About

Knock-Off Movie Covers is a meme trend that uses fake movie covers, either heavily photoshopped or just a simple character swap. The desired effect of the meme trend can be to either create a new movie idea, or to make a Mandela Effect type of joke by having a famous actor be cast in a movie cover instead of the real star of the movie.

Origin

The biggest pioneer in this meme genre is the account 365DaysOfClick, which started with the meme trend after picking up the torch from the Click movie, refusing to let the meme die. This led to them creating an Instagram^[1] account, with their first post being on June 2nd, 2017, posting the original click movie cover (shown below).

Spread

On February 28th, 2021, the account posted the first photo^[2] that would qualify as a knock off movie cover, a copy of the click movie but with Seth Rogen perfectly replacing Adam Sandler on the box art (shown below).

This concept was pushed further on TikTok^[3], where they posted a video of Shrek Rogen, on the movie Click, playing on a Shrek TV, earning 156k likes in 10 months (shown below).

These memes really hit their stride when the genre was opened up to be about other movies and properties, such as utilizing the Vin Diesel meme Nothing Stronger Than Family as a parody of Friends, done in the TikTok^[4] on July 20th, 2021 (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References