We’re all familiar with movie tropes — Arnold Schwarzenegger shouting a ridiculous pun at a bad guy before shooting them with a grenade launcher, the nerdy high school girl who becomes the prom queen, the grizzled police detective who doesn’t play by the rules. Movies tend to deal in established character archetypes and story cliches that audiences recognize and connect with, because making movies is hard, and sometimes you just need to give people what they want. But there are some once-popular movie tropes that have all but faded into history and need to make a comeback, if for no other reason than I want to see more movies about professional bodybuilders being forced to care for children.
These tropes can be revisited easily with Movies Anywhere’s robust library of titles, and we’ve noted below which trope-filled features are eligible for Screen Pass, which allows you to send your collection of these movies (and their tropes) with friends and family. So let’s dive in!
Strong Man Takes Care of Children
The Pacifier, Mr. Nanny, Kindergarten Cop
For some reason, we all agreed long ago that a powerful man being forced to care for children was one of the funniest concepts imaginable, as if the notion of being a caretaker would be so far from their muscular minds that they might accidentally eat the children somehow instead of dropping them off at school. We abruptly ceased this trend sometime in the early aughts, after Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson attempted to revive it with The Game Plan and The Tooth Fairy, but it’s making a comeback thanks to Dave Bautista’s My Spy. Let’s keep going. Make Jason Statham an international assassin forced to go undercover as a pediatrician, I don’t care. Give Triple H a shopping cart full of babies, let’s see what happens.
Cop with Dog Sidekick
Saddling a no-nonsense cop with a ridiculous and/or criminally insane partner is a tale as old as time, but in the late 80 Hollywood stumbled onto the idea of making that partner a dog and for a brief moment the cosmos aligned. This was a bonafide genre for several months in 1989, which saw the release of both K-9 and Turner & Hooch, but the genre came to an abrupt end after that. It’s as if the climax of Turner & Hooch, in which a money-laundering seafood baron shoots the titular Hooch to death in defiance of test-screening audiences everywhere, was metaphorical. Chuck Norris tried to revitalize the CopDog phenomenon with 1995’s Top Dog, but his wheel-kicking conservatism and penchant for aggressively shitty movies did nothing to further endear us to cops or dogs. Disney+ is releasing a 12-episode series adaptation of Turner & Hooch, so we may be poised on the verge of a CopDog renaissance. But it’s wild we haven’t gotten one of these a year since the Clinton administration. If we can team Clint Eastwood up with a chimpanzee twice in the same century, we can make Ice-T solve mysteries with a bulldog.
Talking Baby Movies
Amy Heckerling’s 1989 comedy Look Who’s Talking catapulted the world into a bold new era of movies featuring babies that psychically communicate with each other via indeterminate black magic. The movie spawned a near-immediate sequel and a TV show spinoff called Baby Talk starring George Clooney, but then Hollywood slept off the talking baby hangover and pivoted hard into talking dogs. They even made a third Look Who’s Talking that doesn’t feature a single talking baby, but entirely too many dogs with the voice of Danny DeVito. I want to see the same time and energy devoted to the Air Buddies franchise deliver me a fresh boon of gabby baby films. To be clear, the babies must communicate psychically, and only with other babies. Don’t give me any of this Boss Baby nonsense. Also, in keeping with the spirit of the original Look Who’s Talking, which starred Bruce Willis as the voice of little Mikey, the babies must all be voiced by tough guys. Let’s see a movie about a preschool rivalry featuring the voice talents of Ray Winstone and Henry Rollins.
Dinosaur Buddy Movies
The Land Before Time, Dinosaur
From the mid-1980s right up until around Jurassic Park was released, pop culture became very concerned with dinosaur friendships. More specifically, human beings getting to befriend dinosaurs, and those dinosaurs existing in weird alternate realities in which they dress and behave like Reagan-era skate punks. Dinosaur City, Theodore Rex, and the Super Mario Bros. movie all feature kids, established comedians, and accomplished character actors palling around with humanoid dinosaurs in vaguely dystopian settings. We’re Back pulled regular dinosaurs from the past, cursed them with the ability of speech, and unleashed them on 1990s America to sing and dance for children. The ABC sitcom Dinosaurs gave a bunch of humanoid dinosaurs blue-collar jobs and suburbia. The point is, for a few years we wanted nothing more than to be friends with dinosaurs, or at the very least force dinosaurs to wear collared shirts and ride the bus. I feel like this is what the next Jurassic World trilogy needs to be about.
Saying the Name of the Movie in the Movie in Dramatic Closeup
Home Alone, The Matrix, Broken Arrow
In the 1998 Howie Long action thriller Firestorm, the word “firestorm” is said no less than 115 times, with varying degrees of intensity. 1990’s Home Alone goes out of its way to make sure you know little Kevin McCallister is home alone with subtle tricks such as a dramatic closeup of Joe Pesci uttering the phrase, “He’s home alone.” It’s not worth counting how many times somebody says “the Matrix” in The Matrix, but Morpheus alone delivers several Shakespearean monologues about it. Waiting for a character to say the title of the movie used to be kind of a game with audiences, specifically when the title was somewhat abstract and not a proper noun (like a character’s name or the name of the film’s setting). For instance, who among us wasn’t on the edge of our seats waiting to see if Kevin Costner was going to say “Well, it truly was a field of dreams” and walk off into the corn with Shoeless Ray Liotta. More modern movies should feature a character dramatically saying the title in closeup, it would bring this game back for a whole new generation of audiences.
Movies About Hacking / Hackers in Hawaiian Shirt
In the 90s, the movie shorthand for “laid back computer dude” was a Hawaiian shirt with optional glasses. Every cool guy hacker in American cinema was replete in Tommy Bahama grandeur, with the notable exception of 1995’s Hackers, in which everyone is dressed like members of an industrial band. It’s weird we don’t see many movies about hackers anymore, because even though computers and the concept of “hacking” have become way more mainstream, Hollywood apparently still refuses to learn how computers actually work. You could 100% reboot The Net in 2020 and change nothing about the plot or the terminology and it would seem just as current as Unfriended: Dark Web. Hackers are literal wizards as far as movies are concerned, so let’s keep leaning on that with some delightfully silly thrillers. Also, make sure at least one of the hackers is dressed like Elvis in Blue Hawaii.
Baby Escape Films
Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, Baby’s Day Out
Infants escaping their neglectful parents and going on adventures is one of my favorite subgenres of comedy because it highlights two important issues - babies, and adventures. In Honey, I Blew Up the Kid (the sequel to Honey I Shrunk the Kids, one of the crowning jewels of parental neglect films), Rick Moranis accidentally shoots his toddler son Adam with a laser that makes him grow to the size of several toddlers. Adam then goes on a Godzilla rampage through Las Vegas, blissfully unaware of the extensive property damage and probable deaths he is causing with his gigantic boyish exuberance. Baby’s Day Out, meanwhile, is concerned with a normal-sized baby who goes on a sightseeing tour through New York City while three bumbling kidnappers nearly kill themselves with hijinks trying to capture him. We need more films in which barely sentient miniature humans with almost no situational awareness plunge daringly into adventures while the rest of the world Wile E. Coyotes around them.
Holiday-Themed Horror Films
Blumhouse is trying to revive this genre with their Hulu series Into the Dark with varying success, but I long for the 70s and 80s in which it seemed like there was a themed slasher movie for virtually every holiday. There are countless Christmas ones (SIlent Night, Deadly Night, Black Christmas, Elves, Christmas Evil, To All a Goodnight), but the 1980s also churned out movies like My Bloody Valentine, April Fool’s Day, New Year’s Evil, Terror Train (which is also about New Year’s Eve), and multiple Halloween sequels, including the best Halloween film Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. We’re warming back up to Christmas horror with movies like Krampus and no less than two Black Christmas remakes in the past decade, but as far as holiday-themed slasher movies we’re still largely focused on only Christmas and Halloween. Give me a murderous Easter bunny or a maniac dressed like a pilgrim, I don’t care. Let’s see a Fourth of July horror movie akin to 1996’s Uncle Sam, which is literally about the personification of the U.S. government going on an Independence Day killing spree. Give me an Arbor Day Massacre, you cowards.
90s Explosions
The Rock, Con Air, Lethal Weapon 4
It’s hard to articulate exactly what I mean, but things simply don’t explode in modern movies like they did in the 90s. To illustrate my point, watch The Rock and Con Air back-to-back and then watch Bad Boys for Life. The action in all three films is very good, but the explosions in the latest Bad Boys (and in many modern action movies) feel flat and heavily augmented by digital effects. There’s probably a legitimate safety reason for this, but as a rebuttal let me offer that I don’t care. If you’re going to blow something up, it should look no less awesome than the beginning of Lethal Weapon 4 in which Riggs and Murtaugh defeat a flame-throwing supervillain by rocketing him into a tanker truck and detonating an entire gas station. That explosion likely shaved years off of the lives of everyone close enough to feel its wind, and it was unequivocally worth it.
End Credits Rap Songs That Recap the Events of the Film
In the 1990s, making a blockbuster movie also meant having a tie-in song and music video featuring at least one of the stars of the film. This was an extremely important marketing strategy back then, because MTV was very popular among young people and still played music videos at this time. If you had Arnold Schwarzenegger in your Guns N Roses video, you could send it to MTV and they would play it several times a day without asking you for a dime, resulting in hours of free advertising for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. However, the absolute peak of this particular genre of blockbuster was the end credits rap song that summarized the events of the film. Obviously the ruler of this particular kingdom was Will Smith, who claimed the crown by writing tasty jams like "Men in Black" and "Wild Wild West" to delight audiences while also providing them with helpful recaps to use as study guides while watching the credits. "Turtle Power!" by Partners in Kryme is another strong entry in this genre, which lays down a fantastic beat while going through nearly every moment of the 1990 film Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Music videos may not be a viable marketing platform in 2020, but Hollywood should absolutely consider bringing back the end credits rap summary. Eminem did a verse about Venom, in his song “Venom,”, which played over the end credits of 2018’s Venom, which might be enough to single-handedly resurrect the trope.
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