8 Hilarious Prop F*ck-Ups In Movies

Even a painstakingly detailed Wes Anderson production isn’t safe from mistakes, proven by graphic designer Annie Atkins when working on The Grand Budapest Hotel. Speaking on the 99% Invisible podcast she explained her role in the production, and highlighted one rather unfortunate mistake.

Not every prop mistake is worth fixing if it’s small enough that people won’t notice. However, Atkins describes the concept of “hero props” - a prop that “gets a bit more screen time or has a kind of character of its own.” These are highly visible props that have to be made utterly perfect and, and must fit a description in the script; messing one of these up is a big problem.

Messing up hundreds of them? Definitely worse.

Half way through production, Atkins explains, she received a call from Anderson drawing her attention to the Mendl’s Bakery boxes which at one time almost fill the entire screen. “There’s two t’s in patisserie,” he said, and at that moment she realised that every single box contained a misspelling.

Her hand-lettered text had never gone through a spell-checker before printing it onto hundreds of paper boxes, and every single one had to be fixed in post to get rid of an accidental second T.