A Wild ‘Cruella’ Spoiler Tweet Set Off A Meme Frenzy On Social Media

While a huge portion of the streaming audience is spending their Memorial Day weekend watching the Friends reunion special, those with Disney+ were given a new add-on option in the new Cruella movie. The Emma Stone-led origin story of the villain from 101 Dalmatians franchise is best described as “gritty,” even if the biggest news from the movie was anything but. That’s because a supposed leak of a pivotal scene from the film went viral, in large part because it was bizarrely funny out of context.

Serious spoilers ahead here, as the rest of the post discusses one of the major reveals from the movie that hit the Disney streaming service (and theaters) this weekend. But, well, Cruella’s origin story apparently follows a lot of other famous works: namely that she’s evil and really hates Dalmatians for a very personal reason: they killed her mother.

In a clip that went viral on Twitter this weekend, a scene from the movie apparently showed the death of Cruella’s mother in front of her as a child. And it was, well, dogs to blame. Dogs running wild and pushing her mother over a cliff to her death. No, really. Many people were shocked that the film resorted to a classic motivational trope here, especially with it being dogs killing a human. Which is why the clip, and many tweets referencing it, quickly went viral.

That disbelief, however, soon gave way to memes that doubled down on the absurdity of dogs plotting the death of a girl’s mother. Especially out of context, the clip was pretty absurd.

It had a few people offering up ideas for future origin stories.

Or even more nuanced origin ideas that would have spawned fewer memes.

There were just other really good Cruella memes out there, too.

We’ll see if Disney continues down this path for antagonist origin stories, but this one didn’t go down as gritty as they hoped this time around.