Pink smoke, pigs and Pixar: a dozen movie Easter eggs to feast on

Archie Leach makes an appearanceOne of Hollywood’s most durable Easter eggs debuted in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940) when Cary Grant’s character says: “The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat!” And in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) his character sits pensively in a cemetery where Archie Leach’s gravestone is to be seen. In Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese’s character is called Archie Leach. Leach is, of course, the real name ofCary Grant– a very goofy and unglamorous sounding name compared with the sonorous “Cary Grant” – and a rare example of Hollywood alluding to the open secret of rebranding its stars and effacing the bland ordinariness of their origins.Peter BradshawUn oeuf is enough: have we had our fill of movie Easter eggs?Read moreA tribute to TechnobladeMy children dragged me toA Minecraft Movierecently. Packed screening. Loads of kids. A little way into the film, a pig crossed the screen wearing a crown, and a collective “Awww” rose from the audience. For the life of me I couldn’t understand why, and then my 10-year-old leaned over and explained it. The pig was the profile picture of Technoblade, a wildly influential Minecraft YouTuber who died in 2022. It was a sweet touch, both acknowledging Technoblade and the importance of the wider YouTube community to the game’s success. Didn’t like the film, but it was a nice touch.Stuart HeritageArnie does the BardI’m a sucker for a fake trailer – the most delectable of ways the movie industry can disappear up its own fundament. So while the ones for the ecclesiastical Brokeback Mountain, AKASatan’s Alley, from Tropic Thunder and Edgar Wright’s faux Britsploitation horrorDon’t, from Grindhouse, occasionally pop up in my head, it’sArnold Schwarzenegger’s Hamletfrom 1993’s Last Action Hero that lives there rent-free. As 90s Hollywood was getting hip to postmodernism, this is a perfectly executed mashup of high and low culture, with the meathead as an Uzi-toting sweet prince, his payoff lines burning as bright as his stogie tip: “Not to be!” And now surely the time is right for Arnie’s Lear: “As flies to wanton badasses are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport!”Phil HoadArnie does KurosawaLast Action Hero is a parody of the action genre so crammed with indiscriminate references to other films it’s virtually one Easter egg after another. Mainstream audiences would have recognised nods to Basic Instinct, Amadeus, The Seventh Seal (already parodied in Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey) et al, but are less likely to have clocked the screenwriters’ homage to Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963). Alas,Arnold Schwarzeneggerspotting the telltale pink smoke produced by incinerated banknotes somehow lacks the impact of Kurosawa’s burning briefcases sending pink smoke into a grey sky, the only touch of colour in an otherwise black and white film.Anne BillsonA history lesson from PixarMy childhood spanned the golden Pixar era: I was six when Toy Story came out and 20 by Up. I knew their films were different from other kids’ fare because my grownup relatives loved them (Toy Story was my grandpa’s favourite film). An ITV documentary on the making of 2001’s Monsters, Inc. taught me why. It introduced me to the concept of Easter eggs: how the studio loved to reference itself and, moreover, cinema history. The rotund green monster Mike Wazowski and his snake-haired girlfriend Celia Mae go on a date to the restaurant Harryhausen’s, which the doc revealed was named after Jason and the Argonauts animatorRay Harryhausen– something I knew nothing about aged 12. When you’re young, films feel like closed worlds designed just for you. The realisation that they were actually part of a vast history, and that they contained layers below the surface, made me gawp, and I’m certain it stoked the interest in learning how things are made that I now get to pursue for a living.Laura SnapesView image in fullscreenA giant in the field … Ray Harryhausen’s special effects in Jason and the Argonauts.Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/AlamyIdina Menzel channels Broadway in WickedI adored last year’s film adaptation ofWicked– to the bafflement of a number of my friends and colleagues, who had found the film long, confusing and generally “a bit much”. Which I get. Because if you weren’t a musicals-obsessed seven-year-old when the original production became the latest Broadway sensation, I appreciate that the film might not have hit in quite the same way. But Wicked was unapologetically a film for the fans, and the breathless excitement of my seven-year-old self was awakened when Broadway’s original Elphaba, every 00s theatre kid’s icon Idina Menzel, sings the famous “ah-ah-ah-ah” run of notes from Defying Gravity in her cameo appearance. It’s testament to Cynthia Erivo’s talent that when at the end of the film she sings them again, in their proper place, they’re just as arresting.Lucy KnightAlien meets Predator – for the first timePredator 2 – Stephen Hopkins’ urban sequel to John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s arboreal shoot-em-up – is a far more interesting film than it’s often given credit for. It isn’t a patch on the peerless original, of course, and only the maniacal would claim otherwise. But Danny Glover’s haggard and really quite terrified detective is a far more interesting protagonist than an invincible bodybuilder brandishing a gun the size of his own leg, and the film is content, for better and worse, to do its own thing, critics be damned. One of its finest diversions from the first movie comes at the climax, when Glover’s Lieutenant Harrigan finds himself aboard the extraterrestrial game hunter’s spaceship. There, he discovers a wall festooned with trophies from the beast’s previous hunts, and given centre stage is the ossified, banana-like skull of a xenomorph, the acid-blooded chief biters of the Alien franchise. This brief nod implied a vast, shared cinematic universe before such things were drearily commonplace, and suggested that one day we would see these two enthusiasts of gory space violence face off. Sadly, that dream was infinitely preferable to the reality of the two Alien vs. Predator films that resulted, which are only slightly less unpleasant than slamming your fingers in a door. But let’s just forget about those.Luke HollandView image in fullscreenCritics be damned … Kevin Peter Hall as the Predator and Danny Glover as Lieutenant Mike Harrigan in Predator 2.Photograph: 20th Century Fox/AllstarObjects may be closer than they appearMy favourite Spielberg Easter egg is in virtually every summer film of his, from Duel through Jurassic Park: his monster-in-the-rearview-mirror shot. You may remember it best from Close Encounters: Richard Dreyfuss waves on the lights he sees in his rearview mirror only for them to go up and over his truck. Dreyfuss said he could hear the audience react when he read that in the script. But ideally the two bodies, pursuer and pushed, are in motion: Indy using his rvm to spy a Nazi climbing along the side of his truck in Raiders, Dennis Weaver doing the same for the monster truck in Duel, or Bob Peck spying a T rex catching up with his 4x4 in Jurassic Park. Spielberg even includes the warning “objects may be closer than they appear”. The visceral intent of every chase scene of his in just seven words.Tom ShoneDarcy resurrectedAdmittedly, “what a clever nod to Colin Firth/Mark Darcy” wasn’t my first reaction when Leo Woodall emerged from the pool in a soaking wet white shirt inBridget Jones 4. But I did appreciate the nostalgia for fans who have loved Bridge for 25 years. It wasn’t the only thing that brought back the best memories with our favourite spinster: blue string soup cocktails, awful dinner parties with smug marrieds, Bridget’s newfound knowledge of Chechnya, the massive knickers and a snowy end-of-film snog. The most special, though, was Darcy’s son wearing his dad’s reindeer jumper.Hollie RichardsonThe boy in Death in Venice ages into a human sacrificeOne moment you are youthful beauty personified. The next, you are white-bearded and crinkled, and your once-worshipped visage is being staved in with a mallet. Björn Andrésen was 15 when he played the sailor-suited twink in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 adaptation of Death in Venice, and 63 when he stepped off a cliff as a human sacrifice in Ari Aster’s sunlit horrorMidsommar. (The jump didn’t finish him off: hence the mallet.) His cameo represents a highpoint in the tradition of the casting Easter egg. Andrésen, whose life was ruined by Death in Venice and the ensuing adoration, must have relished destroying the face that started it all.Ryan GilbeyZombie bike messenger delivers the goodsView image in fullscreenBlink and you’ll miss it … Michael Smiley as a zombified Tyres (yellow cap) in Shaun of the Dead.Photograph: Universal/Sportsphoto/AllstarMy favourite series as a slightly nerdy teen was Spaced, Channel 4’s homage-heavy flatshare sitcom, so I felt bereft when it was announced that the show would end after just two series. But there was a mega consolation prize on offer: a big-screen outing for Spaced’s creator and cast, in the form of Shaun of the Dead. In the main, while I enjoyed Shaun, it didn’t quite live up to its predecessor – marauding zombies weren’t as funny as bickering Robot Wars contestants or a man dressed as a vacuum doing performance art – but I did appreciate a blink-and-you’ll-miss it Spaced Easter egg at the film’s climax: there, among a horde of the undead, was a zombified version of Tyres, the sitcom’s wild-eyed bike messenger raver, still wearing his little yellow cycling cap and listening to thumping techno through his wraparound headphones.Gwilym MumfordLego Alfred gives a Bat-biographySome Easter eggs are sly nods, others lazy studio cross-promotion, but The Lego Batman Movie (2017) dropped one so audacious it deserves its own Bat-signal. In a gloriously meta montage,Alfred dryly recalls his master’s “weird phases”, including 1966’s dance-happy caper and the infamous Bat-nipple debacle, effectively canonising every previous cinematic dark knight as just chaotic footnotes in this Lego loner’s emotional scrapbook. Keaton, Kilmer, Clooney – all downgraded to painful fashion faux pas in the life of one emotionally constipated minifig. Which means Batman & Robin wasn’t a cinematic travesty - it was Lego Batman’s rebellious club-kid phase, complete with rubber codpiece and lashes of neon regret.Ben Child