Movie Magic: 22 Card Names That Are Film Titles

In Order of Their Silver Screen Premiere …

Blackmail (1929)

Alfred Hitchcock's first talkie was also about the nefarious Cabal's criminal practices.

Vertigo (1958)

Hitchcock has had a more direct homage in Ice Age, as proven by the fact that Drew Tucker's art for is the explicit reproduction of a key scene from the incomparable mystery with James Stewart and Kim Novak.

Carnival of Souls (1962)

This off-kilter indie classic shares its name with .

Death Wish (1974)

The title of the seminal vigilante movie with Charles Bronson in Judgment.

Heaven's Gate (1980)

Michael Cimino's notorious career ender was a similarly poorly received .

Raging Bull (1980)

This entirely insignificant from Legends bears, quite comically, the same name of Martin Scorsese's major masterwork.

Body Double (1984)

, mostly known as a combo piece, is a doppelgänger in name of Brian De Palma's risqué thriller.

Flesh and Blood (1985)

The title of Paul Verhoeven's violent medieval drama is sometimes spelled with a "+" in place of the "and"—much in the same way is only known as "Flesh and Blood" due to the conventional way to parse the names of split cards from that era.

No Way Out (1987)

This tense political drama with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman was only recently matched with from Innistrad: Midnight Hunt.

Dead Ringers (1988)

David Cronenberg's disturbing medical horror has its own in Apocalypse.

Field of Dreams (1989)

Kevin Costner again, this time dealing with a ghostly baseball fantasy. Legends was .

The Abyss (1989)

A card from Legends once again made for a possibly unwilling movie reference. To be fair, is suggestive of many different ideas, not just the ocean depths of James Cameron's sci-fi adventure.

No Escape (1994)

The Owen Wilson thriller from 2015 may be slightly more relevant than the Ray Liotta actioner from 1994. Both are unwittingly represented by .

Sudden Death (1995)

By the way, we have already crossed the temporal line of the creation of Magic, which means that cards can predate films. It's not the case for Van Damme's action flick, though, as was first printed eleven years later in Time Spiral.

Armageddon (1998)

Michael Bay's epitome of silly disaster movies is just named after the same "end times" Biblical concept as the iconic sweeper from Limited Edition Alpha. But it's still a funny coincidence.

Ghost Ship (2002)

The most important film with a title that roughly corresponds to is 1943's The Ghost Ship, from the stable of legendary RKO producer Val Lewton. Among those that instead are an exact match, this 2002 deep sea haunting is actually not as bad as they say, but it came out eight years after the card.

Ghost Town (2008)

Another case of prescient reference. from Tempest was released in 1997; the comedy with Ricky Gervais seeing ghosts hit the screens more than a decade later.

Oculus (2013)

And again: Mike Flanagan's specular horror was two years away when was printed in Mirrodin Besieged.

Need for Speed (2014)

This is a bit of a trick. The film with Aaron Paul came out in 2014, but the racing video game franchise of which it is a part had its first installment in 1994, seven years before in Odyssey.

Inside Out (2015)

2008's Eventide is certainly not Magic's oldest set, but it was still seven years ahead of the award-winning Pixar film of the same name.

Silence (2016)

Martin Scorsese has got another card in his filmography thanks to Magic 2010 of his historical epic about two Jesuit priests in seventeenth-century Japan.

Leave No Trace (2018)

The survival drama that launched the career of Thomasin McKenzie was already at the time of its release, due to Ravnica: City of Guilds.

Close but No Cigar

Unfortunately, doesn't perfectly translate the title of the Swedish silent masterpiece The Phantom Carriage; has a tamer spelling than Mortal Kombat; is not 100% the same as The Sixth Sense; and adds an extra letter to Into the Wild. On the other hand, is most definitely a tongue-in-cheek pun/reference to the video game series, whose only film adaptation simply called Tomb Raider is the 2018 reboot with Alicia Vikander.

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