Meet Joe Black Opening Scene

About

Meet Joe Black Opening Scene refers to a scene from the 1998 film Meet Joe Black in which Brad Pitt's character, Joe Black, shares a long, tender exchange of regretful looks with Claire Forlani's character, Alison Parrish, before suddenly getting hit by a car and dying. The scene began to trend in 2019 after a Twitter user posted the clip, calling it the "most bonkers one minute of a movie that I have ever seen."

Origin

In the opening of Meet Joe Black, Brad Pitt's character dies after being struck by a car. Online, it appeared in an August 30th, 2006 YTMND featuring the LOL Internet meme. ^[4]

Spread

It was posted to YouTube on December 24th, 2007 by ReubenSala (scene shown below, left). Prior to that, on October 13th, 2006, a remix of the scene was posted by user SpankTheGorilla (shown below, right).

On April 11th, 2019, Twitter user @ladyastronauty posted the clip to Twitter with the caption "This is the most bonkers one minute of a movie that I have ever seen," gaining over 28,000 retweets and 105,000 likes (shown below).

Twitter users quickly expressed their agreement with ladyastronauty's assessment of the scene. Twitter user KrangTNelson commented "I have honestly never been more surprised by any video clip" (shown below, left). User @nsonic79 wrote when they first saw the scene, they burst out laughing and were shocked it wasn't the end of the film.^[1]

Others made edits of the scene, imagining if the films credits rolled directly after. User @TonyWild99 edited the clip to include Ocean Man, gaining over 1,500 retweets and 9,200 likes (shown below, top). User @bellarinaa tweeted the clip with the Curb Your Enthusiasm music, gaining over 960 retweets and 7,500 likes (shown below, bottom). The film's sudden trend led to news coverage from Indiewire,^[2] Mashable,^[3] and others.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References