5 Great Side Stories Hiding In Famous Blockbusters

And this isn't just any old workplace where your colleagues consider you with such dull indifference that they probably forgot they signed a "Sorry For Your Loss" card for your family. This is an office full of professional journalists -- people paid to notice weird coincidences and look into them. So give us that movie, DC. We don't need any more dark origin stories about back catalog villains. How about a 90-minute workplace comedy in which Clark weaves a web of increasingly complex lies to keep his colleagues from doing even the most cursory of digging into the death records? (Or, you know, reaching up to take his glasses off for a second.)

Even without the Superman link, somebody must have raised an eyebrow at the guy who was not just missing but actually buried in a clearly marked grave for two years. What could he possibly say to throw them off the trail? That he faked his death for an assignment? "Oh cool, which story was that for?" Unless he has superhuman lying abilities, Clark will dig himself into a Coen brothers plot faster than a speeding bullet.

At the end of Endgame, when Thanos is dead (again) and everyone else is alive (again), Cap takes it upon himself to return the Infinity Stones to their original timelines and make sure there are no loose threads for *shudder* tie-in comics or novels. After finishing that up, he takes the long way back by traveling to the '40s and aging up to the present, ultimately looking worse than Eric Bana's Hulk movie.

It's no real mystery what happened while he was gone, and it hits all the well-trodden beats of a Marvel movie. Captain America: Reverse Time Heist would see Cap gallivanting through space and time, sneaking the Stones back into '70s S.H.I.E.L.D. HQ and that Indiana Jones ripoff temple on Morag. He'd have to inject the Reality Stone back into Natalie Portman. He'd have to give Loki's scepter back to the H.Y.D.R.A. agents, along with some kind of awkward apology for running off with it. The meat of the story would obviously be him dealing with the inevitable fuckups that come with time travel. But it all builds toward an implied encounter so huge that it's kind of amazing Endgame ignores it completely. Cap would have met Red Skull again when returning the Soul Stone.

To be fair, pretending to be gone but roaring back 80 years later is a classic Nazi move.

As far as Cap knows, Red Skull died back in the '40s. But we found out in Infinity War that in fact our redheaded friend somehow Space Stoned himself into a job telling people to jump off cliffs. But did anybody bother telling Cap about this? Would he really be willing to hand over an Infinity Stone to an undead space Nazi? However this showdown goes down, it'd make a hell of a capper to Captain America 4.

Knowing how much trouble Doc gets in whenever he tries to build anything, it's easy to see him getting tangled up in a classic Western outlaw plot when he tries to source parts (no doubt illegally) for his futuristic train from all over the planet. You think he can get rare earth minerals down at the general store? How does he avoid detection in the course of this years-long project, both in acquiring materials and building/testing his machine? (One that, oh by the way, every government and military in the world would love to have in their possession.)

And that's just before he builds it. You don't just create a machine that defies the laws of astrophysics unless you plan to use it, and they obviously have. Clara and the kids regard the journey 100 years forward in time with all the excitement of a rest stop, so clearly they've been on this road trip before. And Doc brags to Marty that he's already been back to the future (like, the future-future, not this 1985 "future" shit).

There's just no way a family of four can whip around with such an irresponsible disregard for the space-time continuum, in the least subtle time machine ever built, without some mayhem going down. Even if this movie is just about dropping Biff Tannen's great-great-grandkids into a spaceship full of alien shit, we wanna see it.

The last time we saw this T-Rex, she and all her dino buddies had the run of Isla Nublar after the last of the humans noped out on a chopper. The Lost World and Jurassic Park III took place on Isla Sorna next door, so those were different T-Rexes. That means that somewhere in the 22 years between Park and World, someone had a worse cleanup job than the guy who follows the Brachiosaurs around with a shovel. A team obviously had to go in, subdue (but not kill) an island-load of pissed-off prehistoric beasts, and then build a new park around them.

"Let's see you find a way out of this one, Life!"

We even know who did it, and when. It was Vic Hoskins, aka Vincent D'Onofrio, aka the buttplug who wanted to weaponize the raptors in Jurassic World. Buried deep in the in-universe corporate website is a log entry from Vic dated April 19, 2002: "I was impressed with the team today. Hell, staring a seven-ton predator in the eyes is no easy job. These things are bigger than you'd expect! Let's just hope Timack knows how to build strong paddocks." (Spoiler: They don't.)

Given Chaos Theory's chumminess with these movies, there's no way this went totally as planned. A movie about Vincent D'Onofrio on a Cretaceous safari with a sassy squad of mercenaries picked off one by one could have been the Aliens to Jurassic Park's Alien (and Jurassic Park III's Alien: Resurrection).

The movie half-assedly explains a bit of this. We're told that It crash-landed on Earth in a meteorite millions of years ago, but it doesn't bother telling us about the space turtle, even though we know it's there, still guiding our pubescent protagonists. When the kids are swimming in the quarry, they yell out "Oh look, a turtle!" because apparently the budget couldn't stretch enough to actually show one. Turtles also show up in the form of stuffed toys and Lego models. Director Andy Muschietti said that these signs are how Maturin reveals himself ... which seems a bit unhelpful, but who are we to tell godlike entities how to do their job.

In the first movie, Beverly gets deadlighted and comes back with visions of the future -- a telltale sign of the guiding flipper of a clumsy cosmic turtle. In the second movie, it's Richie's turn to get flashed. In both cases, we don't see their souls zooming off through a higher dimension, and the inevitable existential crisis that would bring. Instead we just see their bodies levitating slack-jawed ... which is probably how the audience would react if you actually paused the finale to interject a giant turtle into the film, apropos of nothing. So maybe it was for the best.

For more, check out 5 Screwed-Up Messages Hidden In Famous Sci-Fi Films:

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