Little Italy is the mocked 2018 movie poster for a romantic comedy starring Emma Roberts and Hayden Christensen as young lovers between rival family pizza shops. Reddit and Twitter passed it around in May 2018 as a punchline for how bland and dated the film looked, and Star Wars fans folded it into Prequel Memes gags built on Christensen's Anakin Skywalker role.
Origin
The poster started spreading on May 11th, 2018, when it was posted to the /r/movies subreddit and climbed past 18,000 upvotes[1]. That thread put the promotional image in front of a wide Reddit audience that had mostly never heard of the film or its director, Donald Petrie, who a decade earlier had made the tonally similar pizza-shop romance Mystic Pizza[4].
- Platform: Reddit / Twitter (viral spread)
- Creator: Unknown
- Date: 2018
Overview
Little Italy is the ridiculed 2018 movie poster for a romantic comedy starring Emma Roberts and Hayden Christensen as young lovers caught between their families' rival Toronto pizza shops[1]. The image shows the pair standing back to back in matching t-shirts branded with their respective restaurants, framed in a soft TV-movie style that struck 2018 viewers as bizarrely dated[4].
The joke ran in two directions. Redditors passed the poster around in disbelief that a film this bland was actually shipping to theaters[1]. Star Wars fans zeroed in on Hayden Christensen and remixed the poster into Prequel Memes riffing on his Anakin Skywalker role[2].
How It Spread
Twitter piled on within a couple of days. User @rhymeswithaidan joked that they couldn't believe the film was coming out in 2018 rather than 2006, pulling roughly 1,800 retweets and 8,200 likes[4]. User @bobby posted the poster with the caption "what's going on here?" and picked up over 300 retweets and 3,000 likes[1].
Sharper viewers noticed that Emma Roberts' shirt read "A Slice of Heaven," the exact wardrobe her aunt Julia Roberts wore in Mystic Pizza back in 1988. Twitter user @TylerCoates flagged the reuse, and the Daily Dot picked the connection up, half-seriously floating Little Italy as a stealth Mystic Pizza sequel[4].
The Star Wars fandom joined in on May 13th, 2018, when a /r/prequelmemes post reworked an Attack of the Clones line into a pizza snowclone[2]. Around the same time, Imgur user pumpactionpurdey photoshopped a Revenge of the Sith scene onto the Little Italy poster[1]. An audio snippet from the film also lives on meme sound repositories for reuse in short-form video edits[3].
How to Use
Most Little Italy edits keep the original poster composition and swap the pizza-shop t-shirts, taglines, or actors' faces for whatever feuding-groups gag the format is being pointed at. Prequel Memes versions typically drop the back-to-back pose next to Anakin or Obi-Wan dialogue instead of pizza lines[2].
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Little Italy?
Little Italy is the 2018 movie poster meme, drawn from a romantic comedy with Emma Roberts and Hayden Christensen as rival-pizza-family lovers, that Reddit and Twitter users passed around as a punchline for how dated it looked[1].
Where did Little Italy come from?
The poster spread on May 11th, 2018 through a /r/movies thread that pulled more than 18,000 upvotes and pushed the image into wider Twitter circulation[1].
What does Little Italy mean?
As a meme, Little Italy points to the specific promotional image and the running joke about a bland-looking film[4]. The phrase also carries separate slang meanings tracked on Urban Dictionary that are unrelated to the movie-poster meme[5].
How do you use Little Italy?
People typically reshare the original poster with a caption mocking its dated look, or swap the pizza-shop shirts and faces to riff on other feuding groups. Star Wars fans often paste Anakin dialogue onto it for Prequel Memes edits[2].
Is Little Italy still popular?
The peak of the Little Italy meme was mid-May 2018 around the poster's release, with a Prequel Memes echo shortly after; it is mostly remembered now as a moment rather than an active format[2].
