13 Background Distractions That Completely Ruined Movie Scenes

It used to be pretty easy to watch films: you'd sit, care-free, drinking in the spectacle and being as entertained as possible by the story and the characters and the whole lovely experience. But then directors starting adding in a ridiculous number of background gags, Easter Eggs and hidden secrets, and the whole cinematic experience was reinvented.

Now, thanks to the rise of ultra HD movie screens, the backgrounds to movies - which someone slaves over from design stage to filming, don't forget - are now as important as the plot that's going on in the front. As the crippling fear of missing any sort of Easter Egg or funny moment accidentally caught on screen has risen, so too has the focus on things that barely used to matter.

There's a reason for it as well: in the past, before HD revealed too much, there was a far more casual attitude to extras and less compulsion to reshoot expensive scenes simply because there's something horribly distracting going on just out of focus.

And nobody is talking about the careless inclusion of cars or chem trails in historical movies €“ that's just the shoddy work of your normal run-of-the-mill continuity editors: what we're focusing on here is the next level of distraction. The examples on this list are prime goofs, wilful distractions and disarming curios that fundamentally change how you view the scenes.

Honourable Mention

The Circus Time Traveller

Not in an actual film, hence the inclusion as an Honourable Mention, but this now infamous footage apparently captured a time traveller, talking on her mobile phone in the background of a Charlie Chaplin promotional film from the 1920s.

Absolute rhubard, of course, but you have to admit the footage is oddly compelling.