When a movie franchise or studio finds out a character of theirs has become iconic, or at least well recognized, those characters become closely guarded intellectual property. You’re not going to see Captain America showing up in Jurassic World, just like you’ll never see Gandalf in a Star Wars movie. Aside from the fact that it’s difficult-to-impossible to convince multiple movie studios to share the rights to characters or stories at all, it just simply wouldn’t make sense to do it.
Except, sometimes, it does. Enter the random character cameo, a quick and easy way to jolt your audience’s attention and give them a hit of that sweet, sweet pattern recognition. Despite what movie studios would have you believe, there have been tons of major character cameos across franchises and genres for decades. It’s a step past a mere dialogue reference and becomes its own form of visual joke, and we’ve collected the best ones for this list to show just how strange and hilarious it can get.
A lot of these movies are already spoofs on franchises or the movie industry as a whole, so it stands to reason that they’d rustle up a cameo or two to really drive the point home. Comedies like these exist in a kind of liminal space that allows characters from one end to hop over to the other, at least for a scene or two. But some of these cameos are more than that, suggesting strange shared worlds between otherwise completely unrelated properties. Here are a few of the best to make you wonder if all of these movies are part of the same cinematic universe.
Iconic Characters Who Made Cameos in Other Franchises
These famous movie characters made surprising appearances in films outside their own franchise.
Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
READ MORE: Surprising Disney Cameos In Other Movies
Guilty Pleasure Movies From the ’90s
These ’90s films do not have good reputations. Most are cheesy and a few are really dated. We love them anyway.
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