe:
Warner Bros. Television"I wish I could fly away and quit this life of Goon #2-ing."
It's also in the likes of The X-Files, Transformers, and Futurama:
20th TelevisionOceanic Airlines: Even in the emptiness of space, we can find a way to crash.
Entire movies have been set on Oceanic flights. But they also pop up in stuff with no air travel whatsoever. In fact, they seemed to have launched very successful cross-media advertising campaigns. The company can be spotted in video games like The Wolf Among Us:
Telltale GamesOceanic Airlines: The best way to fast-travel.
And comic books, like Daredevil:
Marvel ComicsOceanic Airlines: Even a blind man could fly our planes (because they're going to crash anyway).
It's even the airline of choice for nonflying superheroes, like Spidey in What If? Spider-Man vs. Wolverine:
Marvel Comics"I bet Iron Man never has to fly coach."
But Oceanic's wings span even further than that. The airline has also featured in the background of both Google and Apple ads, meaning it somehow found a way to soar the WiFi airwaves right into the real world.
GoogleFunny, "Lost" is exactly where most good Google apps wind up.
Either Oceanic is proof that most popular fiction happens underneath the same sky, or the company's true success is making highly experimental dimension-hopping jet engines -- which would at least explain all the crashes.
The most famous part of NYC isn't Wall Street, Hell's Kitchen, or wherever the Jets and the Sharks used to dance-fight. It's actually Riverside Drive, a thoroughfare that runs almost the entire length of Manhattan's West Side. You've never heard of it? That's odd, because all of your favorite characters live there.
Among the many fictional residents of Riverside Drive is White Collar protagonist Neal Calfrey, who plans all his cons in a spacious two-bedroom at #351. Just a few doors down, Midge and Joel Maisel (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) can be heard not loving each other at #404. But don't walk around after dark, because some of the gangs of The Warriors hang out in Riverside Park. Not to worry, though, because Death Wish's Charles Bronson, who lives at #33, is probably part of the neighborhood watch.
Paramount PicturesGentrification, one bullet at a time.
We can get even more specific and narrow it down to two blocks. Between 87th and 89th street, you can find the homes of Liz Lemon (from 30 Rock) at #168 and those of Will and Grace (from, um, Will & Grace) at #155. Meanwhile, Freddy Rumsen (Mad Men) lives at #152, and was probably boozing it up with Don and Peggy when Tom Hanks' character from You've Got Mail moved into the very same building.
Between The Terminator and Predator, Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in Commando, playing a retired special forces operator who kills an island's worth of henchmen working for a would-be dictator who has kidnapped his daughter. And while it's the least popular of what we like to call the Triceps Trilogy, one part of the film has endured: the island nation of Val Verde, a favorite holiday spot for '80s macho men.
20th Century FoxUgh, don't you hate it when someone takes their work with them on vacation?
Any action flick about a tough U.S. soldier killing a lot of Central Americans during the Reagan administration is obviously meant to be set in Cuba, but in order not to start another missile crisis, screenwriter Steven E. de Souza created the stand-in nation of Val Verde. De Souza also made Val Verde the home of the imprisoned dictator the paramilitary antagonists are trying to free in Die Hard 2. Thanks to his success, other writers started paying homage to him, making Val Verde their Central American dictatorship of choice.
The nation spread all over, from military dramas like Supercarrier and NCIS to comic books like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. And between all those properties and the cinematic universe clusterbomb that Alien vs. Predator created, that means that there are probably more fictional worlds that have a Val Verde than a Cuba.
Related: 6 Places You'll Recognize From The Background Of Every Movie
If the protagonists of the Transformers movies are anything to go by, the entire world is filled with nothing but aggressive jocks, scheming nerds, and hot babes ... oh, and giant robots. It's no wonder, then, that this abundance of annoying teen tropes would attract the attention of noted teenager eradicator Jason Voorhees, who has managed to ooze his way into the Transformers universe through a terrible conduit named Trent DeMarco.
Paramount Pictures"I contain multitudes, bruh."
DeMarco, played by Travis Van Winkle, appeared in the original Transformers from 2007 as the stereotypically obnoxious boyfriend of Megan Fox. He barely gets a few minutes of screen time to spout jock nonsense before leaving the series forever after being dumped.
So what happened to Trent afterward? Maybe being dumped caused him to have a change of heart, ditch his bro ways, get a stable career, start a family, and live a nice quiet life in the suburbs. Or maybe he got impaled by a farming tool wielded by a psycho killer in a hockey mask:
In 2009, Van Winkle starred in the remake of Friday the 13th, again as a character named Trent. So unless you believe in a multiverse theory whereby the only constant throughout infinite dimensions is a frat dude named Trent DeMarco, that means Transformers and Friday The 13th share a universe. While massive shapeshifting robots are fighting for control of the Universe, ol' Jason is out in the woods keeping Michael Bay's excessive douchebag population in check.
Of course, Bay is the very reason these two very different worlds collide. Not content with polluting cinema with his own work, Bay is also a prolific producer of bad B-movies, and had a stake in the Friday The 13th reboot. And it seems one of his only creative demands was to have Sam Witwicky's old rival get horrifically slaughtered by Jason. We're starting to get the feeling that "Trent DeMarco" was also the name of Bay's high school bully.
To make sure all of their movies don't look and feel like one extended Snyder Cut, DC and Marvel have sought out diverse groups of up-and-coming genre directors, each bringing their own style and approach to their films. But sometimes these directors bring something else when crossing over. Something darker. Something ... evil.
When DC hired James Wan and David Sandberg, they probably didn't expect that their rogue's gallery of supervillains, evil aliens, and angry gods would be bolstered by possessed porcelain. But both Sandberg's Shazam! and Wan's Aquaman have scenes which feature Annabelle, a demonic doll from both the Conjuring series and its Annabelle spinoffs. In Shazam!, the doll sits on the shelves of a pawn shop in Philadelphia, waiting for someone to give it a good home to haunt. In Aquaman, the doll can be seen ominously chilling on a massive underwater trash heap while Aquaman and Mera are swimming toward Atlantis. These are blink-and-you'll-miss-the-jump-scare moments, but both directors have confirmed on social media that their old ghoulish work friend ties together the two very differently dark universes.
Not content with summoning all the demons, ghosts, and ghouls from the Conjuring movies, Sandberg dragged yet another horror movie through the eldritch blood portal. In Shazam!, actress Andi Osho plays a social worker named Emma Glover -- the very same character she played in Lights Out, Sandberg's horror movie about an immortal shadow monster. Gee, no wonder Batman was super paranoid about Superman. All the other supernatural unkillable beings in their ever-expanding universe are pure evil.
Related: 5 Fictional Universes That Overlapped In Mind-Blowing Ways
There are plenty of Arnold Schwarzenegger roles that would fit right into a scary movie. How about Jericho Cane from End Of Days, the cop who had to battle a gasoline-peeing Satan? Or Doug Quaid from Total Recall, who's not even phased by three-boobed women, let alone spooky ghosts? But if any Schwarzenegger character should be in a thriller, it's definitely the one who spent an entire movie pretending to be an elementary school teacher.
Kindergarten Cop came out in 1990, and was part of Schwarzenegger's attempt to remind people there was a soft, funny actor underneath those 400 pounds of Predator-murdering muscles. It's a shame, then, that his bid for family fun wound up sharing a universe with gaming's most disturbing series, Silent Hill. While neither the game nor the movie explicitly mention it, eagle-eyed gamers noticed that both were set in identical-looking schools, and have provided evidence even more solid than a child asserting that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina. Just take a gander at the foreboding entrances to these halls of learning:
Universal Pictures
KonamiOne is set in a awful world filled with psychological torture. The other is set in a video game.
And this eerily similar poster of a dead-eyed bulldog:
Universal Pictures
KonamiRight out of frame is a toddler with a pyramid head.
Not to mention this very unusually organized medicine cabinet:
Universal Pictures
KonamiIf only all schools had an extra life in their medical kits.
So what in the Sam Silent Hill is going on here? While developing his game, director Keiichiro Toyama wanted to throw some of his favorite pop culture stuff into the mix. So he grabbed at whatever American movies he had on his shelves and jammed them in. There are references to The Shining, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a bunch of David Lynch films ... and Kindergarten Cop, apparently.
Follow Ryan Menezes on Twitter for bits cut from this article and other stuff no one should see. Adam Wears is on Twitter and Facebook, and has a newsletter dedicated to depressing history facts. It's not as heartbreakingly sad as it sounds, promise! E. Reid Ross has a book called BIZARRE WORLD that's due to be released in September. He's practically on his knees begging that you pre order it now from Amazon or Barnes and Noble and leave a scathing/glowing review.
For more, check out 8 Mind-Blowing Connections Between The Works Of Joss Whedon - After Hours:
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