9 Movie Endings That Oddly Reference Other Things
1. Superman Returns - Fred Claus
The villain in 2007's Christmas comedy Fred Claus is Clyde Archibald Northcutt (Kevin Spacey), an efficiency expert sent to the North Pole to streamline Santa's (Paul Giamatti) operations there.
At the end of the movie, Clyde is confronted by Santa, who deduces that Clyde is a bad person because he never got the Christmas present he always wanted as a child - a Superman cape.
In his youth, Clyde was bullied for wearing glasses and hoped the Superman cape would empower him, at which point Santa gives the present-day Clyde a Christmas gift.
You guessed it - it's the Superman cape, which with some encouragement Clyde wears, even removing his glasses to complete the Superman look.
Given that Fred Claus was released the year after Superman Returns, where Spacey played the supervillain Lex Luthor, the scene was clearly a play on that.
Except, it's a bit strange for two reasons. Firstly Spacey didn't play Superman, so is the gag basically implying that, deep down, Lex Luthor - the man who stabbed Superman almost to death in that movie - wishes he was the Man of Steel?
And secondly, the Venn diagram overlap of people watching Fred Claus who would even get the joke, let alone have actually seen Superman Returns, is going to be pretty damn small.