Any studio worth their salted popcorn needs an in-joke: Hitchcock had his cameos, Lucas has his THX 1138 and Pixar have their Pizza Planet trucks. How else to make an audience pore over every frame but the promise of spotting something only a select few of them will understand? Or a name only a handful will have heard of? The exclusivity of these references is what makes them so valuable for those in the know, and so infuriating for the outsiders. The examples included in this article are a mix of the sneaky and the subtle, the split-seconds that send us scrambling for the pause button and the movie forums to show off that we got the in-joke. For the purposes of this article, parody movies do not count and the in-joke must be a reference to either the film's director or cast only. So, let's begin...
10. Watchmen
The film opens with the death of the Comedian, an embittered ex-vigilante who has taken to a hotel room in order to hide from his past, which, if we're to believe all that we see in the superb title sequence, irrefutably places him at the crime of the century. Suddenly, the door is kicked open and a shadowy figure stands before him. In a panic, the Comedian throws a mug of coffee towards the stranger. He misses, but the mug does manage to knock the last digit off the door, changing it from 3001... Director Zack Snyder deserves a smiley face here, as he references his most famous work not once but twice. Towards the film's finale, we can see that the megalomaniac villain Veidt has built a wall of TV screens into his Antarctic retreat, in order to monitor the world's media. However, it is the closed-circuit screen that interests him the most, revealing the approach of do-gooders Rorschach and Nite Owl, and as the camera zooms in, we can briefly see that one of the neighbouring screens is showing the 1962 film,
The 300 Spartans. http://youtu.be/YhJMAaix0CA