Rubik's Cube in popular culture

The Rubik's Cube, a 1974 invention of Ernő Rubik of Hungary, fascinated people around the globe and became one of the most popular games in America in the early 1980s, having been initially released as the Magic Cube in Hungary in late 1977, and then re-manufactured and released in the western world as Rubik's Cube in 1980. As of January 2009 350 million cubes have sold worldwide making it the world's top-selling puzzle game. It earned a place as a permanent exhibit in New York’s Museum of Modern Art and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1982. The Cube retains a dedicated following, with almost 40,000 entries on YouTube featuring tutorials and video clips of quick solutions.

The ability to solve a Rubik's Cube quickly is often used as a way of establishing a character's high intelligence. The films Brick, Armageddon, Dude, Where's My Car?, WALL-E, Let the Right One In, The Pursuit of Happyness, Snowden, and the series Seinfeld and The Simpsons include sequences which depict this.

Characters are frustrated by the Cube in the films UHF, Being John Malkovich, The Wedding Singer, And The Band Played On, and Hellboy.

In the film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009), the lead character uses the "Cube of Rubik" as a ruse to deceive and slow the villain's progress.

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