What Is a MacGuffin? Meaning and 10 Movie Examples

Vincent Vega flips the latches on a briefcase in Pulp Fiction. A gold glow lights his face, and he stares like he’s seen something holy. Jules asks if they’re happy. Vincent says they’re happy. Then Quentin Tarantino closes the case, and you never find out what’s inside.

That briefcase is a MacGuffin: the thing everyone in a story wants, while the audience barely cares what it is. Co-writer Roger Avary later said the glow was just an orange light bulb. It didn’t matter. You spent the film watching people kill for it. (The case has a famous ancestor too, the glowing box in Kiss Me Deadly, which we cover in our intertextuality examples in movies.)

What Is a MacGuffin?

A MacGuffin is a plot device that every character wants: the money, the papers, the statue, the case. It gives the story a reason to move. The audience follows the people chasing it, not the thing itself, so the story rarely needs to explain what it is.

Screenwriter Angus MacPhail is credited with coining the word. Hitchcock made it famous. In a 1939 lecture at Columbia University, he described it as the thing that always turns up in a story: the necklace in a crook story, the papers in a spy story. He later told François Truffaut a joke to explain it. Two men are on a train in Scotland. One asks what the odd package is in the luggage rack. “A MacGuffin,” the other says. “It’s for trapping lions in the Highlands.” There are no lions in the Highlands, says the first man. “Well then, that’s no MacGuffin.”

The joke is the point. The package doesn’t need to make sense, because nobody in the audience is there for the package. You’ll also see it spelled McGuffin. It’s the same idea.

A MacGuffin is close to a Chekhov’s gun, but it works the other way round. A Chekhov’s gun is shown early and must be used later. A MacGuffin only has to be wanted. The Pulp Fiction case is never used for anything. It just keeps everyone moving. A red herring is different again: a false clue built to send you the wrong way.

10 MacGuffin Examples in Movies

These 10 MacGuffin examples count down from a nut to a black bird. Every entry tells you what the MacGuffin is, who wants it, what it really turns out to be and how the film did.

10) Ice Age (2002)

A saber-toothed squirrel spends the whole film chasing one acorn, and causes chaos every time he grabs it.

The film opens on Scrat, voiced by director Chris Wedge, trying to bury his acorn in the ice. He cracks a fissure that runs for miles and sets off an avalanche. He survives, acorn in hand, and gets trampled by a herd of migrating animals. That’s the first five minutes.

Scrat was meant to appear only in that opening. Test audiences loved him so much the filmmakers kept bringing him back, often straight after the film’s most dramatic moments. In the last scene, 20,000 years later, he thaws out on a tropical beach, tries to bury a coconut and cracks open a volcano. Ice Age opened to $46.3 million, a record for March, and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.

9) National Treasure (2004)

To find the greatest treasure in history, Ben Gates has to steal the Declaration of Independence.

Benjamin Franklin Gates, played by Nicolas Cage, comes from a family of treasure hunters. A clue on a pipe aboard an old ship points to a map hidden on the back of the Declaration of Independence. His former partner Ian Howe, played by Sean Bean, plans to steal it. So Ben steals it first, during a gala at the National Archives.

The Declaration is a perfect MacGuffin because you already care about it. You don’t need a scene explaining its value. The invisible ink leads to Benjamin Franklin’s Silence Dogood letters, then to a pair of spectacles in Independence Hall, then to a chamber beneath Trinity Church in New York. The National Archives has said there’s no map on the real one. National Treasure opened at #1 with $35.1 million and held the top spot for three weekends.

8) Bullet Train (2022)

One assassin is sent to grab one briefcase off a speeding train, and so is everyone else.

Ladybug, played by Brad Pitt, takes what sounds like an easy job. His handler Maria tells him to board a Shinkansen in Tokyo and take a briefcase with a train sticker on the handle. He doesn’t know the case holds ransom money for the son of the White Death, a crime boss played by Michael Shannon. Several other passengers are assassins who want it too.

The case changes hands so often it becomes a running joke. Tangerine and Lemon are guarding it. The Prince rigs it with explosives. When Ladybug finally hands it over in Kyoto, the White Death’s men open it and it blows up in their faces. The prop was a real TUMI aluminum briefcase. Bullet Train opened at #1 with $30 million and held the spot the following weekend.

7) Repo Man (1984)

A $20,000 bounty sits on a 1964 Chevy Malibu, and nobody should open the trunk.

The film opens with a cop pulling over the Malibu. He opens the trunk, there’s a white flash, and all that’s left of him is his boots. Then you meet Otto, a bored punk played by Emilio Estevez, who falls into a job repossessing cars for Bud, played by Harry Dean Stanton. When a $20,000 bounty goes out on the Malibu, every repo man in Los Angeles goes looking.

Critics read the glowing trunk as a nod to the box in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), and Pulp Fiction’s briefcase followed a decade later. Writer and director Alex Cox never says what’s inside. In the last scene, the car lifts off with Otto and the mechanic Miller aboard and flies over the city into space. Entertainment Weekly ranked Repo Man #7 on its list of the top 50 cult films.

6) Charade (1963)

Three men chase a widow across Paris for $250,000, and the money is in plain sight the whole time.

Regina Lampert, played by Audrey Hepburn, comes home from a ski trip to find her apartment stripped and her husband dead. During the war, he and three other men stole $250,000 in gold meant for the French Resistance, and he kept it all. Now the other three want their share, and they think Reggie has it. Cary Grant keeps turning up with a new name every few scenes.

The joke is that nobody can find the money because it has already been spent. Her husband turned it into three rare stamps and stuck them on an envelope. Reggie gives the stamps away to a boy, who trades them to a dealer. Peter Stone won the Edgar Award for the screenplay, and Charade joined the National Film Registry in 2022.

5) Ronin (1998)

A team of hired guns fight across France for a silver case, and the film never opens it.

Deirdre, played by Natascha McElhone, hires a crew of mercenaries in Paris to steal a case. Sam, played by Robert De Niro, and Vincent, played by Jean Reno, are among them. Everyone wants the case and everyone double-crosses each other for it. Nobody explains what’s in it.

Director John Frankenheimer spends the money on the chases instead. The final car chase used 300 stunt drivers, with the actors riding in cars driven at up to 100 mph. At the end, a radio report announces a peace agreement in Northern Ireland. Vincent asks Sam what was in the case. Sam says he doesn’t remember. Roger Ebert joked that it might be the briefcase from Pulp Fiction.

4) Mission: Impossible III (2006)

Ethan Hunt breaks into a Shanghai tower to steal the Rabbit’s Foot, and the film never says what it is.

Owen Davian, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, kidnaps Ethan Hunt’s wife and gives him 48 hours to deliver the Rabbit’s Foot. Ethan, played by Tom Cruise, breaks into a skyscraper in Shanghai, steals it and hands it over. You learn almost nothing about it. Benji, the team’s tech expert, guesses it might be something apocalyptic. Nobody confirms it.

That was the idea. The film is about Ethan trying to save his wife, and the Rabbit’s Foot is just the price. The series came back to it nearly 20 years later in The Final Reckoning (2025), but in this film it stays a mystery. It was J.J. Abrams’s first film as director, and its $47.7 million opening was the fourth largest ever at the time.

3) The Lady Vanishes (1938)

A sweet old lady disappears from a train, and the secret she’s carrying is a song.

Iris Henderson, played by Margaret Lockwood, befriends a governess named Miss Froy on a train across Europe. Then Miss Froy vanishes, and everyone on board swears she never existed. Iris and a musicologist named Gilbert, played by Michael Redgrave, search the train and uncover a spy ring. Miss Froy, it turns out, is a British agent.

What she’s carrying is a tune. She teaches it to Gilbert in case she doesn’t make it home. He hums it all the way to the Foreign Office in London, then forgets it in the waiting room. A door opens, and there’s Miss Froy at the piano, playing it. In his book-length interview with Truffaut, Hitchcock agreed the tune was a perfect example of a trivial, absurd MacGuffin. The film was the most successful British film to that date.

2) North by Northwest (1959)

Cary Grant is chased across America by spies and a crop duster, all because of “government secrets.”

Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant, is an advertising man mistaken for a spy named George Kaplan. Kaplan doesn’t exist. He’s a decoy invented by the CIA. Soon Thornhill is framed for murder, chased by a crop duster and hanging off Mount Rushmore. The spies, led by Phillip Vandamm, played by James Mason, are smuggling microfilm out of the country inside a small statue.

When Thornhill asks what Vandamm does, a CIA man known as the Professor answers vaguely. Something to do with government secrets, perhaps. That’s all you ever learn. Hitchcock called it “my best MacGuffin,” the emptiest and most absurd one he ever used. Thornhill doesn’t care about the secrets either. He just wants his life back. The film is #4 on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest thrillers.

1) The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Everyone in San Francisco wants a jewel-covered bird, and it turns out to be lead.

The film opens on a title card. In 1539, it says, the knights of Malta sent a golden falcon covered in jewels to Charles V of Spain, and pirates seized it. Four centuries later, private eye Sam Spade, played by Humphrey Bogart, is hired by a woman calling herself Miss Wonderly. Soon he’s surrounded by people who have chased the bird for years: Gutman, Cairo and the woman who hired him.

When the falcon finally arrives, Gutman scrapes off the black enamel with a penknife. It’s lead. A fake. Nobody in the audience minds, because the film was never about the bird. It was about who would lie, steal and kill for it. A detective asks Spade what it is. Spade calls it the stuff that dreams are made of. The line is #14 on AFI’s list of the 100 greatest movie quotes, and it was John Huston’s first film as director.

Every one of these films was built around something that barely matters. Here’s how they did.

Ice Age turned its acorn into 5.9 times its budget. The Maltese Falcon, made for about $381,000, did almost as well. Ronin had the smallest return, 1.3 times, even with 300 stunt drivers. The Lady Vanishes is left off because no reliable gross survives from 1938.

The critics tell a different story. The five oldest films all score 93% or higher. The Maltese Falcon, The Lady Vanishes and North by Northwest explain their MacGuffins least, and they score highest. National Treasure explains its MacGuffin most, and it scores lowest.

Hitchcock vs George Lucas: Should the Audience Care?

Hitchcock thought the MacGuffin should be as close to nothing as possible. The characters must care. The audience shouldn’t have to. That’s why he was proudest of North by Northwest, where the secrets are never named.

George Lucas disagrees. In a 2008 Vanity Fair feature on Indiana Jones, he argued the audience should care about the MacGuffin almost as much as the heroes and villains do. He named R2-D2 as the MacGuffin of Star Wars, the droid carrying the Death Star plans, and he called the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders the ideal one. You love R2-D2, so you care what happens to him.

Both approaches work. Here’s how to choose:

1. Decide what your story is about. If it’s about the chase, keep the MacGuffin vague, like North by Northwest. If it’s about the object, make the audience love it, like R2-D2.
2. Show what it costs, not what it does. Mission: Impossible III never explains the Rabbit’s Foot, but you know exactly what Ethan stands to lose.
3. Give it a clear owner and a clear thief. Every good MacGuffin is pulled between at least two people who want it badly. Our screenwriting guide covers how to build that conflict.

FAQs About the MacGuffin

The Final Cut on the MacGuffin

A MacGuffin is the thing everyone wants and nobody needs to understand. It can be a briefcase, a song, a nut or a black bird made of lead. What matters is who’s chasing it, and what they’ll do to get it.

What does your hero want so badly they’d break the law for it? And does the audience need to know what it is?

For more on how stories hold together, see our guide to Chekhov’s gun, our foreshadowing examples in movies and our guide to Freytag’s pyramid.