10 Exact Moments That Made Fans Hate Movie Franchises

6. Nuking The Fridge - Indiana Jones 4

Indiana Jones Fridge
Paramount

The first three Indiana Jones movies are a perfect, universally-beloved trilogy. Indy and friends literally ride off into the sunset at the end, making a fourth movie seem highly unnecessary. But we got one anyway! And while Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull's opening scenes showed promise, it all fell apart with the arrival of a now-infamous moment.

Seconds away from death by nuclear explosion, Indy throws himself into a fridge, shuts the door and is blasted into the air, crashing back down to Earth a fair distance away. He then emerges, miraculously unscathed, and just... walks away.

For obvious reasons, this was dumb. Part of Indy’s charm is that he comes across as a normal everyday guy caught up in crazy situations, not some indestructible superhero who can survive almost anything. The fridge scene turned him into the latter, and it suddenly became a lot harder to view the character as the Indy we knew and loved.

This scene is one that fans mock and meme-ify to this day, and it marks the moment when the franchise pushed its lead character’s plucky determination to unbelievably bizarre levels. It’s no surprise “nuking the fridge” became the new shorthand for movies that include ridiculous leaps in logic.

Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!