# Little Italy
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.
## 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].
## References
1. [https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/]()
2. [https://www.reddit.com/r/PrequelMemes/]()
3. [https://tuna.voicemod.net/sound/98af536b-8e2f-457e-8940-43d469956741]()
4. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/little-italy]()
5. [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Little%20Italy]()
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Source: https://meme.com/memes/little-italy
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