After the end of the 2001 film Rush Hour 2, a montage of Jackie Chan’s mistakes starts rolling. He’s the star of the film, but he repeatedly falls backward while trying to complete a front flip, and faceplants as he’s running through a crowd.
For years, blooper reels were common comedy film fare. As the credits roll in Disney’s Toy Story 2 (1999), Buzz Lightyear deploys his space helmet to find that someone doodled a mustache and beard on it. At the end of 2003’s Haunted Mansion, a group of zombies is dismissed from the scene, and one of them jokes they should go get a beer together.
What a ride. But experts say these post-movie goodies seem to be fading from cinema, partly due to a rise in dramatic post-credit epilogues, and streaming platforms overtaking DVDs.
Where bloopers come from
Bloopers started as an industry inside joke in the 1930s and 1940s, said J.D. Connor, an associate professor of cinematic arts at the University of Southern California.
“Several studios would save some of those at the end of the shooting day, and at MGM, in particular, they would put together strings of bloopers for their studio Christmas parties,” Connor said.
These mistakes increasingly became public entertainment over time. Bloopers started appearing at the end of television shows; then, they became the show themselves, with programs like TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes, hosted by Dick Clark starting in the 1980s, Connor said.
But it was Chan and his frenetic stunts that popularized bloopers, said Michael Meindl, an associate professor of media production at Radford University. Blooper reels appear in all three of the Rush Hour movies, Chan’s 1995 movies Rumble in the Bronx and Thunderbolt, and 1998’s Who Am I?.
Bloopers were a way of showing celebrities were imperfect, Meindl said. They, too, tripped over chairs and forgot what they were supposed to be saying.
“We laugh at misfortunes that are not our own,” Meindl said. “As long as those bad things are not happening to us, we love to laugh at it. These movie producers are tapping into that need.”
Why we’re not seeing bloopers as much
Bloopers can add more cost, labor and time to a movie, Meindl said — all things that movie studios try to avoid.
But Connor argues that making bloopers are cheaper than ever, since footage is now stored digitally, and not on tape and film like before.
Still, bloopers have typically followed comedy movies, which don’t get the same return on investment as other genres, Meindl said.
“We tend to go to movies much more as events now, versus just kind of randomly going,” Meindl said. “The investment… [is] going to be those big events — action, fantasy, sci-fi, dramas.”
Filmmakers have instead started using the window of time once reserved for bloopers for something else — post-credit scenes. These clips often move the story forward in some way, or tease possibilities for a sequel movie.
“You’re going to be treated to this moment after the film, after the credits are done, where you can get a glimpse of maybe who the next villain is going to be, or what the next storyline is going to be,” Meindl said.
Marvel’s Iron Man (2008) is largely credited as popularizing post-credit scenes, Connor said.
Iron Man, aka Tony Stark, has just finished saving the world. The movie “ends,” but Stark is later shown returning home to find an unknown man waiting there. It turns out to be Nick Fury, who has come to recruit him for the Avengers Initiative — setting off a cinematic universe that has lasted almost 20 years.
“That was a big risk that they took at the time,” Connor said.
Now, post-credit scenes are a Marvel hallmark, and they’ve spread throughout the movie landscape. Marvel alum Ryan Coogler recently used a post-credit scene in his 2025 non-Marvel vampire blockbuster, Sinners.
Bloopers largely still exist on films’ disc releases, but physical copies don’t sell as well as they once did. Some moviegoers may be motivated by bloopers and other special features to buy them, but it may not be enough for studios to respond, Meindl said.
“I don’t see much evidence that studios are really interested in preserving physical media to that degree,” Meindl said.
These behind-the-scenes segments, therefore, may be pushed to other platforms, such as social media and YouTube. They might show up on streaming services, but they’re not as readily available, Connor said.
“You usually have to go back to the main menu, and scroll down, and click on it on purpose,” he said.
But Connor is hopeful that comedy theatrical releases will shine again this year — and by extension, blooper reels.
“I think that we’ve seen the studios try all they can to get people back into theaters, except big, audience-pleasing comedies,” Connor said. So perhaps bloopers haven’t blooped their last bloop on the big screen.
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