15 Movies That Break the Fourth Wall (Besides Deadpool)

One of the most common reasons filmmakers break the wall is because of how efficient it is at communicating dense information to the audience. And what information is more dense than economic concepts. 

To easily communicate these concepts to the audience, The Big Short has various celebrity cameos to explain these concepts with metaphors. This scene breaks uses a fourth wall break for both comedic effect with the quantitative addressing the audience as well as an informative technique.

Airplane! at large is a comedy, but there is one scene that is inherently more dramatic than the rest of the film. Before things get too serious, a fourth wall is broken as a comedic relief that brings the film’s tone back on track. Just before the audience can say, “This is getting cheesy,” the fourth wall break is a punchline to a joke we didn’t even see coming.

The freeze frame ending of The 400 Blows is the only fourth wall break in the film. Not to mention it’s the oldest example of a fourth wall break on our list. French New Wave and auteur filmmaker François Truffaut told Jean-Pierre Léaud, the child actor who played Antoine Doinel, to look straight into the camera for the ending scene of the film. 

The result is one of the most iconic closing frames of all time that has left Antoine’s facial expression open to interpretation. Is he happy? Lost? Upset? All we know is he’s looking straight at us attempting to convey some sort of emotion, yet the film ends before giving us a definitive answer.

When you first watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) there is so much to laugh at that the ending of the film might feel like an anticlimactic cop-out (literally). But keep in mind that the main reason the film ended this way was because the production’s budget ran out.

That being said, the 4th wall breaking ending was the troll of all trolls that may have been ahead of its time. Upon repeated viewings, the ending only becomes more and more outlandish and hilarious.

The end is just one of the many curveball jokes in one of the best comedy movies of all time, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As you can tell from this list, one of the main genres that breaks the wall is comedy and few comedies have done it better than Wayne’s World. This scene from Wayne’s World breaks the wall as an overstatement on the ridiculousness of product placement and sponsorship. The film itself is meta comedy at its finest as it points out absurdities to the audience in a comedic way.

There’s other ways to create a fourth wall break than through the visuals of a film. American Psycho does this through a voice over of its main character, Patrick Bateman, as he directly addresses the audience. In scenes like the one above, we see what is actually happening in the film and then hear what Patrick is actually thinking through the direct voice over.

While Patrick may be an unreliable narrator, the auditory breaking of the 4th wall gives us insight on the truly psychotic mind of the film’s protagonist. 

He doesn’t blink. He seems to be drinking milk. And he’s staring right at you. Few opening shots are more unsettling than the opening shot of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. And the breaking of the wall to the audience is what really does the trick. 

The first thing we see in the film is the piercing eyes of Alex, played by Malcom McDowell, looking straight into our souls. We’re disturbed before we even see the creepy and peculiar room he is in. Although breaking the 4th wall in film is not completely uncommon to Kubrick's directing style with examples seen in Full Metal Jacket and The Shining, Kubrick manages to break the wall to access the audience uniquely every time.

You may notice a trend in this list of psychopathic characters breaking the 4th wall in film. It’s no coincidence. Filmmakers often break walls to allow the audience into the mind of the film’s psychopathic character.

In one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films, Psycho, the wall is broken at the end of the movie and becomes one of the most iconic, memorable, and disturbing shots in the entire film. Not to mention the brilliant yet subtle skull superimposed on the face of Norman Bates.

One of the main traits of Jordan Belfort’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street is his impeccable confidence and charisma. To really get across to the audience the type of man Belfort is, Martin Scorsese has Belfort address us directly. 

This is a common practice in Scorsese’s filmmaking style because it is a direct way to connect a film’s protagonist to the audience. Scorsese is also a master at combining scenes that speak directly to the audience with dynamic blocking to keep the scene incredibly engaging.

Scorsese makes it back on this list yet again with the ending scene of one of the best gangster films of all time. Scorsese uses voice over narration throughout the entirety of Goodfellas so that the film’s protagonist, Henry Hill, can directly address the audience. But it’s not until the final scene of the movie that Henry looks straight into the camera right at us. 

Scorsese uses his dynamic blocking again in the courtroom scene as Henry breaks the 4th wall for the first time. Scorsese does this again in the final shots of the film, with Tommy (Joe Pesci) firing a gun right at the camera as a capstone to Henry’s story and an homage to The Great Train Robbery.

Sometimes the goal of a film is to make the audience forget that they are watching a film in the first place. In that regard, fourth wall breaks in film would be the biggest way to disengage an audience from the magic of a film.

Yet Ferris Bueller’s Day Off actually immerses the audience further into the film by breaking the 4th wall.

Ferris talking to us directly makes us feel like one of his friends playing hooky with him rather than simply watching the action occur.

In the genre of superhero fiction, it is quite difficult to create characters that stand out and bring something new to the table. Deadpool does so by not only breaking the 4th wall, but completely demolishing it. In fact, many attribute the movie's success as the highest grossing R rated comedy of all time to the characters direct access and dialogue with the audience as well as the hilarious Deadpool screenplay.

Deadpool undoubtedly lands on our list of the best superhero movies of all time. And although the origin of Deadpool’s consistent fourth wall breaks can be traced back to the comics rather than the screenwriters, we have to give it to the filmmakers as well as Ryan Reynolds for how well they pulled it off. 

It’s not easy for a comedy to walk away with Best Picture and nearly sweep the Oscars, but Annie Hall does so because of its clever writing and storytelling. While it operates on a level of wit that can disengage certain audience members, it still is able to cut to the heart by speaking to us directly.

Few filmmakers in cinema break the 4th wall more frequently than Woody Allen, but this scene from Annie Hall has to take the cake for its creativity and ingenuity in using more than just the protagonist to speak to the directly audience. The same cleverness that makes this scene can be found throughout the movie and makes it one of Woody Allen’s best films of all time.