18 Memes That Should Be Movies

The Premise: A struggling musician (James Franco) cannot get a gig, let alone a record deal, but his long-suffering girlfriend sticks by him regardless.

He creates a new tune, and notices that his pet hamster starts dancing to it. He tries it out on other animals, but to no avail - but when he goes to the pet store, the hamsters go crazy.

Can he find fame and fortune as the impressario of a new rodent-based musical extravaganza?

Key scene: The "hampsters" win over a sceptical crowd, and soon have them dancing in the aisles.

The Premise: An experimental adult off-shoot from the Jim Henson Creature Workshop.

When one annoyance too many by housemate Ernie sends him over the edge, misanthropic Bert goes loco.

The mental Muppet eventually finds his way to Afghanistan, where he becomes a jihadi warrior training under Osama Bin Laden.

Key Scene: Bert's meltdown in the middle of the Street. "This outburst was brought to you by the letters F and U!"

The Premise: Every day heartbroken Dave (Chris Pine) pines for the girl who dumped him. Suddenly, he begins hearing a song everywhere he goes.

He knows the tune: it's Ricky Astley's 80s synth-pop hit Never Gonna Give You Up . He sets out on a quest to find the bequiffed guru of love, the only man who can tell him how to win back his true love.

Key Scene: Astley explains the facts to him: "You've known each other for so long, your heart's been aching but you're too shy to say it."

The Premise: The inspirational true story of Ghyslain Raza (Jonah Hill), a boy whose quest to become a Jedi makes him the subject of derision.

When his training is broadcast to the world, he is bullied so badly he receives psychiatric care.

But, like his heroes, he comes out fighting, getting an out-of-court settlement from the kids who instigated his public humiliation, and then becoming a conservation lawyer.

Key Scene: Raza is taunted at school without knowing why, until his classmates start miming lightsaber duels.

The Premise: When Hollis (Nicolas Cage), the curator of a museum of photography buys a roll of film off eBay, he discovers that every negative contains the image of a squirrel posing for the camera.

Soon, every photo in the museum bears the intense rodent's visage...and the curator realises he has unleashed the spirit of a vengeful nature god determined to destroy all technology.

Key Scene: An anxious Hollis heads to his dark room to process his latest photos, and sees the familiar silhouette forming on the prints.

The Premise: After his notorious performance on the MTV Video Awards, Kanye West (playing himself) realises he is in a position to speak out against all of the injustices of the world.

Putting his music career on hold, he sets out to challenge accepted wisdom and becomes a prophet of truth.

Key Scene: Kanye talks down a bank robbery hostage situation when he reminds them that the Iranian Embassy siege was the best of all time.

The Premise: The badgers have the best life imaginable. They eat the local 'shrooms, then they dance like maniacs.

But in every garden, there is a serpent... and soon the badgers have to fight to protect their crop from a vicious snake.

Key Scene: The bravura opening rave sequence, which holds a single shot of the badgers busting their moves for a whole half-hour.

The Premise: Appropriately, this one is a bit meta.

The lawyers have given up. Rather than stem the flood of Hitler parodies, Oliver Hirschbiegel gives his consent for the entire film to be re-released with new subtitles.

Everybody has a crack at the full-length version, with Ricky Gervais' Big Brother parody becoming the most infamous. The Prince Charles cinema in London devotes itself to round-the-clock screenings.

Key Scene: Mrs Goebbels poisons her children. Why? Take your pick: the lack of a photo option on the iPad, Oasis splitting up, the England team's performance...

The Premise: Scientists experimenting with a new brain serum accidentally create a mutant breed of cats, who have the power of speech and cognition...sort of.

The LOLcatz (voiced by Jennifer Tilly, Yeardley Smith and Joe Pasquale) find everything funny, and begin to communicate in their own irritating slang. The scientists attempt to kill them, but when the laughing kittens escape, the race is on.

Key Scene: The LOLcatz venture into a fast food restaurant and approach the server, who is startled when one asks, "I can has cheezburger?"

The Premise: Yer standard prison drama, with a twist. It's a musical.

Glee -style, a dance troupe is formed by Luis Guzman's Broadway-loving thief. Initially, the creative convicts have to contend with the homophobia and macho bullshit of their fellow inmates.

Yet as more and more prisoners are won over, can they secure the approval of the warden and the prisoners' Mr Big (Danny Trejo) to stage a revue?

Key Scene: The climactic performance of Michael Jackson's Thriller .

The Premise: 18th Century France. One night, after drinking too many flagons of wine, artist Joseph Ducreux (Will Ferrell) discovers a new talent for crude but imaginative verse.

This spoken-word singing, known as hollering, quickly turns Ducreux into a celebrity, but incurs the wrath of the aristocracy.

Too late: Ducreux's lit the fuse and now the working classes are thinking about a revolution.

Key Scene: Ducreux meets Marie Antoinette, and insults her by hollering, "Remove thyself from mine path wench. Step aside, step aside."

The Premise: A reality show spoof charting what happens to the Argentina manager after his team's embarrassing exit from the World Cup.

Apoplectic, Maradona falls back into old habits, but his appetite cannot be contained by drugs. Instead, he turns to pugilism, and finds a new lease of life as an amateur boxer.

He's written off by the experts for being too short, but then he does have the hand of God...

Key Scene: A gang attempts to mug Maradona but, in a parody of his famous 1986 World Cup goal, he runs around them, punching and kicking each of them into the dust.

The Premise: After making an inoculous joke online, geeky Trevor (Paul Giamatti) receives a coupon informing him, "You Win The Internet."

Puzzled, he checks it out with a lawyer and discovers it is true. The previous owners (a cabal of governments, scientists and military forces) wanted to pass it on to whoever made them laugh the most.

Now Trevor has a choice: does he use his powers for good...or for evil?

Key Scene: In a controversial move to impress the hot feminist chick he's trying to pull, Trevor bans porn from the Internet, incurring the world's wrath.

The Premise: After 9/11, a photo is found of a man apparently standing atop the World Trade Center before the planes hit.

Alarmed by its provenance, the authorities are even more shocked when the same guy appears in images at other famous tragedies.

Is he the cause of the crises? Or a superhero drawn to disaster in order to try and help people?

Key Scene: After a decade-long manhunt, a Government agent tracks down the tourist guy (Eddie Marsan) on top of a mountain in Iceland...only for the volcano to erupt.

The Premise: In this controversial satire of the rites-of-passage movie, Samuel (Kodi Smit-McPhee) hits his twelfth birthday and realises the world isn't quite as he thought it was.

After accidentally seeing his first porno, Samuel's curiosity is piqued, so he sets off on an odyssey of dark discovery.

Key Scene: Samuel stumbles upon a serial killer mid-slaughter, and asks in all innocence, "I am 12 and what is this?"

The Premise: Earth is attacked by alien invaders, who quickly destroy all military establishments.

But when the aliens attempt to communicate with humanity to deliver their demands, it appears their translation devices are faulty.

How can the aliens subjugate the Earth, if nobody knows what they are talking about?

Key Scene: The alien transmission is broadcast on Times Square. "All your base are belong to us!" they declare. The New Yorkers yell back at the screen, "What the fuck? Speak English!"

The Premise: In this topical satire, cinema attendances are down, and the paying public even seem to have got bored of 3D. Yet they're watching the World Cup, aren't they?

The cinema chain owners believe that people are tuning in to listen to the relentless drone of vuvuzelas, so begin to install a vuvuzela sound generator on every seat to make movies more exciting.

Ticket sales improve 400% in a week, as a new fad starts.

Key Scene: A gang of yobbos pays to see an Oscar-bait tear-jerker, simply to annoy the genuine fans.

The Premise: When a leading movie website accidentally reports a false fact about Back To The Future , it is quickly repeated as Gospel.

But the site's tongue-in-cheek apology backfires and accelerates into an unwitting global hoax.

It isn't long before wars are postponed, employers are letting their workers take the day off, and neighbourhoods are holding impromptu street parties to celebrate the fictional Future Day.

Key Scene: Colin Hanks' Future Day party is ruined when the truth comes out.