Movie tropes — recurring themes, plot devices, or clichés — are as old as cinema itself, but some of these overused storytelling devices have mercifully gone the way of the dodo.
Once-ubiquitous movie tropes such as the damsel in distress, gay best friend, repetitive catchphrases, and smoking have fallen out of favor as our society changes. Now we know that women don’t just need rescued, gays aren’t exclusively supporting characters, one-liners get old fast, and dying from smoking is not glamorous.
When is the last time you saw any of the following tired movie tropes in a recent movie? Did you audibly groan?
1. Quicksand
Growing up in the 1970s, movies and TV shows made it seem as though quicksand would become a bigger problem later in life than it actually did. I have yet to tromp through any wooded area and find myself getting slowly swallowed into the earth after unexpectedly stepping into a pool of dense quicksand.
Although even relatively recent movies such as 2016’s The Jungle Book feature a quicksand scene, it’s a fantasy film filled with talking animals. Suspension of disbelief is already in play, so you’re willing to accept the old quicksand threat as plausible in this context.
A quick Internet search will tell you that in the unlikely event that you ever encounter quicksand, you would, at most, sink to your waistline and no more.
2. Smoking Everywhere
It’s difficult for people of this century to remember a time when everyone smoked anywhere and everywhere. When you went into a restaurant, the first question the hostess asked was, “Smoking or nonsmoking?” You could smoke in hospitals, bars, coffee shops, and even on airplanes.
In movies, smoking gave characters something to do with their hands while delivering lines. The billowing smoke sometimes produced a desired dramatic effect, like Robert De Niro smoking in a dark theater in Cape Fear or in The Hunger where the chic Manhattan vampires seem to spend more time smoking than drinking blood.
Vampires can’t die from COPD, heart disease, or lung cancer like us mortal moviegoers who now know the dangers of cigarettes. There are some cities such as Beverly Hills where you can’t even light up within a certain amount of feet from the entrance of a building, so using smoking for dramatic effect in a movie set in the present day just isn’t believable anymore.
3. Catchphrases
Arnold Schwarzenegger has said some version of “I’ll be back” in nearly every movie since 1984’s The Terminator. Other catchphrases such as “May the Force be with you” or “The name is Bond, James Bond” are so instantly recognizable that the names of the movies they come from don’t even need mentioning.
Some of the most groan-inducing catchphrases are from stand-alone movies such as Titanic‘s “I’m the king of the world,” Forrest Gump‘s “Life is like a box of chocolates,” or the repetitive “Show me the money!” from Jerry Maguire. In the case of the latter movie, most people remember the annoying one-liner more than the actual plot, which is the problem when a calculated catchphrase becomes bigger than the movie itself.
4. Cookie-cutter Bodies
Hollywood movies and TV shows definitely have a type: stereotypically hot. The women of Baywatch were all jiggly up top and toned down below, while the men were always tan, muscular, and had full heads of hair. No matter what genre of movie, the main characters were once always traditionally attractive and had similar body types: lean, flawless skin, and no visible flab. If you saw a plus-size character, they were there for comic relief or in the background for “realism.”
In more recent years, some filmmakers have pushed back against the cookie-cutter bodies presented in movies, but we still have a long way to go before what we see on-screen comes closer to resembling what we see around us every day. Barbie — the highest-grossing film of 2023 — explored the yawning chasm between the real world and fantasy by featuring Barbies of all shapes and sizes. Even Baywatch pinup Pamela Anderson, now in her late 50s, attends events today au naturel without any makeup.
The world may finally be ready for an action hero with a dad bod or romantic leading lady with some cellulite or visible wrinkles — a prospect that seemed unthinkable even 10 years ago.
5. Bad Guys Without Storylines
Not every movie villain requires a two-hour spin-off film that explores their awful childhood and the motivations (excuses?) for their bad behavior. For example, is it scarier to think of Halloween‘s Michael Myers as an ordinary boy who just snapped one day and started killing, or do you need to know why? John Carpenter’s Halloween doesn’t explore the “why” and is considered a horror classic. Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween remake attributes Michael’s psychopathic behavior to an abusive home life, which makes the character less mysterious.
In 101 Dalmatians,we know that Cruella de Vil wants Dalmatian fur for her coats, but a reason for her hatred of that particular dog breed is unexplored. In 2021’s Cruella, Emma Stone plays Cruella and we learn that her nasty behavior comes from a childhood desire to follow her dream of becoming a fashion designer. So now this Disney villain is… sympathetic?
Some movie villains need a little backstory to make them believable, but it’s not helpful to explain away every Cruella or Maleficent’s motivations with a detailed account of how they were wronged.
6. Glasses for Nerds
Ever since the silent-movie era when actors such as Harold Lloyd wore horn-rimmed glasses in 1923’s Safety Last!, filmmakers have used eyeglasses to tell audiences, “Hey, this character is smarter than the others.” Never mind that people who don’t need glasses are perfectly capable of reading and being brainy — eyeglasses became visual shorthand to convey nerd vibes.
Velma from Scooby-Doo is a perfect example of a nerdy character whom we know is smarter than the rest because she wears glasses. Filmmakers took this one step further in the nerd-obsessed 1980s when nerdy characters wore thick-framed glasses — usually with tape holding one arm in place — to let the audience know beyond a shadow of a doubt that, yes, these characters are brainy, socially awkward geeks.
Today, most people realize there is zero correlation between the need to wear glasses and intelligence, so this tired trope occurs less frequently.
7. Stalking Mistaken for Love
How many movies feature a guy who follows, aka stalks, a beautiful woman around until she pays attention to him? What is actually creepy and borderline criminal behavior is presented as just an age-old story of “boys chasing skirts” until the woman realizes the guy pursuing her is actually a swell guy and deserves a chance at love.
The Notebook starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams is a perfect example of this overused trope. After McAdams’ Allie refuses to ride the Ferris wheel with Gosling’s Noah at a carnival, Noah climbs the Ferris wheel and begs Allie to go on a date with him. He actually suggests that he could fall to his death if she refuses the date. Even if a guy as handsome as Gosling in real life did this, shouldn’t alarm bells go off in the gal’s head?
In these #MeToo times, filmmakers have gotten the message that stalking is not romantic. It’s just uninvited and unwelcome behavior.
8. A Beautiful Woman Hiding Behind Glasses
In addition to signaling intelligence, eyeglasses were used to “hide” a beautiful woman on-screen until the “big reveal.”
InThe Big Sleep, a private investigator, played by Humphrey Bogart, interacts with a bespectacled bookstore worker and asks her to remove her glasses. When she takes off the apparatus that allows her to see clearly and turns around to lock eyes with Bogart, he is stunned at her miraculous transformation into a hottie.
The message delivered by movies such as The Big Sleep is that you look more attractive without glasses, so learn to live in a blurry world if you want a man’s attention. Today’s glasses-wearing stars such as Zoey Deschanel and Jennifer Aniston seem to date and get by just fine despite the insulting suggestion of this outdated trope.
9. The Gay Best Friend
As LGBTQ individuals become more visible in pop culture, the lame trope of the “gay best friend” is going back in the closet where it belongs.
A “fabulous” example of the stereotypical gay best friend who follows a straight female around and fusses over her life is Damian (Daniel Franzese) in Mean Girls. Damian doesn’t seem to have needs or desires of his own — he is a human handbag who fires off snarky one-liners and seems singularly obsessed with his gal pals’ lives. Gay characters like Damian exist only to worship and cheer on the leading ladies.
Most people today realize that gay men are not here to help White girls, mean or otherwise, sort through their feelings and eat-pray-love their way to self-discovery. If you like the idea of a gay BFF as a must-have accessory, watch Clueless or Mean Girlsand have a gay old time.
10. Kids Existing Without Technology
Movies such as The Sandlot, Stand by Me, and The Goonies feature kids out in the world doing things such as sports or riding bikes that don’t involve fiddling with their phones. Unless a new movie is set in the 1990s or earlier, don’t expect to see children on-screen without their cell phones ever again.
The children in pre-1990s movies went on adventures outside and explored their environment without the need to document every second on social media or build their “brand” by getting likes and subscribes. Today’s children, like many adults, experience life filtered through the lenses of their phones, which is not cinematically interesting but the reality of life in the 2020s.
11. Answering Machines
For those who are Gen Z and younger, an answering machine is a device that attached to a landline phone and screened calls as well as recorded messages. In movies, there are many scenes featuring a character who leaps out of bed and scrambles around as someone leaves an important message.
In Office Space, Peter (Ron Livingston) skips work and his boss calls him multiple times and leaves annoying messages. Peter, who is miserable at work, opts to let the answering machine do the heavy lifting so he doesn’t have to interact with his boss.
Funny scenes like that don’t work today because few people have landlines, let alone answering machines. Filming a message going to voicemail on a cell phone will probably never become a movie trope like running to an answering machine.
12. Pay Phones
A long time ago in a galaxy where you currently reside, people had to go out into the world without a cell phone. Not only did they have to get from A to B without Google Maps, but no one could reach them until they returned home. Scary, huh?
In movies, characters fished for dimes or quarters to feed to a pay phone to make an important call while out in the world without a cell phone. In Stranger Than Fiction, for example, Will Ferrell’s character races to a subway station pay phone to contact a woman he thinks is penning a story about him.
Today, if you can find a working pay phone, you are probably in jail or maybe an old bus terminal. Since everyone has a cell phone in their pocket, the movie trope involving a mad dash to a pay phone has been permanently disconnected. Please try your call again later.
13. Damsels in Distress
Fay Wray played one of cinema’s first and most iconic damsels in distress as the beauty taken by a giant ape in King Kong. Older Disney animated movies leaned into the damsel-in-distress trope with its princesses: Aurora in Sleeping Beauty couldn’t open her eyes again without a kiss from a handsome prince, and The Little Mermaid‘s Ariel also needed a magical smooch from a man to live the life of her dreams.
The idea of a female character in need of rescue continued to modern times in movies. Acclaimed movies such as Pretty Woman are little more than unrealistic rescue fantasies for women that perpetuate the damsel-in-distress stereotype. Until recently, you had to look at films in the horror genre such as Alien or The Silence of the Lambs to find female characters who could stand up for themselves without the need of a man rescuing them.
The damsel-in-distress trope has fallen out of favor, even in Disney movies. Unlike Rapunzel in the classic fairy tale, the princess in 2010’s Tangled takes control of her life and doesn’t wait around for a handsome prince to rescue her.
14. Unintelligent Horror Characters
In horror movies, the characters who don’t have “final” status usually do stupid things that get them killed, such as investigating a strange noise, running upstairs instead of out the front door, or walking around in the dark alone. In The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the characters who decide to enter Leatherface’s house without an invitation end up, well, massacred.
Although the concept of a smart “final girl” who outwits the masked killer dates back to at least 1978 with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in Halloween, it was Wes Craven’s meta slasher Scream that subverted expectations. In that 1996 classic, the characters — including Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott — openly discuss the stupidity of horror characters and how smart you have to be to survive a horror film. Sidney the perennial survivor transcends the worn-out trope about stupid horror characters and will return in Scream VII.
15. Frozen Steak as Ice
In The Sandlot, the force of a fastball hitting Scotty’s mitt smacks it into his eye and forces the boy to race home. His parents helpfully provide him with a frozen steak to bring down the swelling.
The Sandlot isn’t the first or only movie featuring a character nursing a black eye with a frozen slab of meat. It turns out that a frozen bag of peas or, better yet, a towel over a plastic bag of ice would work much better without the additional fear of bacterial infection from the placement of thawing raw meat on one’s face.
16. Animals Dying in Horror Films
The makers of horror films know that you care more about animals on-screen than partying teens, so killing pets on-screen will elicit more of an emotional reaction than the deaths of often-annoying characters.
In John Carpenter’s Halloween, masked maniac Michael Myers dines on dogs and strangles one that barks too much. A few years later, Carpenter directed The Thing, which features many dogs in peril from an alien threat at an Antarctic research station. Other movies that seem to hate pets with a unique fury include The Babadook, Jaws, Funny Games, Cujo, The Hills Have Eyes, and Pet Sematary, to name a few.
Today, killing a pet on-screen can scare moviegoers and their box office dollars away from a movie, so filmmakers don’t fall back on this upsetting trope as often.
17. Placing the Phone on the Receiver
The act of slamming a phone down on the receiver after a heated conversation looks dramatic on-screen, which is why filmmakers used this trope in movies that took place during a time when phones actually had receivers. Films such as Network, Rosemary’s Baby, and American Psychoare just a few that feature characters hanging up with authority.
Even 1990s movies such as Scream arrived too late to take advantage of the satisfying slamming of a phone on its receiver. By then, most people used cordless digital landline phones on which you pressed a tiny button to hang up. Today, landlines have nearly disappeared in homes and people would rather punch a wall than slam down their precious cell phone to end a call.
18. Hair Dye Change Reflects Personality Change or Aging
At some point during the history of color movies, filmmakers decided that one way to convey a character’s emotional state or age was via hair color. InEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet’s green-splotched hair indicates her youthfulness. When her hair is a passionate red, this implies that she is now in a relationship with Jim Carrey’s character. In Blue Is the Warmest Color, the blue hair color of a woman fades along with her romantic relationship as the movie progresses.
Today, different actors are used in flashback sequences to show characters at different ages or, if the budget permits, de-aging CGI effects are used to make, say, Harrison Ford look like a younger Indiana Jones for a few scenes in a movie. No hair dye or protective gloves required!
Robert DeSalvo
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