About

"You Mustn't Be Afraid To Dream A Little Bigger Darling" is a memorable quote uttered by Tom Hardy to Joseph Gordon Levitt from the 2010 film Inception. In memes, the image of Hardy pointing a grenade launcher after seeing Levitt holding a rifle is used as an exploitable image macro series and object labeling macro to depict one-upping something or to show when an initial attempt is lackluster and that a more extreme or intense option should be done instead to comic effect.

Origin

The original clip that the meme is pulled from is seen during Christopher Nolan's film Inception, which was released on July 16th, 2010. During the scene (featured below), the line is uttered by the character Eames (played by Tom Hardy) to Arthur (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as he brings out a grenade launcher to more effectively kill bad guys than Arthur had been doing with a rifle.

The first time the scene is used in a meme is unknown, but the earliest example appears online in a Facebook^[1] post from the page Moviegasm, who uploaded the blank, three-panel template on November 12th, 2016. The post (shown below) received over 1,400 likes and 92 shares in roughly four years.

Spread

On September 22nd, Redditor carnage-boy posted a variation of the meme example in the /r/dankmemes,^[3] receiving over 64,000 upvotes, 300 comments in less than one month (seen below, left).

On September 25th, 2020, the Facebook^[2] page LOTR posted a variant referencing the Lord of the Rings (seen below, right), receiving over 840 likes, 170 shares and 70 comments in roughly two weeks.

On September 25th, the Instagram^[4] page brobible posted a variant of the meme (shown below, left), receiving over 2,200 likes in roughly two weeks. On October 8th, Redditor^[5] SubstantialBad9 posted another example to the /r/dankmemes sub (shown below, right), receiving over 15,400 upvotes, 52 comments and several Reddit awards.

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References