My gawd, did a bunch of film execs get stoned together, and decide to play “Who can come up with the worst movie premise?”
Laura needs a really good lawyer: just because you are named as a child’s guardian does not mean that you must take them, and you are allowed to divorce someone who needs more care than you can give. It may sound shitty, but sometimes it’s the only practical solution for couples who were dependent on the insurance of the now-disabled partner. Sometimes if they divorce, the disabled person can get better disability benefits, and medicaid until medicare kicks in. And then, if this happens right after the wedding, and the non-disabled person wants to bail, yeah, crappy, but the person has that right.
Laura bludgeons Kyle’s other friend to death several minutes before the wedding to keep him from murdering Kyle over the insurance money. Now that she and Kyle share this secret, it’s implied, she can’t just divorce and abandon him - otherwise, he’ll seek revenge by ratting her out.
Wasn’t that kind of what The Odd Life of Timothy Green was about? Some infertile parents being rejected for adoption bury a box detailing all the traits they want in a child. The child literally grows like a plant into a young boy and teaches them a lesson about parenting, then disappears. They’re inspired to retry adoption and finally get a real kid in their care.
How about the Canadian film Starbuck? A forty-something man learns that the sperm donations he made as a young man resulted in 533 children, 142 of whom have sued to learn his identity. All of the ones we meet are young adults.
(There’s an American remake, called Delivery Man, and starring Vince Vaughn. Like most remakes, it’s not as good.)
I think George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner counts, as would the Steve Martin film A Simple Twist of Fate, which is based on it, though I haven’t seen it.
I think Silas Marner counts, but it does involve the adoption of an infant. The parental figure, however, is this awkward bachelor whose only concept of being responsible for a child was having a little sister. Btw, what is it with George Eliot and big brother/little sister dynamics?
Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna might count. It’s basically the extended family member must suddenly take care of a child that they weren’t planning to idea.
Eric Segal wrote a novel, Man, Woman, and Child, which dealt with a couple finding out that the man had an illegitimate child because of a dalliance in France. The child’s mother died, leaving Dad in custody.
This was made into a movie back in 1983 starring Blythe Danner and Martin Sheen.
It’s incredibly common. Just from among the movies I’ve seen in the last three or four years…
Leon: The Professional Les Miserables Tom Jones The Kid (Charlie Chaplin) Anthony Adverse Wuthering Heights Tarzan the Ape Man (inter-species) Auntie Mame Cinema Paradiso Jeremiah Johnson The Lion King (inter-species) Oliver! The Awful Truth Father Goose A Thousand Clowns Edward Scissorhands The Search True Grit Paper Moon The Blind Side Captains Courageous
I’m not sure if Face/Off fits those parameters, but Castor (as Sean) does wind up looking after Jamie through the middle of the movie, while Sean protects and later adopts Castor’s son at the end.
Nope, they didn’t give birth. Scully’s ova was stolen, and Ally, when young, had donated some for a project to improve upon methods of freezing unfertilized ova.
In Scully’s case the Consortium used her ova in a hybridization experiment and in Ally’s the ova were accidentally used instead of the wife’s for a couple doing IVF.
This is one of my favorite movies with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant. It’s about a divorcing couple having a custody fight over their Fox Terrier, play by Asta. They both date a couple of losers, contemplate remarriage, and then have to face the awful truth, that maybe they actually love each other. It’s one of the funniest screwball comedies ever, and won best picture in, IIRC, 1937.
According to IMDb, the only other movie called The Awful Truth is a Michael Moore documentary.
Are you thinking of another Irene Dunne/Cary Grant movie called My Favorite Wife, where Irene Dunne is stranded on a desert island for seven years, and then rescued on the eve of her husband’s remarriage (not a spoiler-- this all happens in the first ten minutes). She has two children who were babies when she “drowned,” and has to figure out a way to tell them she is their mother. It’s a tertiary plot, and I wouldn’t put it in this category.
There’s also an Irene Dunne/Cary Grant movie called Penny Serenade where they adopt a baby, but they do so intentionally-- it’s not a parents by surprise movie. It’s also unbearably tragic, and I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s very good, but it’s a cinematic gut punch.
On the other hand, I would recommend The Awful Truth to anyone. It is so funny, you may blow out a tonsil laughing. The Irene Dunne/Cary Grant version, that is.