About

Force Majeure Avalanche refers to a clip from the French film Force Majeure in which a family is eating outside at a restaurant near the Alps when they see an avalanche. The father assures the family it's a safe "controlled avalanche" as the avalanche approaches before the avalanches causes fog to encase the entire restaurant and its patrons panic. The clip spread on Twitter in June of 2019, as people joked about the father's underraction.

Origin

In Force Majeure, which premiered at Cannes on May 18th, 2014,^[1] the plot revolved around the fallout from the avalanche scene. In the scene, the father is actually correct and the family is safe: the fog that covers the restaurant is fog kicked up from the avalanche, and posed no danger to the patrons. However, the father's instinct to save himself before his family puts the events of the film in motion.

Spread

On June 4th, 2019, Twitter user @zama_mdluli posted a clip from the scene with the caption "Me watching a bad situation and doing nothing till the final hour," gaining over 34,000 retweets and 97,000 likes (shown below, top). The clip then spread over the following several days as people added their own humorous captions. Another popular tweet posted by @ziwe used the caption "this is exactly how america reacts to global warming," gaining over 51,000 retweets and 140,000 likes (shown below, bottom).

As the video spread, fans of the film commented how strange and humorous it was to see a small film become a meme on Twitter. Twitter user @HOLLYWOODRUFF^[2] tweeted how more people were "gonna discover that masterpiece through memes than marketing" (shown below, left). User @Jer_Diamond^[3] posted that he hoped it was the beginning of more art house movies becoming memes (shown below, right). The meme was covered by Twitter Moments.^[4]

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References