One of my favorite things is movies that are interconnected. Not movies in a series though.
One major example is
Chasing Amy
Dogma
Clerks
Jay and Silent Bob
Unfortunantly, i cant think of any more, soo…
I call on the vast knowledge of the SDMB family to help me on my quest to build my DVD collection.
Any genre is cool, anime would be outstanding.
Soldier (a damn awful action movie starring Kurt Russell) is supposedly set in the same universe as Blade Runner. The screenplay was written by the same guy and there are references to the Tanhauser Gate in both of them.
“Chasing Amy
Dogma
Clerks
Jay and Silent Bob”
You forgot to add Mall Rats to that list, and if you really want to get technical, Clerks: The Animated Series (but tha’s a TV show, not a film).
At least in the screenplays, Quentin Tarantino’s movies refer to characters from all the other movies, and many names are reused. For example, Pulp Fiction had Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Reservoir Dogs had Vic Vega (Michael Madsen). They have been said to be brothers, and there was a strong rumor for a while that Tarantino was planning a “Vega Brothers” prequel to both films.
Kieslowski (sp?) was famous for this.
The films in his “three colors” trilogy (“Blue”, “White”, and “Red”) are all heavily intertwined, although completely different films.
And his “Decalogue”, ten short films based on the Commandments, are all set in the same apartment complex-but I guess that’s more of a series.
Another is Whit Stillman’s films, “Metropolitan”, “Barcelona”, and “Last Days of Disco”, which all star Chris Eigemann.
I believe Michael Keaton played the same character in Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and Soderburgh’s Out Of Sight, which were both based on Elmore Leonard novels (set in the same continuity, no doubt).
In Enemy of the state (1998) the Gene Hackman’s role is an extension of Harry Caul, the character he portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s great 1974 film, The Conversation; however, the movie shows it was more than an extension: when the surveillance experts need an ID photo of Hackman they USE a photo of Harry Caul!!
Does anime count? If so…
My anime encyclopedia tells me that the series Nadesico is “supposed” to be set in the same universe as the series Silent Möbius.
More famously, a character named Captain Harlock has shown up in quite a few different anime, as well as friends or kin of his. If you include his manga, you get about six more crossovers right off the bat. (Someone more knowledgeable about anime can give details, I’m sure)
The 80s animated series’ Transformers and G.I. Joe both had theatrical movies…and there’s more than a little evidence that they’re supposed to share the same universe.
Apparently Scream, Scream 2, and Scream 3 are set in the same universe as the Kevin Smith films listed above, since Jay and Silent Bob appear in the third film.
Another interesting case is Trading Places and Coming to America, since a couple of characters appear in both films.
There’s a website in which someone has a list of all the crossover universes in American TV. In other words, they have made note of every case in which a character appears in several shows. (Consider the character of John Munch, for instance, who has appeared in five different shows.) They then would call any group of shows which are connected by such mutual appearances a crossover universe.
The Japanese blind swordsman/masseur Zatoichi and the wandering nameless samurai from Yojimbo and Sanjuro crossed paths naturally in Zatoichi Vs. Yojimbo.
The Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street series apparently are set in the same universe since the crossover film.
For some reason I can’t open up the IMDB right now, but the Bob Hope comedy Son Of Paleface featured numerous cameos by many TV and film western heroes in character, among them Tonto (Jay Silverheels) of Lone Ranger fame. So they could possibly count.
The TV shows Cheers and Wings had mutliple crossovers, mostly characters from the former vacationing on the latter.
“The Great McGinty” and “Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” both by Preson Sturges. In the former, Briany Donlevy and Akim Tamiroff played a crooked politician and his political boss, respectively. Donlevy ended up as governor. In “Miracle,” they are shown as the governor of the state and his political boss.
There’s a brief cameo in “Coming to America” that connects it with “Trading Places.”
Miss Jane Marple does a cameo crossover in “The Alphabet Murders,” connecting her with Hercule Poiorot.
Morgan Freeman played the same character (a policeman who’d authored a book on profiling or something) in Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider.
I was gonna do the Sturges and the Tashlin!
The Sturges connection is odd, though: In McGinty, both men ended up in Mexico; in Miracle, it’s as if they’re still in power.
Although both were originally stage plays, they have been made into movies: Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, in which minor charcters from the Shakespeare play become the focus of the story.
Everybody also eats at Big Kahuna Burgers.
In the Tarantino-produced “Curdled”, there’s a reference made to the Gecko brothers of “From Dusk 'Til Dawn”.
Jabootu theorizes that the movie The Holcroft Covenant is connected to Ronin through a reference to the “man in a wheelchair”. Might be right; John Frankenheimer directed both films.
Two of my favorite shows, Law and Order and Homicide: Life On the Street, had two crossovers. Then Munch (Richard Belzer’s character on Homicide) became a regular cast member of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. So all of them are in a shared universe.
(And I suspect Oz, the prison show, is in the same continuity too.)
We know Superman and Batman are in the same continuity from a few throwaway lines from the latter two Batman movies (“He must be halfway to Metropolis by now,” “Now I know why Superman works alone”), but all DC characters inhabit the same shared universe.
And the Marvel characters share their universe too. Even though different studios made the movies, Spider-Man, the X-Men, the Hulk, Daredevil, and Blade are all in the same continuity, and often interact with each other in the comic books the movies are based on.
X-Files and Millenium had a crossover once as well.
Munch also showed up in an episode of X-Files about the origin of the Lone Gunmen.