Paul Blart: Mall Cop

Confirmed 237,858

About

Paul Blart: Mall Cop is a duology of action-comedy movies directed by Steve Carr and starring Kevin James as the titular character Paul Blart. In spite of their poor reception, the movies became popular online due to their promotional posters, which were popularly edited by manipulating the image and making anagrams of the title and subtitle, in a similar style to Expand Dong.

Origin

Upon its box office release January 16th, 2009, Paul Blart: Mall Cop^[1] was heavily panned by critics, receiving a rating of 33% on Rotten Tomatoes^[2] and an overall score of 5.2 on IMDB.^[3] On April 17th, 2015, its sequel Paul Blart:Mall Cop 2^[7] was released, this time directed by Andy Fickman,^[6] which was regarded by critics as an even more of a failure than the original film, with an overall score of 3.9 on IMDB^[4] and a 14/100 rating by the users on Metacritic.^[5]

Despite their negative critical reception, both films performed relatively well in the box office. On the Internet, the original film drew a substantial ironic fanbase similar to the fandoms surrounding Johnny Test and Cory In The House with the emergence of anagrammed posters for the movie on 4chan^[11] and Tumblr^[20], shortly after the announcement of the sequel production in 2014.

Spread

According to an article published by Don't Panic Online^[8] on November 4th, 2014, the photoshop meme initially took off under the moniker "Paul Baul Mall Call"^[9] on Tumblr, though it has since become associated with several other nicknames, including Peep Beep Meme Creep^[21] and " on Tumblr and Paul Blart Meme Cop^[19] on Facebook. In additional, similar results can be found with more generic search queries like "Paul Blart Mall Cop Meme"^[20] and "Paul Blart Mall Cop."^[10]