About

Don't Cry Babe, It's Just A Movie is a two-panel webcomic that shows a couple watching a movie on a couch, wherein, the man tells the woman not to cry over a movie and the woman tells the man to not cry over something else that meme creators insert in. The original template comes from an Instagram cartoonist in early 2018. It then became an exploitable image macro across platforms going into the following years, inspiring the Stop Crying, It's Just a Movie / It's Just a Game trend in 2020.

Origin

On January 21st, 2018, Brazilian cartoonist Crislane Passos posted a comic to Instagram,^[1] showing a couple sitting on a couch. In the first panel, they're watching a romance movie that the woman is crying about. In the second panel, the man is laying on her lap, crying about a soccer game. Over the course of four years, the post received roughly 20,000 likes (shown below).

Spread

The comic started to be remixed going into 2019, predominantly on Reddit. On April 20th, 2019, Redditor Tenimental posted a remix to /r/me_irl,^[2] replacing the bottom text to read, "Don't cry babe, it's just a Minecraft song parody." The post received roughly 6,200 upvotes in three years (shown below, left). On April 21st, 2019, Twitter^[3] user thebaldrage (since-deleted) posted a version that replaced the bottom text to read, "a black guy in a video game," earning an unknown amount of likes (shown below, right).

On September 9th, 2019, a since-deleted Redditor posted a meme to /r/Gamingcirclejerk^[4] that replaced the text to read, "Gay person in a video game," earning roughly 13,500 upvotes in three years (shown below, left). On October 9th, 2019, YouTuber Menrick made a video using the aforementioned meme, gaining over 400 views in three years (shown below, right).

More iterations continued to appear going into 2020 and 2021. For instance, on February 29th, 2020, Redditor lukino1212sk posted a version to /r/pokemon^[5] that referenced Pokémon movies, earning roughly 2,700 upvotes in two years (shown below, left). On May 4th, 2022, Twitter^[6] user bigwanger12 posted a meme that showed the male character losing his entire Minecraft inventory, earning roughly 99,500 likes in one day (shown below, right). However, the aforementioned meme was originally posted to Funnyjunk ^[7] on April 21st, 2019.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References