The best movies out there masterfully create and maintain their own universes, inviting audiences to suspend their disbelief just for a few hours while a world is built around them. Sometimes that means creating things that only exist in that world, and sometimes, delightfully, those things are movies themselves.
There are few things funnier than a fake movie within a real one, and, especially in movies that are themselves about the act of making movies, those fakes can look so real that we actually kind of wish they were. Whether they’re in the form of a goofy poster or an overdramatic trailer or a scene played for laughs on a character’s home TV, many of them, even the obvious parodies, would probably be very fun to watch.
For this list, we’ve chosen 12 of these movies-within-movies to highlight, celebrating the best scenery-chewing gangster classics, prestige sci-fi blockbusters, melodramatic action movies, and sleazy modern adaptations of classic monster movies that never existed. (And we’d like to extend an honorable mention to every “movie” shown in the end credits of 22 Jump Street.)
Many of these, one could argue, were never meant to look “good,” to which we’d say, doesn’t that make you want to watch them more? Read on for every fake movie that deserves to be made into reality.
12 Fake Movies from Actual Movies We Wish Were Real
Many of these obvious parodies seem like they’d be fun to watch.
READ MORE: Our Favorite Fake Movie Trailers From Films
Movies We Love Because They’re Always On Cable
There’s something fun about surfing through TV channels later at night and happening upon something you’ve never seen before.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
