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These reveals went right over everyone's heads.
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00:00It's always great fun to revisit a movie and realise that the filmmakers were a lot sneakier
00:05than you thought, hiding some sly secrets, canny easter eggs and ingenious reveals in
00:11plain sight. These gotcha moments can hugely enhance the rewatch value of a given film.
00:17From crucial reveals that quite literally change everything we thought we knew,
00:21to minor but fascinating slivers of character context, these reveals all flew over just
00:27about everyone's heads. So with that in mind, I'm Ellie for WhatCulture and let's take a look at
00:31these movie reveals nobody noticed. Starting with Boo's name is Mary, Monsters, Inc.
00:39In Pixar's stone-cold classic Monsters, Inc., the pint-sized human protagonist Boo is never actually
00:45referred to by her real name, only the nickname bestowed upon her by her newfound pal Sully.
00:51And honestly, that's just fine, but the curiosity about her actual given name endures regardless.
00:57Yet for those paying ultra-close attention to the adorable scene where Boo goes to sleep in
01:02Sully's bed, you might notice that the various drawings she scrawled are all signed with one
01:08single name, Mary. And so it's reasonable to assume that this is her name, and that it was
01:13hiding right there in front of our faces the entire time. But if you somehow still weren't convinced,
01:18the official novelisation of Monsters, Inc. indeed confirms Boo to be named Mary. The name was
01:23seemingly lifted directly from Boo's voice actress, Mary Gibbs, who is herself the daughter
01:29of one of the movie's story artists, Rob Gibbs, who sadly passed away in 2020.
01:35Frank's first appearance, Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko has been endlessly dissected and
01:41obsessed over by fans for the last near-quarter century. But here's something neat you probably
01:47never spotted in the opening three minutes of the movie. During the initial montage sequence set
01:53to Echo and the Bunnymen's The Killing Moon, Donnie cycles through the streets and is briefly
01:57passed by a red car. To be specific, it's a red Pontiac Trans Am, the very same car that's revealed
02:04to be
02:04driven by Frank much later in the movie. More to the point, this is the very distinctive vehicle Frank
02:09hits Gretchen with, killing her, a fact eerily foreshadowed in this opening scene. As Frank
02:15drives past Donnie, the following lyrics from The Killing Moon can be heard.
02:19I know it must be killing time. The lyrics could also reference the fact that Donnie
02:23subsequently shoots Frank dead. Richard Kelly's dense sci-fi thriller is absolutely pat to the gills
02:28with easily missed details. But few are more interesting than knowing that Donnie and Frank
02:34first crossed paths earlier than expected. Leonard is Sammy, Memento. Early on in Christopher Nolan's
02:42astonishing mystery thriller Memento, amnesia-riddled protagonist Leonard Shelby tells the tale of Sammy
02:48Jankis, a fellow amnesiac who accidentally killed his wife by giving her an insulin overdose due to
02:54having no memory of previously injecting her. Near the end of the film, however, we find out that Sammy's
03:00story is really Leonard's. Leonard accidentally killed his own wife, and while wracked with
03:04traumatic guilt, cooked up a false murder mystery story to help repress the truth. But there's a
03:10brilliant visual hint at this a little while before the truth finally comes out. When Nolan cuts back
03:16to Sammy at one point, Sammy is briefly replaced by Leonard for a few fractions of a second. The
03:22significance of the image may not be immediately clear to first-time viewers, but the visual language
03:27nevertheless nods to the fact that in terms of this story, Sammy and Leonard are one and the same.
03:34John Milton is the series' ultimate villain, Scream 3. Here's something that even many die-hard
03:41Scream fans haven't really thought about. The overarching antagonist of the entire franchise
03:46was actually revealed back in Scream 3. Though Billy Loomis and Stu Marker were, of course,
03:51the original Ghostface killers, and also responsible for the murder of Sidney Prescott's mother,
03:56Maureen, a year prior, Scream 3 reveals that the buck didn't stop there. Rather, Billy was goaded
04:02into killing Maureen by her estranged son and Sidney's half-brother, Roman Bridger. After Maureen
04:08rejected contact with Roman, he recorded footage of her having an affair with Billy's father,
04:13in turn triggering Billy's murderous response. But even Roman isn't really the true evil architect
04:19of the Ghostface lineage. It's actually John Milton, the Hollywood producer, who allowed Maureen to be
04:24sexually assaulted at one of his parties, resulting in her becoming pregnant with Roman.
04:30Beyond Milton partaking in the gang assault himself, the implication is that he may well be
04:35Roman's father. And even if not, he facilitated the events which would ultimately cause every single
04:40one of the Ghostface murders. To say that he has a lot of blood on his hands, even decades after
04:46being
04:46killed by Roman, is quite the understatement. Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis's relationship,
04:53Watchmen. Love it or hate it, Zack Snyder's Watchmen is absolutely filled with subtle details. And perhaps
04:59the most interesting reveal happens during the movie's magnificent opening credit sequence.
05:04While it's little secret that the glimpse of Silk Spectre's retirement party is framed to resemble
05:10Leonardo da Vinci's iconic painting The Last Supper, take a peek at the right-hand side of
05:15the frame, and you'll see two heroes, Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice, sharing an intimate
05:20conversation. One might infer that their closeness is probably a bit too close for mere friendship.
05:26And that would be because, as implied by Alan Moore's original comic, Captain Metropolis and
05:31Hooded Justice are actually secret lovers. The body language says it all without Snyder having to
05:36spell it out. Though the more recent HBO Watchmen TV series dispensed with the innuendo and directly
05:42confirmed the pair to be romantically involved. Yet for 2009, when the prospect of a gay superhero
05:48on screen was something studios would unfortunately squirm at, Snyder had to settle for a fleeting visual
05:54implication. Vaughn's poor eyesight, Major League. Midway through the classic sports film Major League,
06:02we learn that rookie pitcher Ricky Vaughn struggles to control his 100mph fastball because he has poor
06:08eyesight. This is soon remedied by fitting him with glasses, and he immediately becomes a force
06:13to be reckoned with. But Ricky's problem is actually visually signposted much earlier in the film,
06:19when he's at a restaurant with teammates Jake and Willie. Jake spots his ex-girlfriend Lynn across the
06:25restaurant, and after Jake looks in her direction, so too do Willie and Ricky. However, unlike Jake and Willie,
06:30Ricky has to squint hard in order to see Lynn. An incredibly subtle hint to the very issue that's
06:36causing his pitching problem. Even accepting the fact that Charlie Sheen has always been a bit of
06:40a squinter. This is a surprisingly sneaky way to foreshadow the big reveal regarding his character.
06:47No incoming calls allowed, Fight Club.
06:50David Fincher's Fight Club boasts one of the all-time great WTF plot twists, when we learn that
06:56anarchist Tyler Durden actually isn't real, but merely an invented alternate persona existing
07:02within the mind of our unnamed insomniac protagonist. And while there are a number of
07:07visual hints at the twist peppered throughout the film, none are quite as emphatic or brilliantly
07:13subtle as this one. After the protagonist's apartment is blown up and Tyler calls him from
07:18the payphone, Fincher shows a close-up of the phone which bears the text,
07:22no incoming calls allowed. And so if there's no way for the payphone to receive incoming calls,
07:28then how can Tyler even be calling the protagonist? While first-time viewers might simply assume that
07:32this was a production mistake on Fincher's part, let's be honest, would the ever-meticulous
07:37Fincher let a goof like this slip through the cracks? And even if he did, he'd surely fix it in
07:42post-production. In retrospect, of course, it was clearly a sneaky nod towards the fact that
07:47Tyler doesn't really exist. Dog days were numbered, John Wick. The events of the first John Wick are
07:55set in motion by the murder of John's beloved pet, Beagle Daisy. And once John has had his bloody
08:00revenge, he ends the movie by breaking into an animal shelter and freeing a pit bull, which becomes
08:05his pet for the remainder of the series. But there's actually a little more to this than first meets the
08:10eye. If you look closely, when John is liberating the dog, you can see that the dog's patient notes
08:15have the words, To Be Put Down, stamped in red ink. So anyone worried that John stole a dog from
08:21an
08:21actual owner can rest easy. He actually saved the canine from being imminently put to sleep.
08:26Given that John himself spends the entire franchise scarcely skirting death until fate finally catches
08:31up with him, it's a rather apt metaphor that he saves a dog from being shuffled off their mortal coil.
08:38Hail Abraxas, Late Night with the Devil. The terrific horror film Late Night with the Devil
08:44concludes with the shock reveal that late-night talk show host Jack Delroy made a pact with the
08:49devil, sacrificing the soul of his wife in exchange for fame, in turn causing her fatal cancer
08:55diagnosis. But Jack gets his just desserts by film's end when demon Abraxas tricks him into
09:00stabbing cult survivor Lily to death on live television, sealing his fate. Abraxas and the cult that
09:07worships him are introduced in the film's opening newsreel montage. Though there's also a sneaky hint here
09:13that the demonic entity has the ability to influence our perception of reality. When we see a front page
09:18clipping from the Hollywood Observer, the bottom of the page names the movie of the week as Hail Abraxas,
09:25a sly suggestion that things aren't quite what they seem, and that Abraxas has the potential to bend
09:30reality to his will. Flip phones in 2011, Final Destination 5. The fifth Final Destination drops
09:39one hell of a jaw-dropping twist in its final moments, when we learn that the entire film has
09:45actually been a secret prequel to the original Final Destination, with the few surviving characters
09:50boarding the doomed Flight 180, which explodes shortly after takeoff in the first movie.
09:56Considering that Final Destination 5 was released in 2011, and the original film is set in 1999,
10:03there should have been a few easy tells, right? Except the film does a fantastic job of mostly
10:08distracting the audience from this fact, save for the presence of one thing throughout, flip phones.
10:14Foldable flip phones were enormously popular in the late 90s and early noughties, and they're present
10:19in several scenes despite largely fading from use by 2009. All while smartphones, which were surging
10:26in popularity by the 2010s, were nowhere to be seen. This is one of those ingeniously sly early
10:32reveals you'll kick yourself for not noticing, even though it's probably the most subtle thing ever
10:37put into any Final Destination movie. You already have it, Puss in Boots' The Last Wish.
10:44Get ready for a bit of a feels trip with this one. In the surprisingly brilliant Puss in Boots' The
10:49Last
10:50Wish, Goldilocks intends to use the fallen wishing star to wish for a human family in place of her
10:56adopted family of bears, much to their understandable upset. But when Goldie stumbles upon her favourite
11:01childhood fairy tale book, In the Dark Forest, there's actually a hidden message concealed on
11:06one of the pages. If you take the first letter from every line, it spells out, you already have
11:12it. As in, Goldie already has a family with the bears. Given that the Dark Forest is a pocket
11:17dimension which conjures illusions of travellers' own memories, effectively reflecting their own
11:22thoughts and feelings back to them, this is basically Goldie's subconscious telling her
11:26that she doesn't need to wish for a family when she's already got a loving, albeit non-human one
11:32already. Foreshadowing doesn't get much sweeter than that, really, does it?
11:36Elle's One Dollar Bills, Kill Bill Vol. 2
11:40In Kill Bill Vol. 2, Elle Driver makes a deal with Bud to buy the bride's precious Hattori Hanzo sword
11:47for one million dollars. When she rocks up to his trailer with the money, though, Bud removes a few
11:52stacks of cash to find that Elle has hidden a black mamba in the case, which promptly kills him.
11:57Elle's scheme was a little more precarious than it actually seems, though, because if you look closely,
12:02when Bud is first inspecting the money, the case clearly isn't packed with one million dollars.
12:07Though Elle has placed a hundred dollar bills on top, the edges of the bills below are clearly one
12:12dollar bills, because why bring one million dollars to a deal with someone you're just planning on
12:16killing anyway, right? But this definitely presented a lot of risk on Elle's part. If Bud had chosen to
12:21inspect the stacks of cash a little more closely before picking up the one concealing the black
12:26mamba, he would have easily realised that Elle was ripping him off. Then again, you can argue that
12:30Elle knew just how much of a dope Bud was, and that this plan was effectively foolproof.
12:36Genetically Modified Kaiju, Superman
12:39Midway through James Gunn's Superman, Lex Luthor unleashes a kaiju upon Metropolis in order to
12:45distract Superman while he infiltrates the Fortress of Solitude with Ultraman and the Engineer.
12:50The film never explicitly reveals precisely how Luthor obtained said kaiju, though when Mr.
12:55Terrific scans the creature, attentive viewers can learn a little more about it.
13:00Beyond listing the entity's dimensions, the scan also mentions that the kaiju has undergone
13:05genetic modification, with its DNA slash RNA being altered by an unknown party.
13:11It's not much of a leap to assume, then, that the villainous Luthor was responsible for this.
13:15While we still don't know where the kaiju came from, Luthor almost certainly captured and
13:20experimented upon them. We can also deduce that this experimentation likely explains the creature's
13:26ability to grow from pint-sized to skyscraper-sized in a mere matter of minutes. Knowing all this,
13:32the big guy's demise at the hands of the Justice Gang is even more tragic.
13:37Marcy Isn't Real, A Beautiful Mind
13:40The big reveal in Ron Howard's iconic, best-picture-winning drama, A Beautiful Mind,
13:45is that mathematician protagonist John Nash is actually suffering from schizophrenia,
13:49and several characters he interacts with, namely his friend Charles, Charles' niece Marcy,
13:55and agent William Parcher, are mere hallucinations. But this is actually slyly nodded to much earlier in
14:01the film, when John visits Princeton University to see Charles, and we see Marcy run across a field
14:06populated by pigeons. Despite Marcy running frantically around, as kids do, the pigeons,
14:11oddly, don't move at all. Extremely unusual behaviour for the birds, as everyone knows.
14:16While one might immediately assume that the pigeons were added in post-production,
14:20and the VFX team didn't have time to animate them flying, the truth is that it's surreptitiously
14:25revealing that Marcy isn't real. So, of course, the pigeons wouldn't fly away, because nobody's
14:30bothering them.
14:32Strawberry's Future, Anora
14:34Sean Baker's multi-Oscar-winning masterpiece, Anora, may feel like a wholly self-contained comedy
14:41drama, but it does nevertheless open up the world of Baker's previous film, his acclaimed 2021 black
14:47comedy, Red Rocket. During the Las Vegas sequence, an establishing shot of the strip briefly features
14:53a billboard on the left side of the frame, with a picture of Red Rocket's female lead, Strawberry.
14:58In that film, Strawberry was an aspiring porn actress, but the story ends on an ambiguous
15:03note, where her future path remains unclear. Yet, Baker appears to have clarified that entirely
15:08in Anora, given that the billboard refers to Strawberry as Starlet of the Year, before
15:13advertising a two-week live stage show she's starring in. It seems pretty evident from this
15:18that Strawberry made it, in so much as she became famous enough to have a billboard promoting
15:23what is presumably a strip show. While we still don't know the particulars of her adult film
15:28career, the clear implication is that Strawberry succeeded in her goal.
15:33Keck Gets Himself Killed, The Thin Red Line
15:36Like just about everyone else in the movie, Woody Harlson has a small but unforgettable role in
15:41Terrence Malick's poetic war epic, The Thin Red Line. He plays Sergeant Keck, a soldier who dies an
15:47especially horrific death while taking enemy fire. Keck reaches for his grenade, but accidentally pulls out
15:53the pin while the grenade is still attached to his hip. With little time to react, he leaps clear
15:58from his comrades just as it detonates, mortally wounding him. But there's a little more to this
16:03scene than a mere accident. Keck actually unintentionally engineered his own demise.
16:08Earlier in the film, we briefly see Keck using a knife to bend the pin on his grenade, a typical
16:13army tactic
16:14to make pulling the pin and deploying a grenade easier in a chaotic combat scenario. However, the trade-off is
16:20that it's much easier for soldiers to accidentally discharge the weapon and make mistakes like this
16:25without having the time to do anything about it.
16:28The Dirty Dozen vs. Spinal Tap, Small Soldiers
16:33Small Soldiers may not be one of Joe Dante's most celebrated films, but it's still a ton of fun.
16:39And if you were a kid in 1998, there's a decent chance you had a lot of fun with it.
16:43Like most Joe Dante movies, it's also operating on many different levels at once.
16:48And one of its most canny elements that's really only apparent to adults is its frankly ingenious
16:53casting. The Commando Elite toys are mostly voiced by cast members from the classic 1967 war film
17:00The Dirty Dozen, namely Jim Brown, Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy, and Clint Walker.
17:05As for their sworn enemies, the peaceful creatures known as the Gorgonites?
17:09Well, they're largely voiced by cast members from the legendary 1984 music mockumentary
17:14This Is Spinal Tap. Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer.
17:18While kids naturally wouldn't appreciate it, for adults, Dante basically made his own
17:22unhinged Dirty Dozen vs. Spinal Tap movie. Because why the hell not?
17:27Richie the Fanboy, Scream
17:30The big reveal at the end of the fifth Scream film is that the main Ghostface killer is Richie Kirsch,
17:36the boyfriend of protagonist Sam Carpenter. But Richie's guilt is more or less given away
17:41in the first act of the movie, when he and Sam pay a visit to Dewey to get help dealing
17:46with the
17:47new spate of killings. The moment that Dewey answers the door and talks to Sam, keep your
17:52eyes fixed on Richie, whose gaze suddenly turns to one of stunned amazement. Richie being starstruck
17:57by Dewey doesn't make much sense if he hasn't seen any of the Stab movies as he claims. But it
18:03makes a whole lot more sense if Richie is actually a secret Stab fanboy. And from there, it's pretty easy
18:08to deduce that he's actually one of the killers. Indeed, as it turns out, Richie is a disgruntled
18:13Stab fan who embarks on a killing spree with fellow Ghostface Amber in an attempt to give
18:18the flagging series new, real-life material to draw from.
18:22A father's job? Black Panther Wakanda Forever
18:26In the devastating mid-credits scene of Black Panther Wakanda Forever, we learn that the late
18:31T'Challa had a son with Nakia prior to his death, who has been raised in secret away from the
18:37Wakandan
18:37throne. Nakia also remarks that T'Challa prepared her and their son for his impending death. Which
18:43might seem like an affecting line in isolation, but it's actually a far more loaded piece of dialogue
18:48than that. This is a direct reference to a scene from the first Black Panther, where T'Challa's
18:53late father speaks to him on the ancestral plane and says,
18:56A man who has not prepared his children for his own death has failed as a father. Clearly,
19:01T'Challa took those words to heart when his own untimely demise came to bear. An outcome made all the
19:07more upsetting by Bozeman's own tragic passing in 2020.
19:11And finally, Martha in the Mirror Deep Red.
19:15It's only near the end of Dario Argento's all-timer giallo horror flip Deep Red that we find out the
19:21killer was Martha, the mother of protagonist Marcus's friend Carlo. However, it's actually
19:27possible for eagle-eyed audience members to figure this out way earlier. Right at the start of the
19:31film, in fact, where Marcus witnesses the gnarly murder of psychic medium Helga. Marcus instinctively
19:37races to her apartment, as you do, and when he walks through the hallway, he passes what appears
19:42to be a painting. But if you take a closer look, you'll see the painting is actually a mirror
19:46reflecting the face of Martha, who is hidden in plain sight and staring at Marcus. This effectively
19:52reveals her to be the killer about 90 minutes before the movie itself drops the veil in earnest.
19:57And yet, how many of us spotted it? Be honest now.
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