Movie Theories That Will Ruin Your Childhood

Here are some movie theories that will absolutely ruin your childhood!

November 8, 2023・

17 min read

Many iconic movies are horrifying when you analyze their hidden meanings. From the horrific fate of the Grinches to the murderous ambitions of Willy Wonka, let's dive into unsettling movie theories that may well ruin your childhood!

The Emperor's New Groove Theory

The Emperor’s New Groove is an animated Disney classic that tells the story of Incan emperor Kuzco, who gets turned into a Llama after drinking a potion brewed by the evil scientist Yzma.

Although he becomes a Llama, Kuzco can’t understand other animals and still speaks in plain English. When Yzma is later turned into a cat, she also speaks English. Every other animal in the movie is normal, apart from the fly in the footage below:

So why is it that we can understand that random fly that’s only in the movie for a few seconds? There’s only one logical explanation: it was once a human too. Think about it, Yzma would’ve needed a lot of test subjects when perfecting her potions.

And she definitely doesn’t seem the type to care about changing them back into humans afterward! Clearly, that poor guy used to be human before Yzma captured him, experimented on him, and released him as a fly, only for him to be devoured alive by a spider.

Jar Jar Binks Sith Lord

Before the release of Disney’s awful Star Wars trilogy, you’d have been hard-pressed to find a more controversial topic among fans of the saga than Jar Jar Binks. Introduced in 1999’s The Phantom Menace, Binks is a bumbling fool who was apparently designed as comic relief.

Some loved him, some hated him, but what if old Jar Jar was intended to be more than just a gag? There’s substantial evidence that Jar Jar was secretly a super-powerful Sith lord the entire time.

Throughout Episode 1, we see the Gungan misfit performing feats of agility and acrobatics that only force users should be capable of! He also seems to use the force to manipulate people on multiple occasions. In the footage below, he appears to be mimicking the other guy’s speech, like he’s controlling what he’s saying:

And he even uses the infamous Jedi hand wave to stop someone from attacking him! While those movements could’ve been unintentional, Jar Jar was played by a carefully directed actor, and the CGI model was meticulously animated over him by a team of tech wizards. It seems highly unlikely that any of his actions were accidental.

The theory goes that Jar Jar manipulated the events of the entire prequel trilogy to bring the Empire to power. First, he creates a commotion on Tatooine which leads to Qui-Gon Jinn meeting Anakin Skywalker. That is because he knows Anakin is the chosen one and needs to be trained by the Jedi before being turned to the dark side.

He’s also from the same planet as Palpatine, Naboo, so it makes sense that he could’ve joined forces with the Sith Lord, potentially even being above him! He probably wanted to conquer the galaxy and crush all who stood before him! He’s even the one to give Palpatine complete control of the Senate, allowing him to eventually destroy democracy and wipe out the Jedi!

George Lucas most likely planned for all that, but after seeing how massively controversial the character was, decided to play it safe and go in another direction. The theory might crush the hearts of kids who grew up with Jar Jar, but it might also redeem the character for a lot of people.

Harry Potter Curse

The story of Harry Potter has a relatively happy ending, Harry defeats Voldemort, saves the world, and probably has a lot of butterbeers to celebrate. But it’s entirely possible that the epic saga doesn’t actually end as happily as we all thought.

The tale’s central prophecy says that either Harry or Voldemort “must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives.” We, the audience naturally took that to mean that the only person who can kill Voldemort is Harry, and vice versa, but what if it’s more than that?

The exact wording says they “must die at the hand of the other”. Does that mean that neither of them could die any other way? That would make Harry effectively immortal and prevent him from passing on and joining his family, which was the only thing he ever really wanted. Instead, he’d be forced to stand by and watch all his loved ones grow old and pass away before his eyes.

Donkey from Shrek is a Bad Kid from Pinocchio

The ever-popular Shrek franchise focuses on the titular green ogre’s adventures in a fantasy kingdom inhabited by iconic fairy tale characters. At first glance, Shrek’s goofy sidekick Donkey seems to be an original character created for the movies.

However, what if he was originally from another fairy tale? Think back to Disney’s original Pinocchio movie. In a scene that left many of us with some severe trauma, the kids at Pleasure Island are horrifically transformed into donkeys after indulging in the cursed amusement park’s vices.

We already know that the little wooden liar himself makes an appearance in Shrek, so why not one of the transmogrified kids? Maybe they stayed a donkey for so long that they just had to just accept it and move on.

While that seems like a bit of a reach, in Shrek the Third, Donkey mentions how he remembers getting wedgies and swirlies back in high school. Puss in Boots asks how that’s possible when he doesn’t wear underpants because he’s a donkey. His response? An ominous “Some things are better left unsaid.” You’d probably be pretty traumatized and reluctant to talk about my past life too if you’d been forcibly turned into a donkey.

Pixar Car's Theories

Pixar’s Cars movies are already kind of creepy. Where did the gross, organic car creatures that populate the world come from? There aren’t any humans in the Cars world and they’re never mentioned either, which implies that the automobile atrocities developed naturally.

There’s plant life in that universe too, so we know evolution does happen, and given that we also see car models from different eras, it seems that they evolved as well. But what did they look like before they became cars? Were there carriage creatures? Single tires rolling around with eyes? What about before those?

What horrifying abominations crawled out of the primordial ooze in that world? Grotesque "carfish" must’ve clambered out onto the land, and terrifying plane pterosaurs must’ve stalked the skies long before they evolved into anything resembling Lightning McQueen. Alternatively, the cars were created by humans and then chose to wipe us all out.

Another theory states that humans might still be around, permanently living inside the cars. The vehicle would function as an exoskeleton, and the diagram below illustrating this idea is incredibly disturbing. At the core of the car rests the human, attached to the car at every limb to control the car from the inside.

The Connection Between Mary Poppins and Pennywise

A dark theory suggests that Mary Poppins and Pennywise are the same demonic species. The magical British nanny who spreads cheer and wonder is more like Stephen King’s killer clown than you think.

So, they’re both supernatural entities that return to Earth every 20-something years, 25 for Mary P and 27 for Pennywise. They also both seek out children, specifically ones named Georgie.

The duo then feeds on the emotions of the kids they find, Poppins on imagination and happiness, and that clown fella on fear. They even share a love for performance, incorporating singing and dancing as a central part of their “hunt.”

Most damningly of all, they can both make people float. Pennywise makes his victims float in the sewers below the town, while Poppins makes people float with balloons. Do you know who else is often seen with balloons? Pennywise. Specifically, red balloons.

At the end of Mary Poppins Returns, after she’s made the rest of the cast float, she’s handed a red balloon! She’s told it must be hers, and with a mournful expression says “Yes, I suppose it must.”

Either our favorite nanny is the same species as Pennywise, or she actually is him! Every 25 years she feeds on joy as Mary and every 27 she gobbles up fear as Pennywise. You’ll never see Mary Poppins the same way again.

Code 2319 From Monsters Inc

In the world of Pixar’s Monsters Inc., the citizens of Monstropolis live a life segregated from the human world. The monsters are terrified of humans, even children because they believe they’re toxic.

But where the heck did that belief come from? It’s something that’s mysteriously omitted from the movies. So, what if the first time that monsters encountered humans was during, the Black Death?

The Black Death was an infamous outbreak of bubonic plague that swept through 14th-century Europe. Anybody who caught the deadly disease could expect pus-filled growths, fever, and within just eight days, death. Supposedly, when the monsters first opened a door to the human world they ended up the slap bang in the middle of the horrific pandemic!

Consequently, they caught the super infectious disease and brought it back home with them, panicking the monster populace and creating the misconception that all humans are toxic. According to the theory, that is why the 2319 incident was taken so seriously in the original movie.

When a monster accidentally takes a human sock back into Monstropolis with them it causes pandemonium. That makes total sense if you think the monsters were terrified that the sock was contaminated with the plague! They even go so far as to shave the scarer. However, bubonic plague is spread by fleas, so removing his hair would’ve prevented them from hiding in it.

Peter Pan Is The Real Villain

Peter Pan is the classic story of a boy who never grows up taking on the villainous Captain Hook and his army of pirates. Captain Hook is the villain but if you subscribe to one infamous theory, it’s actually Pan that’s the bad guy!

Think about it, he sneaks into children’s rooms at night and whisks them away from their families to a foreign land against their will. Already sounds pretty nightmarish.

Then, when they get to that strange place, Neverland, they’re told they have to become one of Peter’s followers, the “Lost Boys”, and that growing up is the biggest crime. Despite that, unlike Peter, the kidnapped children will eventually grow up.

So what happens when they do? The original book that the Disney movie is based on tells us that Peter “thins them out.”, but what does that mean? One of two things, he either banishes them or worse, sends them to sleep with the fishes.

But what’s up with Pan’s obsession with never growing old? By surrounding himself with kids, he could be feeding on their youth to sustain his own child-like existence. And when they’re too old to be of any use to him, he throws them out like an empty soda can.

So where does all that leave Captain Hook? Well, he’s the real hero! Once a lost boy himself, Hook began to get too old but managed to escape the wrath of Pan before he could be “thinned out”. Naturally ticked off with his captor’s treatment of him, he came back to rescue some of the other lost boys and formed his pirate crew with them.

His goal now is to defeat Peter, free the remaining lost boys, and prevent him from taking any other innocent children. The kicker is that the latest interpretation of the story, "Peter Pan and Wendy", features a Captain Hook that was indeed once a lost boy!

Hook fled because he wanted to see his mom again, and when he returned, older, Peter rejected him and their feud began. All signs point to Peter Pan being one of the biggest villains in cinema.

The Grinch Is The Sole Survival Of A Conflict With The Whos

If you love Christmas, you must have watched the Grinch! But what exactly is the Grinch and where does he come from? If you think about that, he’s a strange hateful green creature that appears quite different from the race of human-like beings called “Whos” that he lives on the periphery of. Because of that, they shun him.

However, he's probably not a furry and mutant Who. In the original animated TV special, the narrator states that the Christmas thief gains the strength of "10 Grinches plus two.” The wording implies that the Grinches are a separate species! Or rather, they were. The titular Grinch is the only one we ever see. So where did all the others go?

Here’s where things get crazy. We know the Whos love Christmas, and they’re portrayed as very religious overall. So what if the Grinches had conflicting beliefs and the Whos didn’t like it? They waged a war on the Grinches and with far superior numbers on their side, won.

All the Grinches were wiped out but one, the Grinch himself, who managed to escape. A heretic to their religion, he’s forced to isolate himself in his mountain cave, where his hatred and bitterness for the Whos grows. Eventually, however, he gets so sick of living in loneliness and poverty that he decides to give in and join them.

Abracadabra Harry Potter Theory

We’ve all heard the cheesy magic word “abracadabra”, which is usually used by magicians performing innocent tricks. However, Harry Potter fans realized that the magic word sounds an awful lot like the infamous killing curse “Avada Kedavra.”

In our universe, it’s easy to see that Rowling was inspired by the magician’s phrase. But in the world of Harry Potter, there could be an altogether darker reason for the similarity. Muggles got the expression from hearing the killing curse itself! But how would they have come across the spell?

We know that the wizarding world has a history of bigotry. Many characters mention that muggles used to be persecuted, and the majority of the villains in the series still hate them. What if that hatred was once so commonplace that dark wizards would head out to nonwizarding communities for some good old-fashioned muggle blasting?

Muggles would hear the killing curse as we were attacked, and any survivors would pass the story on. Over time, the expression and the true meaning behind it were lost and recounted instead as “abracadabra”. It’s a super dark theory and that’s even with Voldemort defeated. What if he’d won and brought muggle hate back into the mainstream?

Is Home Alone A Prequel To Saw?

The two clumsy villains of the original two Home Alone movies are bad guys, no doubt. But did they really deserve the kind of torturous punishment that little Kevin McCallister put them through? Kids exhibiting that kind of sadistic behavior rarely just give it up, in fact, it usually gets worse as time goes on.

We don’t actually know what became of Kevin as an adult. Or do we? Home Alone could actually be a prequel to another famous movie in a rather different franchise: Saw. A theory suggests that it’s an origin story for the insidious killer John Kramer, AKA Jigsaw!

For starters, Kevin shows a strange fixation on his next-door neighbor after being told that he’s a deranged criminal, perhaps considering him a kindred spirit. He also revels in tormenting the pizza delivery boy by playing threatening snippets from an old movie:

It’s clear that making others scared brings him great pleasure. But he doesn’t stop at just scaring people. He enjoys inflicting grievous bodily harm on people too! He uses an assortment of twisted traps to burn, impale, and bludgeon the two bumbling criminals. And all with a big old smile on his face!

And if that wasn’t enough to convince you, Kevin also seems to suffer intense hallucinations. For instance, the boy views the furnace in his basement as a rampaging metal monster from the depths of hell! Something’s seriously not right with him.

In fact, those traumatic visions seem to have influenced his eventual death traps. They commonly feature jagged, rusty metal and flames. With sinister behavior, a love for elaborate, torturous traps, and some clearly unaddressed issues, it’s pretty clear that Kevin ended up changing his name to John Kramer and started work on his murderous hobby.

Duloc Destruction

As you should know, after the end of the cinematic masterpiece that is the first Shrek movie, the evil Lord Farquaad is defeated and his kingdom of Duloc is left without a ruler. We next see the kingdom a few years later in the Scared Shrekless special and the once prosperous civilization is in ruins.

You might think that people abandoned the city after Farquaad’s tyrannical rule ended, but would that really happen? Surely someone else would just take over and it’d be business as usual. That city wasn’t just abandoned; it was violently destroyed. And if you think about it, it’s pretty obvious by whom: The fairy tale creatures.

They were treated horribly by Farquaad, who banished them from his kingdom and enacted all sorts of atrocities on them. It’s only natural that they’d want some payback and a lot of them, including the dragon, were already inside Duloc at the end of the first movie, giving them the perfect opportunity to exact their brutal revenge.

They stalked the streets of the kingdom, burning down houses and terrorizing citizens in a revenge-fueled craze! Until, eventually, nothing was left but a burnt-out shell.

Willy Wonka's Serial Killer Theory

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a classic tale of wonder and whimsy but it’s also clearly a mega-macabre story of death and destruction. In the original 1971 movie, eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka is portrayed as a recluse who’s lost all faith in humanity.

The only thing he feels is hatred, for those who keep trying to steal his chocolate recipes and for the greed he sees in the general populace. So, why would he hold a contest to allow a bunch of kids to visit his secret factory? Here's why: to punish humanity for its avarice!

He set the whole thing up knowing that the kids would ignore his rules and warnings. The factory was one big death trap and the golden ticket scheme was just a way of luring the kids into it. Wonka was the twisted mastermind behind all the terrible fates that befell them within the walls of his nightmarish plant.

Remember that crazy boat the group goes on after Augustus Gloop falls into the Chocolate River? It’s only got enough seats for the survivors! Almost like Wonka knew that Gloop was going to fall.

Wonka says at the end of the movie that all of the kids survived, but he also made clear at the start of the movie that he couldn’t be trusted by pretending he was a frail old man and then doing this:

There’s no way the children survived the horrific torments that the madman subjected them to. And, one of them is literally turned into a giant blueberry! Willy probably intended to escape in the Great Glass Elevator after the carnage but ended up so impressed with young Charlie’s lack of greed that he took him under his wing. Does that just mean he wants to make Charlie his evil young protégé?

If you enjoyed investigating these movie theories that will ruin your childhood, you might want to explore the scariest Pixar movie theories and the scariest Disney movie theories. Thanks for reading!