Movie Scenes Inspired by Another Movie's Poster

Cafe Society
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The scene in Cloverfield (2008) where the head from the Statue of Liberty gets tossed into a New York Street was admittedly inspired by the poster for John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) , which showed the head in a New York Street, a scene which doesn’t occur in that film, nor with any explanation.

Movie posters are made to be v isually compelling and to arrest the attention of passers-by, so it’s not surprising that other artrists might see them and draw inspiration from them. Movies, after all, are themselves supposed to be visually striking. The problem is that in pre-CGI years, it was often hard to impossible to make the actual movie live up to the advertising hype.

Another case of the poster inspiring a scene in a later movie occurs with the low-budget 1962 film The Brain that Wouldn’t Die. The poster features the heroine from that film as a decapitated head (“Jan in the pan”, as the MST3K crew called her) . Behind her is a brain in a jar of fluid with a giant eyeball, something that doesn’t appear in the film, and isn’t even hinted at. Apparently it just looked cool and eye-catching.

In 1990 schlock filmmaker Frank Henenlotter essentially remade TBTWD as Frankenhooker, and he included a scene with that eyeball-enhanced Brain In A Jar

It’s a cheap effect, not done with CGI or anything, and it fits Henenlotter’s jokey tone more than that of TBTWD’s. I suspect, in fact, that the earlier film’s poster was drawn after the film had been finished.

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) was such a low-budget film that its effects weren’t even up to the standards of the time. You can see images bleeding through the optical effects, and the giant props, like the rubber hand, look embarassaing. But it had a helluva poster, which has since become iconic:

The film couldn’t even begin to hope it could reproduce that image of the highway-straddling Allison Hayes picking up cars and dwarfing the city beneath her more than 50 foot height. The poster has inspired a lot of drawings, images, political cartoons, and the like. The film inspired a Darryl Hannah remake, and a couple of imitators, Attack of the 50 foot cheerleader, Attack of the 50 foot centerfold. It had already inspired a comedy remake the very same year it was made, with The Thirty Foot Bride of Candy Rock, Lou Costello’s last film.

None of these films tried to reproduce that image in the film – they were all low-budget films themselves. Hannah’s film did copy the poster of the original. Alas, Daryl Hannah didn’t bestride a superhighway, either. So none of these films really qualify – they didn’t include that iconic image.

Any others?

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How about a twist: movie posters in a bunch of movies, inspired by another movie.

See You Next Wednesday

This line from 2001: A Space Odyssey (spoken by Frank Poole’s father in a recorded message) was the title of an unfinished script by director John Landis, who turned it into a running gag in many of his films, as seen in the list, including Trading Places, The Blues Brothers, and Coming to America.

As enumerated on the Wikipedia page, the gag was taken up by other directors as well, including in Doctor Who, Babylon 5, and Hellboy II.

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Since I can’t think of anything directly on point, but we’re already going off on a tangent: the opening credits to WATCHMEN have a costumed hero foil what presumably would’ve been like unto Thomas and Martha Wayne leaving the theater and getting murdered by a gun-toting mugger, as hinted at by, as it were, the poster in the movie:

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From Twins.

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I wish I could think of an example fitting the op, but none comes to mind. This thread is too hard. My brain hurts.

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Yes, tough ask.

First thing I thought of was the “Kiss her, you fool” sign in LA Story with Steve Martin and Victoria Tennant yet that’s one of those traffic road signs.

Only other thing I could think of is John Landis’ recurring gag of “See you next wednesday”. In the Blues Brothers it’s a billboard, sometimes it’s dialogue (It is the last line of Kubrick’s 2001), in “American Werewolf in London” it’s a porn film (!), sometimes it is a movie poster yet I don’t recall it ever “inspiring” anyone.

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There was a Brain In A Jar, with eyes, in Robocop 2. I don’t know if there was any direct influence. Brain In A Jar is a pretty hoary cliche in science fiction and comic books.

The 1970 film Waterloo (Rod Steiger as Napoleon and Christopher Plummer as Wellington) has a scene of a cavalry charge designed to replicate Lady Butler’s painting Scotland Forever!

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And in the underrated The Last Action Hero, Sly played the Terminator.

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I had this nagging feeling I was forgetting another scene but I couldn’t come up with it.

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Yeah, I wrote an article about the trope in the now sadly-departed ezine Teemings

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Just checked Donovan’s Brain, heavily referenced in Steve Martin’s The Man with Two Brains, to see if the influence extended to the posters. You could argue a general tropey Brain-Jar-Mad Scientist similarity but I don’t think it fits the OP’s tight parameter.

On the other hand, I’m just watching a cheapie comedy-horror flick called There’s Nothing Out There. The pre-credit attack scene takes place in the horror aisles of a video store, with elements of the attack mimicking cut-away shots from posters / covers. Modest, but probably counts.

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How about movie scenes inspired by the movies poster?

The horror film Ghoulies was created poster first, and features a monster coming out of the toilet with the tagline “They’ll get you in the end!” Apparently this scene wasn’t in the actual movie itself though, and test audiences complained that the poster was the only memorable part of the movie. So they reshot a scene of a Ghoulie monster coming out of the toilet and inserted it into an already existing montage scene.

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Sorry, I definitely did not intend that.

Usually when I write such OPs, they’re intended to be nuclei for people chiming in with examples and trivia from Pop Culture, with the criteria meant to only supply guiderails to keep things from veering off too quickly. I was able to come up with a couple of quick examples, and figured that, as usual, there would be several examples I was unaware of, or had forgotten. Evidently there aren’t so many in this case.

Thanks to everyone who suggested odd bits of trivia , even if they were only peripherally linked. Feel free to vamp.

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A few months before 1776 opened on Broadway, songwriter Sherman Edwards decided that the second act needed an upbeat number to lighten the mood. He glanced at the poster’s image of a cartoon eagle emerging from an egg, and the rest was history:

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Very good. I’d heard that story, but forgot it when I wrote the OP – probably because it was a play, rather than a movie

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Not a scene, but I can’t help thinking that this

Inspired this

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Unlikely. The trope of Monsters Carrying Unconscious Girls goes back way before 1953’s Robot Monster. Forrest Ackerman’s monster magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland had a semiregular feature, “Carry On”, that consisted of nothing but publicity stills of monsters carrying inert women, going back to the 1940s at least.

Incidentally, although the image of Robby the Robot, with two of the gyros in his transparent head looking like “evil” eyes and carrying Anne Francis makes for an eye-catching image, no such moment occurs in the movie. Near the end of the film he does carry Doc Ostrow, but that would have violated the cliche – Monsters NEVER carry guys!

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Or even further. Here’s an illustrated list that includes The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1921) and Dracula (1931).

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Son of Rambow is a charming low-budget film from the UK, released in 2008. It follows two young lads, inspired by a dodgy pirated video, as they attempt to recreate First Blood with a camcorder and some imaginative special effects. Doesn’t match the OP but thought it worth a mention.