About

"My Death Was Greatly Exaggerated" is an object-labeling meme based on a quote from the 2010 film Megamind, used for situations where a person, object or concept makes an unexpected comeback.

Origin

In the film's final battle scene, reporter Roxanne (Tina Fey) sees how supervillain Tighten (Jonah Hill) has knocked out supervillain Megamind (Will Ferrell), leaving her alone and defenseless. Tighten remarks how easy it was, and then casually kicks a bus in Roxanne's direction to kill her too. But the bus is unexpectedly cut in half before it reaches her. She turns around and sees that she was saved by superhero Metroman (Brad Pitt) who has seemingly come back from his seclusive retirement. Metroman previously faked his own death, so Tighten exclaims his surprise to see him alive. Metroman responds by describing his death as an exaggeration. (Irrelevant to the meme's context, several characters in this scene are actually in disguise, making the true character dynamics very different; Megamind is actually Minion and Metroman is actually Megamind.)

The scene has been uploaded to YouTube several times, with the below example being uploaded by the channel Movieclips on November 8, 2019, gaining 17,000,000 views in two years.

Tighten: "Oh, I… I thought you were dead."
Metroman: "My death was… greatly exaggerated."

Possible background

The sentence itself appears to be a reference to Mark Twain (1835–1910), who was falsely rumoured to have died in 1897 when it was actually his cousin who was gravely ill.^[5] Twain's exact words was "the report of my death was an exaggeration", which was later paraphrased into the more popular wording "the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated".

The phrase was used by Steve Jobs on September 9, 2008 during an event where he introduced a new version of the iPod,^[3] reflecting how the newspaper Bloomberg mistakenly announced his death a week prior.^[4] The picture and event is unrelated to his actual death two years later.

Spread

The first known usage of this format appeared on August 20, 2019 with two being posted on that same day, one to r/PrequelMemes and one to r/Animemes. They gained 1,200 and 11,400 points respectively.^[1][2]

Examples

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Search interest

References